Gawker: valleywag, rss

FriendFeed declares instant gratification not fast enough

Owen Thomas — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Faster! In the '90s, people used to reload websites to see if they'd updated. Too slow! Hence the invention of RSS, a protocol for distributing headlines and stories over the Web. Faster! RSS takes too long to update, and requires too much bandwidth to check more frequently. Faster! Visiting multiple social networks takes too long. Paul Buchheit, an ex-Google engineer, cofounded FriendFeed, a site which uses RSS heavily to monitor your friends' activities across multiple websites. Faster! Now Buchheit is working on a replacement for RSS called SUP, or "Simple Update Protocol."

The play on "whassup" seems almost too obvious to mention — but keeping users ultracurrent on their friends' doing is very much the intention. SUP will let sites like FriendFeed pick up news quicker, avoiding the risk that you might be even 30 minutes out of date on swift-moving trends like which avatar style people are using on Twitter. Faster! Faster! Faster!

Google kills $100 million RSS ad system

Paul Boutin — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:20:00 EDT

A year after Google bought RSS-feed ad network FeedBurner for a rumored $100 million, FeedBurner's death was announced informally in a Google Groups thread. Publishers are expected to use Google's own AdSense instead. CenterNetworks publisher Allen Stern explains his frustration in the above video: FeedBurner had built a business that could deliver high ad rates in large volume. With Google failing to meet the same metrics, the only winners are the FeedBurner execs who flipped their company.

Local woman dumps newfangled RSS feeds to type in website addresses the old-fashioned way

Jackson West — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:40:00 EDT

An online publishing veteran who goes by the name of Halsted has stopped drinking from the RSS firehose. She says she's not missing her feed reader's unread items folder:

Nothing has changed. I spend my time writing, reading, and puzzle-solving instead, and my stress levels are markedly down. Now I am absolutely convinced that I need to ditch my RSS reader permanently, and only read a handful of feeds on a start page like iGoogle or Netvibes.

As a journalist, it's my duty to call three friends for quotes to support my article about the "Slow Web" movement now. I expect some blogger will get a book deal for the inevitable manifesto. (Photo by Jef Poskanzer)

Lies, damn lies, and RSS subscriber figures

Owen Thomas — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Google prides itself on running its business by the numbers. But its FeedBurner unit, which tracks subscribers to RSS feeds, has laughably inaccurate numbers, writes venture capitalist and blogger Brad Feld. One out of six of his 117,000 RSS subscribers come from automated signups, he believes; those users rarely if ever read his blog. [Feld Thoughts]

Social media begins to fold in on self, space-time collapse imminent

Jackson West — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:20:00 EDT

Lovably cranky early adopter Eric Rice points out that the reverb in the echo chamber is beginning to cause eye-splitting feedback loops. Normally harmless Twitter posts are automagically crossposted to Jaiku and Tumblr, where all three show up on FriendFeed, polluting your friends' RSS readers. They then curse your name, take screenshots, upload them to Flickr and blog about it. If you're not a member of The 250, you can probably ignore this budding trend safely — at least until it starts happening on Facebook.

Adding up RSS subscribers doesn't add up

Tim Faulkner — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:52:01 EDT

Ego-blogger Robert Scoble,TechCrunch proprietor Michael Arrington, and others along with many of their followers whiled away the weekend manually tallying up RSS-feed subscriber numbers via Google's Reader application for popular blogs. Why?

Counting feed subscribers — for a single feed-reader application, in a market crowded with many — seems a pointlessly masturbatory activity. RSS feeds allow subscribers to track a blog's posts without actually having to visit a website. As such, what do they really indicate, besides the portion of a site's audience that's technically adept and more than a little lazy? If RSS-feed advertising had any money in it, the tech business bloggers could claim some value to their time well wasted. But there isn't, really; what little business there was, thanks to FeedBurner, went away after Google acquired that company and fired its specialized sales staff, who were just beginning to make inroads with large advertisers. When RSS-feed ads add up to a noticeable source of revenue for these sites, real businesses will count this data. Until then, I'll spend my time researching Google's efforts to automate FeedBurner's ad sales, not joining the circle jerk.

China bans all RSS feeds

Mary Jane Irwin — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:46:34 EDT

The Middle Kingdom's net censors have finally patched up a great gaping hole in the Great Firewall of China, its not-so-effective Internet defense against the rest of the world's free press. It's now blocking all RSS feed traffic in an effort to stop the flow of information critical of the Chinese government. The Public Security Bureau has attempted to quash blogs and other forms of forbidden information ever since the great Chinese Internet surge in 2006. Of course, this ban will probably get swiftly dropped once China's intelligentsia discovers that RSS, besides being used for blog-headlines distribution, is also a vital tool for data transfer from Web-based applications. Photo by David Baron)

BusinessWeek goes off its (RSS) feed

Mary Jane Irwin — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:37:10 EDT

At McGraw-Hill's business newsweekly, someone decided, apparently, to do some late-summer database cleaning. BusinessWeek accidentally updating its RSS feed with some really thrilling stories. Headlines include: "More news today than ever," "Headline bla bla," and "just another headline that we need to fill in." Subheads — known in the news business as "decks" — also suffered: "Deck bla Deck bla Deck bla," "But this time we are testing FedEx campaign handling," and "testing the pp9 ad."

New Winer whiner thread

ndouglas — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 10:28:50 EST

Poor Dave Winer. Not only will he never get the respect he deserves for inventing the third-most popular version of the RSS feed format, but he's always getting ragged on too.

This time, the Winer martyr is Rogers Cadenhead, developer and Workbench blogger. He posted a letter from Winer's lawyer, which mostly involves Cadenhead's use of some work from a Winer project and Cadenhead's allegedly undeserved $5000 deposit (Dave cannot afford such losses! He is only a SMALL multi-millionaire). All you need to read is Rogers's closer:

The archives of Workbench contain numerous examples of lavish praise I've given Winer over the years, including an effort I led among his admirers to pool their funds and buy him a get-well iPod after he underwent heart surgery.
I've never been more retroactively embarrassed to have paid someone a compliment in my life.

Well that throws it all in a different light! Dave Winer turned on a man who bought him a get-well iPod. For shame!

Letter from Dave Winer's Attorney [Workbench]