RSS fund ‘even deader than RSS’
p2pnet news view P2P:- Do you reckon RSS is dead? Steve Gillmore does.
“It`s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter,” he said in TechCrunch in May, going on, “RSS just doesn`t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it`s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.”
Dan Primackin quotes him in peHUB, doing the same for Sam Diaz who’s, “calling RSS a Web 1.0 application whose time has passed”.
Then, “things got even worse” when, “news leaked that former Feedburner chief Dick Costello has agreed to join Twitter as chief operating officer,” he says.
So what about RSS Investors, “a venture capital firm formed in 2005 to focus exclusvely on real simple syndication”? – Dan asks.
Answer? It’s, “even deader than RSS”.
“The firm launched with a press release touting the creation of a $100 million fund, says the story, continuing, “but that was basically a PR stunt. RSS Investors wanted to raise $100 million, but had only $20 million from a cornerstone commitment by Ritchie Capital. As Palfrey told me … it never raised additional funds (Palfrey adds that Ritchie Capital`s subsequent troubles played no role in RSS Investors` demise).”
It invested in companies such as Attensa, KnowNow (defunct) and Edgeio (assets sold to Vast.com), “But new deals stopped when RSS Investors ran out of cash, and the decision was made to close up shop,” says peHUBm adding:
‘We never officially dissolved the fund, but we stopped making investments and everyone`s moved on to other things,’ said Palfrey, who now teaches law at Harvard and is a venture executive with Highland Capital Partners. ‘The only active investment we have left is StyleFeeder, here in Cambridge’.
Now you know.
TechCrunch – Rest in Peace, RSS, May 5, 2009
peHUB – RSS Is Dead, So Is The RSS Fund, September 2, 2009
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September 3rd, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I still use rss, and so do a lot of blind people.
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
It’s time to go from rss and switch to twitter? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Do you know how assinine it is to move from a web standard that everyone knows to a proprietary, centralized microblog service?
The beauty of HTML is that any browser can understand it. It’s not owned by anybody.
That all changed when microsoft started introducing their own special tags that only IE could use.
Now much of the web is monopolized by proprietary software. We all use flash, and it’s become a de facto standard for web video. Problem is, only one company (Adobe) controlls flash, and they decide what direction it will take. They abuse their power. If you use linux, you know what I’m talking about. They always screw up the linux version of flash. It’s not an open standard, so linux users can not easily implement flash on linux by themselves. They are at the mercy of adobe and so are we.
It’s time we move from centralized, proprietary software to decentralized open standards, so no one company dictates what direction the web will take. It’s time we take back the web.
Besides, RSS is not dead. It has very specific uses, and in those cases RSS is still used widely.
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Why, so I can receive Twitter spam! I don’t think so, I’ll stick with RSS!
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I completely disagree with this. I see twitter as a community portal for interacting directly with people. If I find links from twitter I get them directly from people I am interested in following. RSS and Google Reader allow me to track hundreds of sites that interest me and quickly peruse their content when I have the time. There is no quick and easy way to go back through hundreds of tweets and I sure as heck don’t want my DestroyTwitter home screen cluttered with frequent news posts. Twitter for me is a social environment, not some kind of content delivery platform. The so-called “experts” who think otherwise are sorely mistaken, in my opinion.
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:45 pm
@ SteelWolf:
Absolutely.
Cheers!
September 3rd, 2009 at 7:26 pm
The main “RSS is dead” complaint I generally see is “RSS doesn’t scale”, meaning “Polling a plain XML file for updates doesn’t scale”.
The usual smart come-back is “Formats and mechanisms aren’t the same thing. Go ahead and write some kind of push-notification service if you want… but make it take the standard RSS *format* as input”.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:22 pm
I don’t know much about RSS feeds but I believe that I have seen many of my visited sites post fake rss stats. I have seen some brand new sites that just opened hours before I visited and that no one has really seen yet boast 10,000 rss readers when the site just opened and the people that have only seen the site is like 22 or so before it goes mainstream. RSS stats allow you to fudge the numbers as from what I can tell.
This is not to say that many people do not use rss feeds. I would think that many people do, its just not as big as they say it is though.
September 4th, 2009 at 3:10 am
@Spider Player: Well, of course. Unless you’re using a replication/stats service like FeedBurner, your stats are gathered, handled, and displayed all within your own web server. It’s perfectly possible for a producer to lie about their popularity while gathering accurate stats for their own use.
I don’t know about you, but I care more for the failure-resistance that decentralization brings (If p2pnet goes down, only p2pnet’s RSS is affected) than the reliable stats that come from trusting a third party to be acceptably fault-tolerant, scalable, and ethical.
Besides, as the “Most popular YouTube vids” Miro feed shows, popularity is a pointless metric for consumers. I don’t even read popularity stats. Either I like something or I don’t and if a lot of other people did, good for them… it probably means I didn’t. (I have esoteric tastes)
September 4th, 2009 at 10:45 am
1p2U.com lets readers pay bloggers a penny for each item that appears in their RSS feed, so I hope people don’t give up on RSS just yet.