This is a post that I had meant to publish 2 or 3 years ago and had forgotten about. Having found it in my unpublished drafts, I decided that it was still interesting, even if the "demise of Google Reader" is no longer fresh news
The original post follows
There has been some noise, since the demise of Google Reader, about whether RSS is "dead."
I think much of the discussion on the topic is somewhat missing the point : even if RSS feeds are not something that normal humans want to collect, curate, subscribe to, and aggregate, RSS is still a great interchange format for computer programs that collect, curate, subscribe to, aggregate, and repackage RSS feeds.
Case in point:
A nice thing about using RSS for such a purpose is that the content emitters don't have to run the same software or the same systems or even be run by the same people as the computer program reading the RSS. Now, of course, not all content emitters want their content to be scraped, collected,curated and repackaged. But, for those that do, RSS (or Atom) provide ideal means of interchange. Note, also, that the example above is probably not anywhere near the most efficient or scalable way to repackage a feed from one source in order to re-display in another.
I believe that this is a corollary to the idea that Twitter is the ideal medium for machines to broadcast short updates to one another and to humans in a medium that is authenticated, but not private.
