In fact, I thought RSS and email would merge into a single client, and that was tried by some developers (even Apple!) with software and plug-ins, but it never caught on.īut I prefer the perishability of Twitter rather than the potential finishabilty. It’s not as organized as RSS by any means-an aggregator is much more like an mail inbox of news, with the same feeling of needing to deal with it. Now, Twitter combines tweets from friends, feeds from news sites, humor, nonsense, and much more. Since Twitter never ends, I find this a difficulty strategy to understand, no matter how I try 3. This is in contrast to Twitter “completists,” who have to manage who they follow to ensure that they can read every single Tweet. I don’t “read” Twitter, either, but body surf it, reading a small fraction of the several thousand messages that flow across my timeline. When I migrated to the Web app, I had a truncated list of a few hundred sources, but many rarely update or have been dead for years. In every case in which there was a Twitter account that duplicated a feed I didn’t avidly read, I followed on Twitter and unsubscribed in NNW. (This is in contrast to tab-based colleagues, who have 1,000 tabs open and unread because they “need” them and will one day read them, like back issues of the New Yorker or Economist.)Įven before switching to Minimal Reader, I had begun to prune my feeds. I developed a kind of quick scanning technique, sometimes scrolling through hundreds of headlines in a few minutes to catch up, before marking all as read. I was never an RSS completist: I didn’t need to read every headline, much less every article. You see, you may not realize this, but I use Twitter. While Black Pixel, NNW’s current owner, delayed on perfecting its 4.0 release -Â still in public beta 18 months later -Â I switched to Jordan Sherer’s niftily designed Web app, Minimal Reader.īut despite the ease of access to Minimal Reader and its general resemblance and similarity in featureset to NNW, I consulted it less and less. When Google Reader emerged as a way to synchronize across multiple readers, including NetNewsWire and Google’s Web app, I switched to that as my backend.Īnd when Google Reader was killed off in 2013, I dutifully migrated back to manual maintenance of sync, using Dropbox and carefully quitting NNW on one machine before launching it on another. When NetNewsWire came out in 2002, I was a relatively early adopter, and used it religiously for the next decade. It seemed a joke in bad taste, but in fact was the day that blogs came of age and a large group of people started sorting out how to use RSS. I found out about 9/11 from Radio Userland, waking up one morning in Seattle, firing it up, and reading an entry from Robert Scoble (site now gone), who posted a short item about what he’d just seen on CNN. (RSS 2.0 and Atom have some improvements on the original RSS 0.9 1, but remained structured around “atomic” or individual news items that are uniquely identified and timestamped.) Winer is widely and rightly considered a parent of RSS, as he adapted, made consistent, and popularized a standard version that had all the basics still used today. I started off aggregating RSS from early blogs using Radio Userland, a multi-purpose tool developed by Dave Winer and his company. It’s been replaced by a change in my needs and a combination of other sources. It’s not intentional the need seems gone. I haven’t checked RSS for more than a few minutes here and there in the last year, and I don’t think I’ve looked at the aggregator I use at all in a couple of months. At regular intervals, a flood of headlines and other folderol would flood in, and if I had time, I would switch to NetNewsWire to scan through the several or dozens of new items, and see if any were worth previewing in the program or opening in a browser. RSS used to be the clock by which I watched the news. Note: This story has not been updated for several years. How I stopped using RSS and didn’t even notice
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