This article comes from the WeChat public account “Instantly” (ID: jikeapp), author kyth, Aifanerjing Authorized release.

This article today comes from Kyth, the immediate product manager, reviewing the development of RSS over the past two decades and some of his understanding.

RSS is Simple Information Distribution. It is an Internet information protocol that helps us obtain information efficiently. Including the early robots, it is also a form of RSS.

I believe that a lot of friends are instant, so I also know it instantly. Maybe it’s not the age of RSS, but it is undeniable that it still has its unique charm.

Writing an understanding of RSS today is actually a promise almost two years ago. Later, a colleague urged me for two years. Just write it.

The birth and development of RSS

The origin of RSS

This article is not intended to expand too much on the story of the origin of the RSS protocol. It is nothing more than the process of translating information. You can go to Wikipedia to find it yourself, or read Aaron Schwartz ₂ ‘s story.

RSS has three full names, RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, and Really Simple Syndication. These terms summarize what it is: It is a brief summary of the content of a website. Using RSS, you can Let people achieve a really simple “aggregation distribution”. The translation of the word syndication is no longer expanded here, but it is indeed a word without the best Chinese translation.

The 1.0 version of the RSS protocol was launched in 2000, 20 years ago.

Why RSS? In fact, this is the inevitable development of the Internet.

In all periods before the era of smart phones, desktop Internet users have been relatively elite among humans (especially in the United States), and everyone needs to improve efficiency when browsing websites. Open all the websites you go to every day to see if they are updated. It is inefficient. You need a way to use technology (that is, crawler technology) to format most of the updated web standards., So that you can receive reminders of web page updates in the future and gather them in one place.

In other words, just as search is a solution for pull mode to improve efficiency, RSS is a solution for push mode. We know that each of these two models eventually produced a superpower in the Internet age: Google and Facebook.

Main applications of RSS

RSS is not a particularly cool thing, and no spokesperson writes a white paper like Satoshi Nakamoto. It is more an efficiency tool based on the Open Web concept, and we later learned that the development of the Internet is basically only a small number of things that people on the earth can accept and love. Most people finally embrace the wall. Garden pattern (walled garden). Will continue to expand later.

The RSS boom has a short duration. In this period, based on the characteristics of RSS mentioned above, there are mainly two scenarios that people can think of using RSS: news and blog. The latter is actually a variant of a personal website: When the main update of a personal website is only the text written by the webmaster, someone abstracts it out and turns it into a public web log service. Blogs also become A thing that has swept the world and lives to this day. The most famous person who gained financial freedom was Ev Williams, founder of Blogger. ₃ After selling Blogger to Google, he continued to participate in the creation of Twitter and Medium, both of which are closely related to the spirit of RSS. Related.

Regardless of the display form, using RSS to receive information requires at least two steps: find the RSS link on the target website and add it to a content collection service (software) of your choice. This is destined for the niche of RSS. The earliest RSS reader I used was Bloglines, and the winner of the final reader battle was Google Reader. Google is not bad money, so when GoogleWhen Google Reader was announced to be closed ₄ , everyone who liked RSS knew that it was RSS without tomorrow.

RSS Gravediggers

Social Network: Gravediggers in RSS

RSS was the hottest when it was about 2002-2005. At that time, another word was very popular, called Web2.0 ₅ . The concepts and ideas involved in the two are different, and there are many Entrepreneurs join in, including in China.

The core idea of ​​Web 2.0 is UGC: users create content. Internet people have made many useful tools and platforms, and look forward to the Internet’s great prosperity when everyone comes to create content. But after 2006-2007, whether it is RSS or Web2.0, these two terms are no longer hot, because they meet the ultimate opponent: Social Networking .

September 6, 2006 was an extremely important day in the history of the Internet, when Facebook introduced the News Feed feature. In the first month of its launch, old Facebook users even continued to protest at the company’s doorsteps, but soon people didn’t care much about privacy, and people around the world became addicted.

The focus of RSS is on push and aggregation, and social networking is the ultimate push and aggregation. The focus of Web2.0 is UGC, and social networking is the ultimate UGC. RSS products cannot reach the user base and are easy to use. Social networks help you to the extreme.

