[zanny]

> RSS is dead

What other technology is pervasively available to subscribe to discretized rich text articles, that will automatically fetch new entries, and maintain a history of viewed / favorited articles?

RSS serves a very critical function on the Internet - automated retrieval of content from dedicated sources picked by a user.

It was never a "platform" or a business model. It is syndication. The end. Everything from blogs, to videos, to art galleries, to music artists, benefit greatly from providing automated syndication to their content. So RSS will always have a place.

[saraid216]

Yeah, none of those are actually part of the spec. What you're describing isn't RSS: it's the ease-of-use automation that was layered on top of RSS that was made easy to do because RSS was a fairly strict format. (I remember many examples of my newsreader breaking because the spec wasn't followed correctly.)

What you're really describing isn't RSS. It's a web archiver.

[danilocampos]

> So RSS will always have a place.

Indeed,

> but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.

[Daniel_Newby]

Not a hot technology? It is widely used by science and technology leaders who have to stay on top of the literature in their field. We're talking heads of $10M research programs, principal investigators, conference organizers, and so forth.

Google could have kept it around just to sell Apps to C*Os. "Apps is like Reader for secretaries."