Here’s how that might play out in a typical reading experience. Let’s say you want to subscribe to all the photos from your Flickr contacts tagged “food.” That’s a unique subset of photos that Digg has to grab from an API call. Every time you hit Digg Reader, it has to pull this data set, just for you. That kind of computational power gets very big, very quickly as you throw more and more users into the mix.
But if you do all that locally for one user on his computer and not “in the cloud” for thousands of them, it’s nothing. My old 2004 Pentium M laptop could do that without breaking a sweat on 100+ feeds.
“RSS is painful. Take the Wired RSS; I have to check it every so often.” (At this point, Young begins to impersonate a computer pinging a server.) “Is there a new story? Is there a new story? Is there a new story? If it’s more frequent than, say, every 15 minutes, some publisher sites will block me.”
Subscribers want to see new stories in their feed readers as soon as they appear online.
If getting news every quarter of hour is not fast enough for you, you have a problem or you are a journalist. If so, there’s Twitter for real time information. RSS readers are retrievers that’s the core function, the speed at which they get information is fast enough if not irrelevant. You don’t subscribe to real time traffic updates with RSS, you download an app or you go on a website for that. RSS doesn’t do and will not cover every news delivery scenario and it’s OK.
It has read counts, and they work, which sounds easy to pull off but requires lots of complex things happening in real time on the back end.
Utterly useless. Any long time RSS reader will tell you that the unread count is bad and pushes you in this FOMO (fear of missing out) race because you can track items. It’s terrible design, the only thing needed is to bold a feed to say something new arrived but hell no, no read counts. It’s the worst and developers all work insanely hard to make that happen. Sigh.
The biggest problem with RSS has always been THERE IS TOO GODDAMN MUCH RSS OH MY GOD HELP ME I’M DROWNING.
No. The problem always has been how complicated it is to subscribe to feeds. RSS still doesn’t have a one-button subscription system. If it had, people would just subscribe/unsubscribe without the need of awkward manipulations or the need of a “suggestion engine”.