I really like jsonfeed, but I just can’t envisage it getting anything like the ubiquity RSS enjoyed in the mid 2000s, when even Safari had a pretty reasonable feed reader built in. Back then my main way of following news/blogs was to combine the RSS feeds of my favourite sites, giving me a single view onto all the news I cared about.

What killed it for me personally though wasn’t the slow death of widespread RSS, but weirdly Twitter. Twitter can be a great news link replacement for RSS if you used RSS the way I did, as the links the people you follow share have been curated by those people themselves. I started to find a much better “hit rate” for content I wanted to read by seeing what influencers in industries I have an interest in share, rather than the hosepipe of stories that RSS was providing. I found I was still getting all the content I wanted without having to wade through all the noise, at which point I just stopped using RSS altogether.

I do however agree it is another sad indicator of a dying open web though.