It seems like everyone and their mother (okay, maybe not their mom), is making a huge deal out of RSS these days. Supposedly it is revolutionary. I honestly just don't get what the big deal is.
Anytime I've tried to use an RSS reader, I look at it a bit, and then I figure I'd rather just go to the actual website. The web is all about unique designs and most of all, interaction and community. With RSS, you have no interaction. Its a one-way channel, and there is no way for a user to discuss that content with you. To me that just breaks the spirit of the web. Plus, with tabs in the major browsers now, browsing multiple sites isn't terribly difficult (unless you have a slow connection, but even then, it isn't so bad). Oh well, maybe this will change one day.
I use it but more from a developers point of view.. just to pull data from a site and use it for projects of mine and stuff like that.
I never use an RSS feed to actually get updates from the site, I usually have a set number of sites I visit whenever I'm on the net so I don't need to have RSS for that.
I use RSS, but not as the main media. I use it to quickly get a little overview about what the article is talking about. If I found it interesting, I'll read the article on the web site. It's also a way to keep some kind of bookmarks (I use it in Opera). In fact, I don't like when the full article is included in the rss, but i can understand that it could be good for some people with some handicap.
The only place I use it is on my Google IG homepage... good for quick links to BBC News, my Gmail, Flickr, and a few bookmark feeds... also had a Basecamp feed on there as well until they added a password to it.
I did try RSS readers but don't see the point really as you have to click through into your broswer to see the text in context.
Like you've all said, it's much faster to have 10 browser tabs open at once, use your shortcuts to flick between them and just scan read for the good stuff.
Only when really really really bored do I fire up sage and rifle through the old RSS feeds. I don't use it as my primary means of getting content however. While RSS is still ripe, it's not exactly all that it's cracked up to be. Not knocking it by the way, but it's just not my thing for the main system here. I can see it's usefulness on the road though under a PocketPC or PDA device where WiFi is available though.
I use my RSS reader all the time. I read probably fifty or so political and tech blogs and visiting each site individually would take far too long. It helps that the feedreader I use (NewsFire for OS X) has a wonderful interface that allows me to just keep pounding the spacebar to jump from item to item and scroll through longer items. So I can sit with my morning coffee in one hand and read all my news with the other. I don't think there's any way I could stay on top of as many things if I had to read the sites the old fashioned way.
I have an RSS reader at work which gives me the headlines of about 15 sites. Takes me straight to articles. I just find it an easier way of checking sites rather than going to the site itself :) Laziness.
I use RSS every 15 minutes. I have Newsfire on my mac, and feed subscriptions to something like 700 sites. RSS is great, it means I get to read content without visiting some awful looking/slow loading/painfullyfull of advertising sites. Also, I don't spend hours checking on my favourite sites now, they come and tell me when something new is added.
I used FeedReader for a while but was bored by two things: - switch between FeedReader and Firefox for many blogs, so "I'd rather just go to the actual website" too and use FeedReader as an alert system - I try to use the keyboard as much as possible and it lost focus constantly while Tab-ing between the 3 panes: grrrr! (said differently: "an unhappy user experience")
Today I'm giving a try to http://www.netvibes.com, seems practical for now (but no keyboard at all here, well as long as I don't have to switch from one to other: should go for it) I will see in a few weeks if I still use it or I find a better Reader in the meanwhile
I use RSS for checking on my favourite sites, some of which I will then visit in more detail. Just makes up for lack of time really, and keeps everything tidy in one place.
I kind of use RSS only for news style sites, like Wired.com or yahoos news but other then that its not really something I find useful. Its good for quickly reading updated news event are newer version of software similar to a change log other then that like for forum use I would rather just visit and look around.
I use RSS purely for headlines, like most of you guys said, and then visit the site if the article seems interesting enough... I find it a lot easier than searching sites several times a day, and a lot less time consuming too.
I have also used Vanilla feeds to check for the latest posts on my bands forum, but then I realised that Vanilla is way to awesome for me not to visit it every hour anyway.
i love my rawdog. simply puts all feeds on a plain ol' html page and keeps it updated.
and for the technically inclined here's a nice article about why RSS sucks, why it should be done via NNTP and why NNTP sucks and why it shouldn't be done via NNTP. ;)
Hi, I use FeedDemon and am subscribed to a huge list of sites, whenever I have the time I take a look at some posts and if I see something interesting I just open the site.
