It’s been quite a while (May) since I wrote a post about the then-less-obvious move away from RSS toward micromessaging. The observation that Twitter’s rapid growth was supplanting the use of RSS as a reading mechanism — in my case abandoning Google Reader in favor of FriendFeed — was met with emotional attacks from RSS’s prime mover, Dave Winer. Knowing from first hand experience in supporting Winer throughout the rise of RSS, I certainly was not caught unawares by the vehemence of the reaction, even as it became more and more personal.
What did surprise me was Winer’s rapid reworking of RSS into a “cloud” enabled solution, even as he continued to argue with such intensity that a centralized service (Twitter) could not sustain itself. In other words, RSS is not being replaced because it can’t be, but in any case it can already do everything the new message bus can. It’s certainly the best case to be made, but it has a weakness best illustrated by observation:
Twitter is winning. The stream is faster. Faster will increasingly win the hearts and minds of those who value speed when all other metrics are commoditized. In the history of technology, doing more faster creates economies of value, which in turn accelerate adoption. The most obvious example: RSS. A technology that has always been difficult to explain nonetheless emerged and spread rapidly to the point today where it dominates the ways information is spread over the network.
Nothing is more pervasive in the network than RSS. It’s the technology that turned the Web into a DVR. We interact with it every day more than any other tool at our disposal. Whether we perceive it that way or not, we do. RSS changed our relationship with information, from hunter to partner. It also changed the way we process that information, the way we create it, and the way we deal with overload.
In a way, it’s the polar ice caps melting that finally hipped us to the obvious. Those glorious days at the wheel of our youth, the sky expanding in front of us to the horizon, the feeling of unlimited power as we stepped on the accelerator. We knew in the exhilaration of the moment the special cost of that freedom, that now was our time and that someday we would need to accept the pull of gravity.
Part of the lure of the open road is outrunning fear. Time traveling. Beating the odds. The odds are Twitter won’t go away, won’t collapse, won’t drag its thrid party cloud into a black hole and vanish. It doesn’t even matter whether it’s called Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or Microsoft. Just like the Internet, the reality of this thing built on top of RSS is that it is bigger than its parts, its companies, its parts. Each node may be centralized but in aggregate it’s the opposite.
If that’s true, attacking a popular service for its failings in business, ethics, or any lack of “openness” does little to slow it down and perhaps the opposite. It’s not a matter of politics, it’s just sheer numbers. People voting with their feet. The arguments about long form versus noisy tweets, or built-in versus external URL shorteners, or RSS versus Twitter. They beg the observation: people like Twitter, they get their information first from the stream, and they need to figure out how to manage the flow.
Is there any magic to bring to bear on managing the flow? Yes, that’s why Twitter is so central. [Editor's note: When I say Twitter read FriendFeed.] Twitter’s Follow cloud, combined with Track, enables an authoritative filter into the flow that extracts a high percentage of the aggregate consensus of that group into a manageable stream. How that manifests itself in its delivery to the screen is what the great software battle of the moment is all about. Which device or devices we use can be interesting to argue about, but they’re all really iPhones in one shape or another. Oh sorry, couldn’t help it.
The raging against the RSS, or Office, or Links is Dead meme — I get that it hurts feelings, annoys VCs, leads to RTBS (RealTime Block Syndrome). But no amount of shooting the messenger (another metaphor) will change the fundamental point I’m making: that RSS has triggered a new wave of innovation that will inevitably build out from where RSS has stalled and eventually create a similar disruption of what it produces. Everybody look up at the sky and smile. Click.
RSS dead/not dead/replaced by twitter… I see RSS more as a content delivery mechanism that works for LOTS of different services (including twitter search no less), while twitter is more of a communication tool.
So apples and oranges, rather than one replacing another.
No denying that twitter works great for fast communication – but I’m not sure RSS was ever really meant for that … it’s more for pushing content from one place to another.
Seems to me, anyway!
Not that I’d speak for Steve but his critique of RSS (as it stands now) is that it’s not a real time technology — there’s a real lag between the time that the publisher publishes and when the end user acquires the info. On the other hand Twitter represents the “real time web” where the minute the airplane plunges into the Hudson you read about it right away.
