It's no surprise that Google Reader became the leader among RSS readers. It's good enough, free, and you probably already have an account to use it. Plus, you know, it's Google.

But after killing off its competitors since they couldn't compete with free, Google Reader pretty much stopped innovating. Compared to a modern RSS app like Reeder on the iPad, the whole user interface feels backwards and under-designed.

In what part do you think that contributed to the "death" of RSS?

Does all this mean that once a product achieves a sufficient marketshare, it has the power to kill off that market even if better alternatives appear?

Has RSS really died? I feel that RSS still lives on through apps like Flipboard (althought I don't personally use any of them).

I used to be addicted to checking my Google Reader account, I loved being the first to know interesting stories, and I felt it kept me in the loop of my profession even while being geographically distant (I used to live in New Zealand).

It's always tricky to self-report on your own behavior but I'm going to offer two reasons why I think I stopped actively subscribing and reading content through RSS:

1. It got overwhelming, I'm subscribed to hundreds of feeds, and even after trying to categorize and group feeds into bundles I still can't keep up with everything. Which is related to...

...2 where I just got bored of the echo chamber where I've subscribed to a bunch of people who are interesting as individuals, but when everyone starts writing about the same topic (and not adding much new to th conversation) then it gets pretty boring. There is only so much I can read about Apple product rumors and responsive design before I loose interest.

My alternative: I have a subscription to the New Yorker which keeps me entertained and informed on an eclectic range of topics that I'd probably not have seeked out to learn about myself. Tech stuff I rely on news.ycombinator.com

I think RSS has been dead for a better part of this decade. I only use it to fetch data from one place to another and when it comes to reading articles and such, I prefer to do that via the site itself.

I see Google Reader as more of a platform. It's the back end for all my news feeds. Syncing Reeder on my Mac, iPhone and iPad as well as for Flipboard.

Platforms that are market dominant are incredibly hard to disrupt.

Google Reader has certainly become a platform for many users - think Reeder & Co. on mobile devices which are apparently very popular. GReader also integrates with Flipboard, as Mathew pointed out.
It's pretty robust, but it desperately needs some dev love. The GPlus integration should be improved upon (there was a great article on that, but I can't find it right now).
Has anyone here taken Fever for a spin?

Good reads on this topic:
- forbes.com
- scripting.com
- theatlantic.com

Similar to Mathew I started adding every person and topic I found interesting to Google Reader, but eventually stopped reading my feeds.

I think the way RSS readers work has something to do with it. For example I follow a similar amount of (mostly the same) interesting people and topics on twitter as well, but by nature twitter doesn't expect me to read every tweet; whereas RSS gives you an unread count, which is usually in 3 digits for me, every time I see the number I feel guilty and end up marking everything as read without reading (at some point in time, I did try to read it all, but this is not possible to maintain without that activity being your job).

I guess the trick is to have an RSS reader that works like twitter. (Flipboard?)

Now that's just unhealthy. You have to weed out stuff regularly for it not to get out of hand.

P.S: There were some good things being said about tinder.com but it's been in beta forever!

@Alexander I found the weeding process itself quite time consuming as I had to skim every source. Some of these were magazine-esque and would have more than one post as well. I now treat RSS just like twitter, it's just a bit annoying to not have an interface that does that for me :)

I think RSS isn't dead, it's impossible to check loads of websites except if you're using RSS. So for journalists and news-addicts like me RSS is more than alive, and specifically via Google Reader, as I use several applications to view 'm (now Reeder for iOS and Reeder for Mac).

I used to be a Google Reader user but I always dislike the interface. Now, I'm using Feedly (a Google Reader front end or sort of) and I really enjoy it, it simple yet sexy and the android and iOS applications are just impressive (not to mention free). Now, I am always aware of what's going on.

While it’s undoubtedly true that Google Reader as a user interface has stagnated, I think Peter Scott is absolutely correct that as a platform, it’s alive and well, albeit for a news junkie niche. (Personally, I *never* used the Google Reader web interface; for me Reeder is the interface, and it’s brilliant.) The danger is RSS is now a platform that is de facto dependent on one party: Google. If Google kills Reader, what would replace it? I worry about this.
Related: the perception that RSS is “dead” probably derives its failure to ignite adoption amongst casual users, but it never made sense for casual use in the first place. If it did, it would have replaced the web as we know it instead of supplementing it.

I hadn't used Feedly before, it's beautifully designed, thanks for pointing it out :)

Going back to Sacha's question. I don't think Google killed RSS, I think it's still heavily used by a bunch of information junkies, and used as a backend to other services.

People have finite time for looking at news etc, my guess is that time is being diverted to Twitter, Facebook etc which serves a similar purpose of aggregating interesting content.

From another perspective, I've tried using RSS in personal projects and found expect for new articles (admittedly what it was designed for) it's painful to use because different publishers use it in such varied ways. RESTful APIs supersede RSS as a way to glue information from sites together :)

Another risk for RSS is future buy-in. A lot of frameworks and services simply support RSS out of the box, but if it’s only consumed by a niche audience, it risks being devalued, with eroding support over the long term. That’s fine if the technology is losing relevance entirely, but where’s the alternative?

RSS isn't dead, but the way we digest the content is changing. I like Pristimatic ( getpristimatic.com ) which combines RSS with Personalized news flow. This is a good way to use RSS. We read RSS because we think the feeds is interesting or worth reading. We don't like read all of them because not all feeds are attractive or useful. A good way to use RSS is making RSS both scannable and readable.

Sorry, it's Prismatic. I typed the wrong link. getprismatic.com

I think the real thing that's killing RSS is the general lack of monetization!

Recently some apps have started to put it together, as @Traicyer mentioned, and Pulse is an example of that: pulse.me

In general though, some feeds provide great quality, rich media, etc, and others are just frustratingly short truncations which bounce me to the website and eliminate the benefit of a reader app.

RSS is still around, it's just not the be-all-end-all that many of us expected.

I, like others probably reading this branch, really hope for Google Reader to pivot, incorporate G+, and become relevant again.

So, Sacha, you’ve collected some pretty diverse viewpoints with your question, some of which are clearly more concerned with the underlying RSS infrastructure (aggregated by Google) rather than the Google Reader UI. What do you think now?