However, while RSS may not be dead, I don’t think anybody would say that RSS readers are a growth industry, and that’s where the challenges for NetNewsWire come in. As John himself writes in his earlier post about NetNewsWire
and
For people who read the news because they’re news junkies, or because their jobs involve following the news, RSS readers may well truly never die. But I would also argue that most of those people already have their apps, services, and workflows well established, and are unlikely to switch unless a new solution truly brings something they can’t get anywhere else…
I’m not a news junkie and my job doesn’t revolve around knowing everything. In fact, I’d say using Twitter, Facebook, Reddit would actually lead me to discover more variety of news that wouldn’t come to my RSS reader. I subscribe to tech news so I won’t know about current events unless it’s on Facebook (which I no longer use) or NY Times.
I do think that people who don’t use RSS or dismiss it are doing themselves a huge disservice. RSS is mostly ad-free, full-text and very easy to read no matter how good or bad the web design is on the publisher’s site. I love RSS! It’s lightweight and very easy. The news comes to me and I don’t have to seek it out. As I’ve stopped use of social media like Twitter and Facebook, the more important RSS has become to me in finding out what’s going on.
If you don’t use RSS, you might be missing great content that just so happened to not be shared by a friend. “If someone doesn’t tweet a link to an article, was the article ever written?” :)