It’s with great trepidation that I step into the epic age old Gillmor/Winer fracas, and I wouldn’t want to offend either of you because your insights mean so much to me:
Mr. Gillmor I’ve sat in a room for about two hours with Dave Winer to listen to what his vision is for CloudRSS. It’s something that’s very much in he beginning stages (i.e. developers are just starting to build proof-of-concept examples as we speak) — so it’s unfair of you to shoot it down by confusing it with RSS (it’s a related concept but still different) or even by seeing it as something that’s of the same generation as Twitter. What Dave is talking about is a next generation specification. Or to use a very clumsy analogy: CloudRSS is to Twitter as HTML was to HyperCard. For what it’s worth my own thinking is that unless you sit down and listen to Dave that you can’t fully judge what he’s working on.
Of course that said it would be helpful for Mr. Winer to avoid RealTime Block Syndrome if he really wants to evangelize his new concept.
I’m not shooting it down. Who the hell am I to say such a thing. When I say the new message bus I am not talking about “Twitter” any more than Dave is. But his arguments about open v. closed and decentralized v commercial don’t make his solutions any more likely to be adopted. I applaud rssCloud just like I arranged to have PubSubHubbub presented at the RealTime CrunchUp.
I think Dave feels that you are shooting it down (now granted I’m not a mind reader) — but I think he takes it very personally when you say that “RSS is dead”. Can’t we just get the two of you on the Gillmor Gang so I can hear a real time real conversation? : )
Dave deleted our last conversation and then blocked me. I doubt he’s interested in dialogue.
Techcrunch is missing out on the real comments at friendfeed http://ff.im/7I76c
Man, Michael Pinto is my hero. I’d never wade in here, except to say that you have to have a much more carefully curated Twitter account than I do to replace RSS with Twitter:-)
Winer and Gillmor are both absolutely correct in their views.
THE GILLMOR POV
Steve Gillmor speaks from the point of view of a “User”
of client software: to detect and interact with
“news and ideas”. His move from a dependency upon an RSS
Reader to a “Track-based” Twitter view was empowering as
a vision of a “Realtime” web conversation.
When Twitter disabled “Track” Steve spent months trying
to encourage a developer to re-build Realtime Nirvana.
Everyone told him… just wait for Twitter to turn it back on
after some re-engineering of the site… still wating I think.
Friendfeed and some others got pieces of the realtime experience
back but we’re still waiting for the perfect solution with
latencies measured in seconds and not minutes.
THE WINER POV
Telling Dave Winer that RSS is dead is akin to playin’ the dozens
w.r.t his mama. Not the best way to get his attention on
a software problem.
RSS is an API and a format for messages. Programmer can easily
see that comparing an API (or format) to an application makes
no serious sense. It’s comparing an envelope to the postman in the
domain of snailmail.
Steve is saying… that waiting for the mail is a pointless way to
get your news. RSS latency is his main issue. He updates a blog and
doesn’t see the readers see or react for minutes. He just won’t go
back after the high of realtime twitter for stimulus response.
Dave’s RssCloud offers developers an extension to the RSS API’s
that can feed the Gillmor Jones for “news” that’s really fresh…
like s teaming bagel fresh from the boiling pot.
When RssCloud’s start appearing in Applications that Gillmor can use the
maybe two good friends will start to remember that “Users” must wait for
developers to catch up to their needs and Developers must always seek to
understand what the critical user is trying to say.
When Winer and Gillmor connect with their visions: we all seem to benefit and experience
another bubble of enthusiasm (if not wealth).
PS> The user (by default) is always right. Even when you think he’s just being a jerk. I think Dave Winer taught us that much. Users = customers. Without customer products, technologies, and ideas just lay there in their “perfect” uselessness.
Dave: Steve is a crusty old visionary user of software and a Quixote of ideas.
Steve: Dave is a crusty old visionary maker of software and a Quixote of ideas.
Neither of you are suitable windmills for jousting.
Join arms against the windmill “dragon” of vested interest that seeks to captures us in their monetary schemes to control the conversation.