In the wake of the death of Google Reader I was planning to write an ode to RSS and how important it is for the web but Dieter Bohn has done the job in his article on The Verge, “Why RSS still matters.”
In short I’m hopeful because something that valuable and so passionately used won’t just disappear. This represents an opportunity for all of us who consider ourselves innovators to build something to fill the gap without Google Reader. At present I’m kicking the tires of NewsBlur but here are some things I’d love to see in the more evolved RSS clients people will start building:
1. Tools for long form reading – similar to Instapaper which I use for deferred but eventual reading.
2. Shared content from feeds, perhaps also syndicated with annotations. Take the social network out of the walled garden and make it open.
3. Tools for curating and annotating syndicated content.
4. Tools for feeds with specialized content like video blogs or podcasts.
5. Integrated Groupware: things like long form chat and the ability to post comments in an environment that makes them visible to some group of people. The big trick is to avoid the walled in social network; we have too many of those.
Any other ideas?