Facebook and Twitter cover two aspects of social networks, more relational and informational, with different audiences. I still remember watching the Gravity for Symbian version of Nokia E71 on Twitter in 2007. I was addicted to watching while eating. Although it was just a small screen, no one around me could understand. Ten years later, everyone is like this. After entering the era of social networking, there have been no major innovations in the RSS field until Google Reade in 2013r Announced shutdown.

The historical limitations of RSS

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 meant that most entrepreneurs put aside the “Internet can make money” thing, but a few people still remember. The Internet is really starting to make a lot of money, and it has to wait until most people go online to use network services. Thanks to Jobs, if the iPhone does not give the possibility of smart phones, the Internet will not come for all.

In this sense, The core problem with classical RSS design is that it doesn’t have a business model or even anti-commercial. The content side’s website was originally advertised. When readers used the power of technology to realize the so-called clean article reading in the RSS reader, no one saw the advertisement. RSS is an ecology that no one benefits in business, so no one has enough motivation to perfect it and develop it.

So when you find that the content side suddenly stops updating one day, don’t complain, this is our choice. Don’t always complain that some news sites don’t support RSS, or that the support is not good enough or complete. First ask, why? The era of the giant baby Internet is over, and no one will pay for it, and business will fail. Zhang Yiming’s article Hello for Page’s courage to turn off Google Reader! 》 ₆ , probably the most suitable footnote for this paragraph.

RSS today and tomorrow

Some RSS services today

The shutdown of Google Reader is a sign, and it can almost be called the post-RSS era.

Some of the RSS services that are still alive today are idealistic. One of the most important companies should be Feedly ₇ . Its role is to take over the banner of Google Reader and make a comprehensive directory of RSS feeds. It also has a client, but you can also use other clients to access your subscription data stored in Feedly.

What about mobile clients?

In fact, RSS, especially RSS with “reading articles” as its core, is not a good enough ecology on the mobile Internet. Because on mobile phones, RSS is most likely to be presented as a list of article titles. And clicking into an article and back again is a very troublesome experience. When a more efficient experience (such as Twitter, Weibo, or Douyin) appears, the old experience is discarded.

▲ Reeder

Word of mouth the best RSS reader for iOS is Reeder << / strong>. In addition, some products such as NetNewsWire ₉ are continuously updated. In addition, there is a well-known InoReader 1₀ , but I have not used it. In fact, I rarely use an RSS reader at present. Similar needs are actually met by social networks and newsletters.

Newsletter and RSS are not technically related, but they are similar in spirit. In the field of writing long texts, what has changed in the last ten years is that there are fewer creators, and creators have less energy to adapt to the RSS format. Newsletter has attracted more people ’s attention, because the author can directly obtain the reader’s mailbox information, and there is a general protocol of Email to ensure access. Startups like Substack << / strong> also make more people see the hope of making money.

The last thing I have to mention is the WeChat public account. The spiritual core of this product is RSS, and the product architecture is designed and executed extremely well. Its creators understood everything about RSS.

Of course, let me talk about it instantly

In fact, from the very first day, it was very clear what RSS was, the limitations of RSS, and what was more interesting than classical RSS.

I once posted a Weibo in the early days saying that in fact, it is really Really Simple Syndication, or even Really Smart Syndication, because traditional RSS only mechanically subscribes to an information source (the assumption is to believe in an information source, People or institutions can produce content that meets their expectations in a stable and continuous manner), but the original and more essential needs than the information source are to subscribeA message of interest in what might happen in the future. Subscribe to the future.

▲ Instant 1.0 and 2.0

“Liverpool Losing Reminder”, “What’s Popular on Twitter Now”, “Kindle Price Reminder”, these things are missing in the public, old Internet and RSS basic directories, or at least they are The fragmentation, and more themes, were unthinkable. These require technology, taste, inspiration and insight. These cannot be copied. In this sense, we can actually admit frankly that the immediate early version was a cooler product than later versions-and of course, more niche.

