Their decision to not find a way to make Google Reader work financially, shutting down for good July 1, 2013, was coincident with the hypergrowth of the power and evil of Facebook's newsfeed. Correlation ≠ causation be damned, I blame the GOOG.
From Wired:
It's Time for an RSS Revival
The modern web contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there's no panacea for what ails this internet we've built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS.HT: MetaFilter where the comments can be pretty interesting.
For many of you, that means finding a replacement for Digg Reader, which went the way of the ghost this month. Or maybe you haven't used RSS since five years ago, when Google Reader, the beloved firehose of news headlines got the axe. For others, it means figuring out what the heck an RSS feed is in the first place—we'll get to that in just a minute. And some of you have already moved on to the next article in your Feedly queue.
No matter what your current disposition, though, in this age of algorithmic overreach there's something deeply satisfying about finding stories beyond what your loudest Twitter follows shared, or that Facebook's News Feed optimized into your life. And lots of tools that can get you there.Cue RSSRSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was first stitched into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the millennium. Its aim is straightforward: to make it easy to track updates to the content of a given website in a standardized format.In practice, and for your purposes, that means it can give you a comprehensive, regularly updated look at all of the content your favorite sites publish throughout the day. Think of it as the ultimate aggregator; every morsel from every source you care about, fed directly to you. Or, more commonly, fed to you through an intermediary known as an RSS feed reader, software that helps you wrangle all of those disparate headlines into something remotely manageable.The difference between getting news from an RSS reader and getting it from Facebook or Twitter or Nuzzel or Apple News is a bit like the difference between a Vegas buffet and an a la carte menu. In either case, you decide what you actually want to consume. But the buffet gives you a whole world of options you otherwise might never have seen."There are multiple approaches to connecting to news. Social felt pretty interesting at first, but when you mix social and algorithmic, you can easily get into these noise bubbles, or areas where you don't necessarily feel 100 percent in control of the algorithm," says Edwin Khodabakchian, cofounder and CEO of popular RSS reader Feedly. "A tool like Feedly gives you a more transparent and controllable way to connect to the information you need."...MUCH MORE
