Stop using your RSS reader

Posted by Fred Oliveira on January 13, 2009 | Comments (28)

Seriously, give it a try. I’m going on a limb and risk saying you won’t regret it. In fact, if you are on places like Twitter, chances are that you are just as informed as your RSS-powered buddies. Before you label me as a nutcase (and hypocritical at that, because I am publishing several feeds myself), allow me to explain.

Drinking from the fire-hose

RSS was fine for a few years. It was manageable because there weren’t that many blogs you were interested in reading. Those things pile up, though. Suddenly you get unread-item anxiety because you see the red notification saying “5000 unread items” and you think “sh*t”. And you go at it, reading all you can read, like a buffet of information. Is this story ringing any bells?

Drinking from the fire-hose

Me, I’ve declared feed bankruptcy. Over 1000+ items are produced in the blogs I subscribe to a day. Unsubscribing a bunch didn’t really help. Also, most of the things I was reading in the feed reader that caught my eye were either featured on Techmeme (which I still have as my homepage on Firefox) or Hackernews. Those that didn’t get to any of these two, would come to me via Twitter. So I just stopped opening the reader. Now I don’t even have one installed and to be honest, I don’t miss it one bit.

Things come to you

We’re living in a pubsub world. I have people I subscribe to on Twitter, and there’s people who subscribe to me. This creates a conversation channel that removes the need for RSS. The conversation becomes the news mediator. Yesterday I heard about Joshua Schachter’s move to Google through Twitter before it was on Techcrunch. Today, I knew about the new Yahoo CEO before it was “all over Techmeme”. Because I subscribe to people whose interests are similar to my own, I hear about things as they happen.

Some might argue that Twitter is more attention-intensive than an RSS feed reader is, but I would disagree. While the feed reader gives you anxiety because you know something is piling up for you to read (much like email), Twitter is a river of news/updates (hat tip to Dave Winer) you can just choose to pay attention to whenever you have time for it. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely closer.

So in conclusion: take my word for it even if only for a few days. Go reader-less for a while and see how much of a difference it makes. Chances are you’re going to be both okay and with a lot more free time to do great work.

Photo credit: Wizardhat on Flickr.

Comments on this post

I agree with you 100% here FO… The only purpose Reader serves for me is following personal / close friends who create content in various places (and FriendFeed + imaginary friends is quickly become better for that); otherwise, it’s become too clunky and is no longer a useful source for ‘news’ for me.

I think you’re right in principle, Google Reader isn’t so great when you have literally hundreds of feeds, multiplied by thousands of stories, to read daily. Ideally, Google Reader or whatever you use should contain sites that you absolutely must visit daily e.g TechCrunch, NY Times, BBC etc.

I agree partially–RSS can be good in moderation. You shouldn’t be reading for 100% inspiration, this will cloud your brain no matter what. Also, take out those shitty feeds you follow. You know, the ones that copy every other one you follow, etc, etc. Feeds can be good but they shouldn’t be the #1 thing on your to-do list for the day. This reminds me of the book 4 hour work week.

Fred, I mostly agree with your take on RSS and yes, people micro-blog easily, so we wil get some news sooner. No discussion on that. But, and this have to do with my personal usage scenarios, I read or flag articles through RSS… elaborated and usually long articles about a given subject. Micro-blogging doesn´t go that way. Yes, often people, publicize their own articles or another persons articles that they like on Twitter. Hmm… and I really think Twitter can be an attention hog because of it´s conversational possibilities. I see people using Twitter *all* day… and I mean all day. And If you believe multi-tasking to a certain point is a myth, then these folks aren´t doing anything besides twittering – which is fine if they don´t have other things to do. :)
I´m admittedly an information addict. I do know that it isn´t really profitable from an intellectual point of view if you deal with too much information. I will agree with you on that every day, but I don´t know if I´m ready for such a disruptive attitude. :)

Yeah, and most important things go past you more than once so even if you miss it the first time, it’ll most probably come back.

As for dropping the reader altogether, I’m not so sure. Remember that most feeds on google reader have only 1 subscriber. Stuff like search results or other low latency content make my reader valuable… But instead of opening it everyday, i’ll do it every other week. Hehe

I guess at some point you realize that something has to go. I stopped worrying about unread feed items a long time ago, just like you, I trimmed down my choice to a few sites that aggregate everything that is important to me (I use netvibes as a homepage), and if the news are important you’ll just end up bumping into it by some other channel.

Twitter has become a recent problem for me, when you start following over 200 people and don’t keep track of if on a regular basis (say every hour) it just starts turning into a noisy crowd. Either you reduce the number of people you follow and lose a lot of interesting data or you spend a lot of time scanning for interesting data and lose a lot of precious time in that process. It’s kind of a catch 22.

Fred! (How’s it going, hope you are great =)

Since you asked, I don’t think this is nesc. the optimal path. I would suggest trimming down your RSS reader list significantly.

It’s not uncommon for me to see ‘no new items’ because I’ve almost universally removed any feeds that I’ll get the news elsewhere (ie. Techcrunch, Mashable, etc. etc.) I’m left with just the individuals, who often are righting entries that are unique to their perspective, that they chose note to post links via twitter, FB or elsewhere.

This has significantly increased the signal to noise ration, and connected me deeper to the people who’s thoughts I value.

And I still have plenty of time to follow all the twitter links and other signals faster means of consumption offer me.

So I’m just throwing it out there, or not throwing the baby out with the bathwater as the analogy was be.

Much respect,

t-

I agree on most of the post but it still makes sense to be “fed”!

I’m on twitter for a couple months now (I will not explain why I haven’t signed before since that would make a pretty lengthy post/comment about social apps media signal vs noise), and I feel that I get all the tech news I’m interested in, thru the people i follow. I still open NNW maybe once or twice a week and pretty much feel what u describe on that field.

BUT,

I think that decision only apply to tech/social media and alike blogs/news nowadays.
There are lots of blogs that are in niche and/or specialized areas of music, design, etc. that are not aware of Twitter and they’re not likely to benefit of being there, at least in hiper-niche areas in which those users have a more, shall we say — elastic view of what’s legal (me included).

Things will evolve and I’m sure that even those niche areas I talk about will adapt and embrace new media (as they always do) but even though (and I’m well aware what you blog audience is), I think that we (early adopters in a broad sense) tend to generalize a bit too much these notions of what’s “in” or “out” when it comes to what people use.

Nonetheless, I think you’re post is pretty much spot on when it comes to what the general Twitter users are feeling today.

Best,

catarino™

I agree with what you have said in part, there is a definite feeling (of panic) when faced with 100+ unread items in your feed reader. There is also the temptation to skim through all the unread items to achieve feed reader inbox zero, however this is at the sake of losing value pieces of information.

Similarly to ‘over following’ people in Twitter, it’s about getting the balance between signal vs. noise just right. The feeds that you mentioned that you read elsewhere, such as on Techmeme, can be removed from your feed reader, as with the feeds that you don’t take time to read or don’t find benefit in what is being published.

As an increasing number of feeds emerge all competing for your time, it is important to be selective and only subscribe to the ones which offer you some value.

I definitely agree with you in what concerns current news or headlines, the ones that make it into the sites you mention. If you want to keep track on a specific subject (for instance SOA, BPEL,…) a reader is a really helper to gather information from a set of sites/blogs.

– Rui

Okay, you’ve pushed me over the edge. I’m doing it. I’m taking the plunge. I’ll stop using my feedreader as of today. Godspeed.

afraid of the increasing num of unread posts, i have been postponing catching up w/ rss for so long, it is 6+ months already, so there it goes.

one not-so-obvious reason is that rss feeds forces us to read all the articles on a writer’s mind, while twitter and other social networks mediate by decanting and broadcasting the best articles, so you just get la crème de la crème. it is similar to getting CDs, which force you to have all the songs, compared to just buying the songs you like from iTunes.

next step would be to delete RSS lnks from our blogs, aintcha freddy boy? hehe

OK, I’m going to stick my head up above the parapet and disagree with this one. Your argument appears to distil down to: “There’s too much news to read via RSS, so I’m going to use Twitter instead – that way any I miss doesn’t bother me”.

To me, the idea of Twitter being the answer to information overload is bizarre. Personally I would prefer people I trust to do all of the hard work, watching Twitter feeds – let them distil the most important items down into articles which I can scan via RSS when convenient. Twitter is the equivalent of sitting under the firehose. RSS done right is the equivalent of drinking a glass of water; unfortunately you had ordered 1,000 glasses of water.

From your description, surely what you *shoud* have done is unsubscribed to everything other than HackerNews and Techmeme?

Like Clay Shirky said, “it’s not Information Overload, it’s filter failure”. I think you can’t expect all the good posts that make a difference to you to just get to you somehow. We just need to think about the time we have availble for them and then toss out all the ones that aren’t that important to you. I don’t think that shutting down all your feeds is something you could get away forever. But time will tell, right Fred?

Me, I’ve never actually used an RSS reader for anything else other than to store feeds. I never get round to reading them!!
The only exception is Viigo on Pocket PC. This little app (also available for Blackberry) is simply great, and perfect for on-the-go reading :)
Oh yeah, and I nearly forgot to mention. I’m a Twitter lover, no wait, a Twitter worshipper! It’s the best thing since I discovered Google search back in 2000 – hands down :)

Wow! I agree totally on twitter.. but RSS, for, is not dead yet. I have organized my Google into mutilple categories 1) must read today 2) must read this week, 3) should read this month 4) when ever. Today, I get my information from

a. Google reader first.
b. twitter search keywords
c twitter network
d. alltop
e. google alerts

Would love to consolidate someday. If anyone has any thoughts please ping at

John
johnmwillis.com

@botchaglupe: that’s my setup as well. I filtered it out in “Daily”, “Weekly”, “Evaluating” and “Almost Dead” (blogs that didn’t post for the last 3 months) folders.

The main problem is that RSS readers haven’t added any significant mutations in the base premise since the early days of there use. First we had a list of X number of blogs, then that got to be to big and so we got folders to put similar feeds in. That’s the extent of how you can organize your consumption of rss. What’s needed is for rss readers to mutate and provide different ways of consuming RSS that isn’t based on feeds. I’d like to be able to search my feeds in google reader and provide myself a folder called Buzz that has posts matching the keywords: layoff, merger, rumor, acquisition, deadpool and launch. I used newsgators search for awhile but it searches everything in it’s db and not just your stuff, so i would get alot of hits from IMHO non-authoritative sources. It would also be nice to have some auto cleanup tools that could be set per feed. Like Only keep 3 days worth of engadget but 7 days worth of techcrunch, so if I didn’t get to it it’s just gone.

BTW, I built myself a feed reader that does the above but i’m not selling it, but thought i’d mention it in full disclosure.

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I just wanted to pop back here to say thanks for encouraging me to jump ship. The only RSS feeds that I read now are activity feeds: changes on our company wiki, friend activity on Upcoming, link to my blog and other important things I manage.

I used to read ~25 – 30 blogs on average every day, but you made me realize that I wasn’t getting much value out of them at all. Compare this to Twitter, where I get bits from the blogs I use to read, friend updates and conversation, which is incredibly more valuable. I think I’m saving about 30 minutes to an hour every day because of this change, and in these times, that’s a lot.

Thanks, and keep on inspiring!

What does a beginner do?

The problem is not RSS. The problem is signing up to too many RSS feeds and not realising that you don’t *have to* read everything.
I find it quite ridiculous when some people mention Twitter as a much better alternative. I’m sorry, but Twitter has all the problems that RSS has (let me know how you do following 300 people), plus it has the inconvenience of short messages and links in the messages (in RSS you also just read the title, and then you click to see the whole message).

You mention hackernews, but unless you visit it everyday, you would probably subscribe to its RSS feed. Some might choose to “follow” it on twitter (if there is an account for the messages there..which I don’t know), which is just the same.

I get as much crap, if not more, from twitter than from RSS, specially because people think they need to put messages more often than in RSS. However, I follow just a few people, compared to the hundreds of feeds I have in my RSS reader.

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