In addition, almost all products in the RSS era have not done social and interactive links. This is the part that is intentionally deepened immediately, and even the basis of the immediate iteration later: You and those with similar information hobbies People should have a chat, at least you can get resonance when receiving the same information. In my opinion, it’s a pity that Google Reader didn’t do it well, especially when the implications of Facebook and Twitter are so obvious.

A corner still under RSS

At present, RSS has become an inconspicuous infrastructure in blogs, news websites, and other fields, and no longer has any waves. But there is an industry that still relies on the RSS protocol to develop, and RSS is one of its most important ecology.

This is the podcast, something invented by Apple. When Apple was a podcaster, it was decided not to host it, only a directory. Therefore, since a podcast address is online, it can be included by Apple, listened to in the Apple podcast app, or Other third-party (so-called general-purpose) podcast clients are distributed via RSS addresses.

The special point of podcasting is that this industry seems to be making no money, for so many years. Especially after the mobile Internet era, as long as you play mobile phones, you must use your eyes, and video is the absolute protagonist. So there are not many people (especially capital)Rush in and iterate on the most basic things in the industry: podcasts, listening software, protocols, and more. To this day, the distribution of podcasts is still based on RSS.

Marco Arment, the developer of the podcast client Overcast, enjoys the status quo of the podcast industry and scoffs at new money like Spotify. His point of view has always been: The reason why the garden of podcasts has achieved a certain degree of long tail, prosperity, and everyone’s enjoyment is because Apple does nothing. When the largest listening channel is “Buddhist” in terms of operation and industry development, it has contributed to a certain degree of blossoming on the content level.

What will happen in the future? do not know. But at least I can be sure that more and more young people are starting to listen to podcasts.

▲ The picture shows the small universe app under beta.

Appendix. Those RSS services in memory

The earliest RSS readers were both Web and PC local. The two most famous are Bloglines and Newsgator , the latter is more famous < strong> GreatNews .

Newsgator is the predecessor of today’s NetNewsWire, and Bloglines is the product with the highest market share among early Chinese Web2.0 enthusiasts. Google Reader was launched in October 2005. It improved a lot of inconveniences in the interaction of Bloglines. Later, in about two years, it basically announced the best experience among all RSS readers, establishing a complete victory.

Another service is RSS Burner . Its principle is to burn several RSS feeds together, customize one’s own RSS feed, and subscribe to others.

This service is FeInvented by edburner , Feedburner was acquired by Google in 2007 and maintained until 2012 when it was shut down. For example, Keso at that time burned his own daily blog “Dolls to the Bulls” hosted by DoNews and his 365key (a domestic Internet abstraction service, imitating the prototype of the United States del.icio.us). An RSS so that his readers only need to subscribe to an RSS address. Many personal geeks in China are doing jobs like “Personal Web Digest”, but they just changed their name to newsletter .

There are still many innovative products in the RSS field. Here I will just mention another one that few people have noticed: FriendFeed . This product uses the RSS protocol to let people aggregate their status updates in various services into the same feed stream. As you may have guessed, its ending was acquired by Facebook. The founder Bret Taylor was a Google engineer. After the acquisition, he became the CTO of Facebook. Now he is the president and COO of Salesforce.

Foreign RSS products are basically followed up in China. Catch shrimp and Fresh fruit are readers similar to Bloglines and Google Reader. After the founder Xu Yirong sold the caught shrimp to Douban, the second venture was beautiful. In fact, Douban has also done RSS crawling on the site. The product name is Douban Nine Points. Feedburner’s domestic imitator is called Feedsky, and the founder Lu Xinxin later sold the company to Tencent Advertising and went public in 2014.

Related links

① RSS protocol origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

② Aaron Schwartz’s story: https: //harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/rss-creator-aaron-swartz-dead-at-26

③ Ev Williams: https://medium.com/@ev

④ Google announced the closure of Google: Reader https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/13/4101144/ google-shuts-down-reader-rss-aggregation-service

⑤ Web2.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 < / p>

⑥ 《Applause for closing Google Reader for Page! 》:

http://m.techweb.com.cn/article/2013-03-14/1283033.shtml span>

⑦ Feedly: https://feedly.com/i/welcome

⑧ Reeder: https://reederapp.com/

⑨ NetNewsWire: