Rebooting feeds
A year ago, Google Reader went away. Since then, we've seen a lot of RSS players catch up with what Google's product was. There are now many readers to chose from. It's time to start thinking about what's next for feeds!
The current specifications for RSS and Atom are old by the web standards and have not evolved in a long time. Yet, the way feeds are produced and consumed certainly has evolved. The reading experiences outside of RSS have evolved. It’s time to reconcile things!
At Superfeedr, we’re convinced that one of the most important things to work on is to ease the subscription process. There are follow buttons everywhere and more than ever content discovery needs to happen outside of search engines. Yet, feeds are left on the side of the road when it comes to that. SubToMe is an effort at fixing that in a decentralized, open and privacy-aware way!
In June, we will be at the “Reboot RSS” workshop and we’ll pitch that idea. We’ve heard from other people involved in the RSS world that they’re interested in seeing the formats evolve (maybe even JSON). Some other are interested in having better analytics mechanisms built in the feeds so that publishers have a better visibility on what happens to their content in the feeds they publish… Similarly, some asked for things like Webmentions endpoints made available in feeds so people can remotely comment on the content they read… etc.
If you’re interested in coming, please, email julien@superfeedr.com