Is RSS dying? It has been reported to be on its last legs and about the pop its clogs for as long as I can remember. Yet it is still going and apparently strongly.

In case you are not familiar with this valuable service, I ought to say a few words about what it is. RSS users may skip this paragraph. What “RSS” actually stands for is disputed. The most popular translation of the acronym is “Real Simple Syndication” but there are at least three other commonly cited contenders. If you follow many websites, then keeping up with them all can be a chore. RSS seeks to make this easy. Many sites that reguarly update their offering provide their RSS feeds. These can be entered into you RSS reader which will then present you any new articles as these appear on the sites you follow. Different RSS readers provide different facilities such as filters to screen out unwanted topics. For more information on RSS and a description of some readers or aggregators, as they are also called, this FreeRange page may be useful.

My first uses of RSS were made through my computer. In those days, only a few decades away in calendar time but aeons away in terms of technical development, if you had a mobile phone you could use it to make and receive calls, send and receive texts (limited to 160 characters), and that was it. Internet-capable mobiles, let alone “smartphones”, were still naught but a gleam in some developer’s eye. Choosing an RSS reader was therefore fairly simple. You could opt for an application or program (the term “app” had yet to be coined) to run on your desktop or for a site on the Web.

In those days, there were many readers to choose from, each offering a core of common features but also struggling to provide bells and whistles that distinguished it from the others. Arguably, the most popular was the Google Reader that you accessed online. You created an account and then entered the URLs of the feeds that you wished to follow. Google discontinued their reader in July 2013, to much protest and dismay. Had they not, I am sure many would still be using it.

Roll the calendar forward a few years and the Internet-capable mobile phone makes its appearance. Compared with today’s smartphones, mobiles’ access to the Internet and Web was at first pretty primitive and provided no serious competition for browsers and email clients on computers. That soon changed, of course. My first mobile with a Web browser was a Nokia 9300 Communicator. The browser provided the width of a Web page but only a few lines in length. My next Internet mobile was a Blackberry. The email service was extremely good with push on all the accounts you signed up for. The Web browser, though, was pretty poor compared with what was beginning to be available from other manufacturers.

Tigger had acquired an Apple iPod and when she upgraded to a newer model, I inherited the old one. I was enchanted by the quality of the display (by now the iPod could handle email and access the Web) and we very soon migrated from Blackberry to iPhones, a decision from which we have never looked back.

It now became interesting to consider using an RSS app on the iPhone. Which one, though? If you follow even a small number of feeds, setting them all up on a new reader is rather a chore. It made sense, therefore, to choose a reader that ran synchronously on both the PC and the iPhone. Whatever changes you made to the one would also be reflected on the other.

Finding a reader that worked on both was not that difficult. The problem lay in finding one that performed on both in ways that I liked. For example, Google Reader would mark an article “read” only if you told it to do so while many others did so as soon as you opened the article. Given that read articles disappeared from the display, this meant that you could easily lose one by mistake. At the very least, a reader should make it easy to mark an opened article “unread”, thus saving it for further study later.

For a long time, I used Inoreader. This has Web access and an app for the iPhone. I would say it’s pretty good and that it will suit most people. There is, though, one slight problem with it: it is a “freemium” application, that is, it has free and paid-for versions. The free version is perfectly adequate for my purposes but Inoreader did tend to nag me to upgrade. While I understand the makers’ desire to acquire income, this annoyed me. So I looked around for other choices.

I eventually plumped for one that I had tried before but had dismissed for reasons that were valid at the time but which I no longer remember clearly. This time around, I was quite impressed with it. It has Web access and an iPhone app. It too is freemium but it has not once nagged me so far. Adding feeds is very easy. Gone are the days when you had to find out the URL of the site’s RSS feed and enter that. Nowadays, you simply supply the site URL and the reader finds the feed and sets it up. This reader seems to catch new posts more quickly than Inoreader does. (I ran them side by side for a while to test this.) The reader I am talking about is Feedly.

Changing RSS readers used to be a chore. You would have to enter all your feeds into the new reader. If you have a large number of feeds, collected over a long period, this could seem prohibitive. Happily, there exists a facility called OPML. This is an acronym for Outline Processor Markup Language but the user doesn’t need to know anything about that. You simply tell your current RSS reader to export its OPML file and then you import this into your new reader. It usually works pretty well and means that you can set up your new reader ready to go in just a few minutes (or even seconds). You don’t need to know anything about the technicalities.

So, in answer to the question posed at the beginning, no, I don’t think RSS is dying. I think it is still a very valuable service and will therefore go on being available until something better comes along. There are of course rivals. For example, if you have a WordPress blog, your site includes Reader, a page on which you can link to other blogs you wish to follow – very much like an RSS reader, in fact. Or there are services like Bloglovin. You may have your own favourite way of keeping tabs on blogs and other sites which may or may not involve RSS. For me, RSS fills the bill and I am sticking with it, at least for now.