I just use RSS in my live bookmarks to see when a site is updated, and I also used a feed aggregator on my site to pull in friends' posts. (Note: can also be used for enemies posts.)
I understand the feelings towards wanting to see and feel a site, or being discoraged that people aren't seeing your site (have you thought about simple excerpts instead of full posts in feeds) but its just not practical to visit everything everyday.. and for some things it doesn't matter wheither you see it in one view or another.
I've got between 150-200 feeds in NNW .. everything from sites I'd normally visit incessently to sites to internal feeds for wikis and such that help keep me be more responsive in an active way (not just looking for stuff to read) and some (like my nextflix feeds) that I'd never visit at all, but keep me informed.
The most useful part isn't for the sites or blogs you'd normally read anyway cause I still find I go to those in a "real" browser anyway, its for those I wouldn't.. things that don't get updated regularly, but that I wouldn't want to miss the rare update to.. or things that I would have alternatively been on a mailing list to get updates for.... Its a great way to keep up on software releases or patches, etc.
I just saves so much time, that I can track more things then I could before... be it check out more designers or read more development blogs for thigns like IE or Firefox or whatever else that I just found I wanted to but didn't have the time to refresh once a day just incase there was soemthign interesting to read.
Plus, it allows me an easy way to ignore all of it when I'm real busy working just by keeping the app tucked away/
krak, not to try to push you into it, but think of RSS as the lazy mans browser extension/alert system. If you have firefox, and often check news sites (wired/ars technica/whatever) check out the sage extenson. and collect a couple of your favorite RSS feeds from your regularly visited sites and forget about it for a while. Then the next time you're bored as shit in front of the computer or passing time, you'll remember its there and recheck all your news (if you haven't for a while).
It's fairly nifty for things like fark.com which have EXTREMELY ugly layouts, plus you can re-theme its output at your own discretion. All-around, a great plugin for existing software.
I've tried sage before. Its a decent extension, but I dont really care for RSS. I also tried the Thunderbird RSS feature.
I don't really have any news type of sites that I visit, just this one and a few friends sites. But whenever I come here or to the others I usually always end up posting something, so RSS would be a waste of my time. Since I am going to go there to post anyways.
"I use RSS every 15 minutes. I have Newsfire on my mac, and feed subscriptions to something like 700 sites. RSS is great, it means I get to read content without visiting some awful looking/slow loading/painfullyfull of advertising sites. Also, I don't spend hours checking on my favourite sites now, they come and tell me when something new is added."
i use google.com/ig for my rss feeds. i do like to still visit the sites though. i just use the google page for a quick glance to see if any of the news sites i like have an article worth reading.
Gregarius seems pretty good : web-based, highly configurable (because you run it on your own server), it uses tags and seems well designed... Maybe I will forget my good old Bloglines. Hopefully. :)
i love using RSS... i don't view it as a replacement for visiting websites at all, but being able to have live bookmarks from my favorite news sites in my firefox toolbar is wonderful! i don't have to visit the site to see the headlines, and if i don't like the headlines, i don't waste a trip to the site...
another great use for them is streaming information from other sites to display on yours. for instance, if i've got a friend with a blog that supports RSS, i can very easily tap that RSS feed with PHP and display his last however many posts i want styled as i'd have them, too!
RSS is beautiful! --btw, i prefer RSS 2.0 to ATOM any day, so i'm going to eventually write an RSS generator for Vanilla to allow for either RSS or ATOM... at least, that's my goal.
I use RSS a lot for news (digg, slashdot, ars technica, etc.) and comics (real life, applegeeks, ctrl-alt-del, etc.) But it integrates so well with Safari. It's a lot like just visiting the website, except there's no ads (usually.. some have started integrating them in the feed summary) and you can see when there's new newsitems.
Firefox's (non extended) approach to RSS seems the best to me.
You drag the lil RSS icon from your address bar to your bookmarks toolbar (or click "Subscribe to Blah.rss") and then it creates a dropdown menu of all the titles in the feed. Each title takes you to a permalink of the story.
I use it to keep up with: my own blog, my girlfriend's blog, my band's news page, bbc news page, support threads in the wordpress/binairy bonsai/vanilla/my crappy VCR forums.
All content, you don't have to trawl through an entire page- just nice tidy links.