When Google Reader was discontinued four years ago, many “technology experts” called it the end of RSS feeds.
And it’s true that for some people, social media and other aggregation tools are filling a need that feed readers for RSS, Atom, and other syndication formats once served. But old technologies never really die just because new technologies come along, particularly if the new technology does not perfectly replicate all of the use cases of the old one. The target audience for a technology might change a bit, and the tools people use to consume the technology might change, too.
But RSS is no more gone than email, JavaScript, SQL databases, the command line, or any number of other technologies that various people told me more than a decade ago had numbered days. (Is it any wonder that vinyl album sales just hit a 25-year peak last year?) One only has to look at the success of online feed reader site Feedly to understand that there’s still definitely a market for RSS readers.
The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog