Irreal readers know that I’m a big fan of RSS and use it as my primary means of discovering interesting content. Happily, despite the efforts of the content aggregators in their never ending crusade to wall in and control all of the Internet’s content, RSS lives on and may, according to some, even be experiencing a comeback.
The worst culprit in the anti-RSS campaign is, of course, Google. It’s not hard to understand why. It’s crucial that access to content passes through Google so they can track and monetize it. RSS makes this difficult so Google used it to capture user bases and then killed their support for it. This includes much more than their infamous sunsetting of Google Reader.
The Open RSS organization has a post from last August that describes How Google has helped destroy RSS adoption. As I said above, it’s much more than just abandoning Google Reader. You can get all the details at the link. Google, it seems, has fully embraced Microsoft’s Embrace, Extent, and Extinguish tactics with regards to RSS.
In one sense, I’m insulated from all this because my RSS solution—the excellent Elfeed— is self contained and doesn’t depend on Google in any way. On the other hand, any RSS reader depends on sites providing an RSS feed. By convincing users that RSS is dead, Google has persuaded content providers not to bother providing an RSS feed.
It’s just another item in the long and sordid list of crimes Google has committed in their total abandonment of their early motto of “Don’t Be Evil”.