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Interesante explicación del servicio de Superfeedr para tener RSS feeds en tiempo real

Every 2-3 months, the future of RSS gets debated feverously and simultaneously on a few blogs. The spark that fuels the fire has always been Twitter and an intricately related subject: the future of RSS readers.

Last week, Richard MacManus kicked off another debate that I commented on. And Ross Mayfield wrote an insightful post “The More Than RSS Market” in response to Jeff Nolan’s “There is No RSS Market”.

When reading the comments on these blogs, I noticed that several people were still confusing RSS (the transport/publish method) with RSS Readers (the human readable method). And to add to the confusion, Twitter is simultaneously a reader, a publishing platform and has an RSS out.

RSS Cloud? I am getting a bit tired of this cloud computing trend.
Yes, I also think that cloud computing is slightly over hyped. However RSS Cloud is not about cloud computing. It is about bringing real-time updates to the RSS protocol.

I have only just grasped what RSS is. Only the technorati seem to use it, normal computer users have no idea.
Indeed: most people have no idea what RSS is or how they can use it. They still visit all their favourite news sites one after the other to check whether something new has been posted. However even people that don’t understand it often use it. If you download podcasts through iTunes you are using RSS technology. Furthermore RSS is the technological glue for many of the popular mashup sites. You don’t need to understand a technology for it to be useful to you.

2009 has been the year I fell out of love with Google Reader. It is probably due to the quantity of unread feeds subscribed to becoming unmanageable within.. say a a day. It was as if I was hunting for my football in a field that hadn’t been tended to for a year. There’s been immense growth yet still difficult to find anything. Reader for me wasn’t the place any more that I could dip in to for a few minutes throughout the day to see what was going on at a glance. I felt guilty for not coming back regularly and lavishing it with the time it required. In the end it bothered me so much I changed one of the options for it to not show the unread count of items. But that was just me hiding from the problem. The problem was an inefficient organisational hierarchy.

I started using Google Reader and Twitter for discovering and sharing content at roughly the same time in April last year. I share and tweet almost exactly the same content. After about 8 months, I have over 1100 followers on Twitter vs. 133 on Google Reader.

How do these two stack against each other from a discovery and sharing perspective? As a newcomer to the social web, my experience can be illustrative of any new user of these services.

Every 2-3 months, the future of RSS gets debated feverously and simultaneously on a few blogs. The spark that fuels the fire has always been Twitter and an intricately related subject: the future of RSS readers.

Last week, Richard MacManus kicked off another debate that I commented on. And Ross Mayfield wrote an insightful post “The More Than RSS Market” in response to Jeff Nolan’s “There is No RSS Market”.

When reading the comments on these blogs, I noticed that several people were still confusing RSS (the transport/publish method) with RSS Readers (the human readable method). And to add to the confusion, Twitter is simultaneously a reader, a publishing platform and has an RSS out.

Yes, there is a problem with RSS readers. Aside from Feedly and Google Reader, RSS readers have not innovated in useful ways. So, I went to my iPhone and downloaded a number of new RSS readers and topical streamers that claimed to contain innovation. My assessment: #fail.

Fact is that most RSS Readers don’t offer a very compelling user experience, unless you’re a dedicated researcher:

1) Feed management is time-consuming, especially when you’re into the hundreds of feeds.
2) RSS readers have very poor filtering and curation capabilities (although Google Reader has social filtering now).
3) RSS readers offer mediocre ways to search or archive content.
4) You cannot re-publish / social share content from RSS readers (except for Google Reader & Feedly).

That said, the future of RSS is bright because what matters now is “what you do with RSS” from a processing point of view, not just as a collection exercise. Hint: that’s what we have been focused on doing at Eqentia where we continuously process and analyze content from thousands of RSS feeds.

Amidst this optimism, there’s a potential threat from Twitter. For some users, Twitter has replaced reading RSS via an RSS reader. But this trend is offset by another segment of users who are flocking to topical readers where RSS is often part of the plumbing.

Will Twitter-published content totally usurp RSS-published content one day? That’s a difficult question to answer, although some publishing platforms are directly pushing content to Twitter without using RSS, e.g. WordPress and Tumblr recently. It would be tragic if websites published to Twitter only and not to RSS, but as long as they are publishing to both,- RSS is safe.

Comparing RSS to Twitter, RSS transports more content than Twitter, but Twitter contains attention-data. Both RSS and Twitter need to go to the source URL to extract more meaning about the content, but users need more than just re-tweet data to get a 360 view on social media engagement. Problem is- today, not all content is surfaced on Twitter. Therefore Twitter is a complementary channel, not a replacement to the Web. Plus, it’s still quite a bit messy and noisy.

To follow the future of RSS in a very comprehensive manner, this Eqentia portal has an archive of 2,000 articles on that topic,- all done via RSS processing, and without letting the user lift a finger on RSS (also on Twitter here).

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Technorati Tags: Google Reader, RSS, Syndication and Feeds, Twitter

Access Password-Protected Feeds with Google Reader

Google Reader is easily the most popular web-based RSS reader, but if you've ever tried subscribing to an RSS feed that required password authentication, you're out of luck in Reader. Weblog Digital Inspiration demonstrates a clever trick to circumvent this problem.

Even though Google Reader doesn't support password protected feeds, Google's FeedBurner does—and what's more, it can turn it into a private(ish) feed that you can then subscribe to in Reader. Check out the video and the link for more details.

The only caveat is that the necessary username and password will be in the feed's url—which, with FeedBurner's NoIndex option, shouldn't be indexed in search engines, but many still may not feel comfortable having, say, their Gmail or Twitter password in a public feed URL (and rightfully so). This workaround is still pretty useful for, say, private blogs and other such things.

Subscribe to Password-Protected Feeds inside Google Reader [Digital Inspiration]

Send an email to Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com.

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MPS 12/24/09

There's also [freemyfeed.com]

I use it for some of my friend's LiveJournal's and it's worked for me. And looking at the feed url, it's all gobbledygook, so I don't think you have to worry about revealing your password and username to anyone. Reply

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There are several ways to aggregate and read feeds.

1. Desktop readers: [Wikipedia] Many users prefer these desktop programs, which couple an integral browser (usually the IE engine) with feed management. The result is a complete, reader-centric workspace, which can be quite powerful. [why use a desktop reader]
2. Web-based readers: Web-based feed readers compete on a par with desktop feed readers. A good one produces a powerful browser-centric workspace, which I find gives me better work flow than a desktop reader.
3. All major browsers and many email clients, for example Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail, now have built-in feed reading. There are also add-ons which enhance their native capability.
4. Some feeds include audio or video attachments and work best with podcast and vidcast readers.
5. Mobile readers for smart phones (not considered here).

The "best" feed reader is a matter of individual preference, or even personal taste. ;-) There are many good ones. Most of them, including the best, are free like browsers. The one that matches the way you want to work is best for you. :-)

No matter which reader you choose, it should give you some way to back up your feeds, preferably as an OPML file. You may also be able to use your OPML file to move to another reader, although the formats may not be compatible.