Google’s Reader fiasco did more to kill RSS than any other actor in the community before or since. Cornering the market damaging their AdWords business with a free product subsidized by that very business and then shutting it down was really gross.

FWIW, YouTube still has RSS available:

  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID
  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME
  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOUR_YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_NUMBER

You used to be able to go into your subscription manager and download an OPML file with the RSS feeds for your subscriptions. I'm unable to find that buton anymore though.

You can still download the OPML file you just click export to RSS reader at the bottom of this page: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager

Youtube used to have an rss feed for a search term, it was very useful.

Now we have to web scrape the results page because their api requires authentication and who wants to use that for results that are public anyways. I sure don't.

Rss worked great and they removed it. Boo.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well. This time it's not MS though.

Last weekend I was reading about RCS, Google's effort to update SMS. They have signed on a lot of partners and I wonder why any of them trust Google to follow through? Telecom companies like technology that ages over decades whereas Google seems to evaluate things fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter.