What is an RSS feed? Why would I use one?

Question

Pretty basic question about internet technology:

What is an RSS feed?

Why would I use one?

Answer 1

The biggest advantage RSS has over, say, an e-mail list, is that the reader is in total control.

When you sign up to an e-mail list, you're asking permission to be added. Then, when you want to leave, you have to ask to be removed. I'm sure we're all familiar with e-mail lists we couldn't get off of.

An RSS feed is different. I only need to direct my newsreader to subscribe/unsubscribe from the feed. The generator of the feed is not involved at all and won't even know I've joined/left.

It's also nice to be able to get updates from multiple websites in one place instead of having to visit each site individually.

Another nice feature is that Google Reader is accessible from work, but some of the sites whose RSS feeds I subscribe to are not. Because I subscribe to their feed I can get their updates without being cockblocked by the firewall.

Answer 2

Really Simple Syndication. Used to publish (in XML) frequently updated content.

I think one would use an RSS feed to announce new products, software updates, news, blog entries, anything that is frequently updated.

Answer 3

RSS in Plain English

Answer 4

The best way you can compare an RSS feed with is a newsticker.

Each time a website publishes a new message it'll get added to the RSS-feed

once on a while your RSS reader/live bookmarks will check the RSS feed and update your live bookmarks or will notify you of new messages.

Now you have one single place to check if your favorite sites have new updates, instead of going to each site seperately an looking for new messages.

Answer 5

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a specially formatted http link on many web pages that lists some or all of the recent content generated at that website. The idea is that a RSS Reader can poll that link on a regular basis, and then inform the user of that RSS reader that there is new content. This means that the user can get on with the reading without having to manually visit each site.

For people who have a lot of websites that they want to see content from, it is a huge timesaver. I have 187 subscriptions in my Google Reader right now, and it would be prohibitively time-intensive to manually check that many sites. My old method of checking, which was to separate all links by topics and then open each topic into separate tabs once per day and then go through them during the day, would not scale with this many links.

The advantage of this way of reading sites is that it is totally reader controlled. You don't ask for permission to join, like a mailing list -- you just do. Similarly you don't ask for permission to leave, you just drop it if it becomes too [stale|noisy|challenging-to-your-world-view] and the author never knows you've gone.

Another advantage of RSS is that sites that infrequently update just vanish from your reader when there is no new content, and then automatically re-appear when new content is published. This saves you the tedious checking of websites which only update randomly or infrequently.

Another interesting use of RSS is Twitter following. I throw people who I am marginally interested in (celebrities, for lack of a better term) into my Google Reader, and then my personal Twitter stream isn't polluted with their updates; and I still see their updates on my terms.

I personally use Google Reader as my RSS reader. I do this mostly so that my feeds and whats-been-read is automatically sync'd across the three devices I regularly read from (my desktop, my laptop, and my blackberry).

Answer 6

RSS is akin to the AP newswire. Anything that gets loaded on to the feed will be sent out to all who currently are subscribers.

RSS feeds can pretty handy for sites that support it. One example is I use RSS feeds to look for specific items on sites like eBay. Long gone are the days where I actually manually search for these items online. Now I let the computer and the RSS capability do all the hard work.

Answer 7

For me the biggest advantage of RSS is that it makes different websites all machine readable.

No matter how different two sites may be - think BBC News and YouTube - they look the same in RSS, which makes it very easy for developers to take their content and place it in their site, or whatever else they want to do with it.

So, to answer your question, one reason you might use RSS is: if you have a site and you want to make it easy for other sites to use your content, but don't want to go to the lengths of creating an api, an RSS feed gives developers the easiest way to use your content.

Answer 8

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

Answer 9

An RSS Feed is an XML document containing articles and their metadata. They're used as a replacement for traditional syndication; that is to say, someone will check your RSS feed every couple of minutes looking for new entries.

I read the news each day as a set of RSS feeds from various websites.

Concretely, if I run a web site called "Widget Daily", which reports on all the widgets that come out each day, every time I publish an article to my site I'll also add an entry to my RSS feed for people who read about the widgets but don't visit the actual web site.

Answer 10

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is usually used to let you check for new content on websites, for example, new posts on blogs, comments on forums, or even new low rates at an airplane.