Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS, Completely

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
I'm not sure what to make of recent rumblings about Twitter, Facebook and RSS, but it doesn't sound good. For them, I mean. Mostly, the links to RSS feeds on user pages are disappearing. The feeds are still there on Twitter (I checked) but may be disappearing; "Twitter recently stopped supporting basic authentication over RSS in favor of OAuth." With Facebook, well, it was never easy to find the RSS feed, and this service appears now to have disappeared completely. No surprise there. I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick's reaction: "There should be an easily accessible feed, public or authenticated, for anything that happens on the web. It's really important. I am very upset about this and feel like yelling at someone about it." Me, I say: if I can't share, I don't want to be in your service. See more discussion (and the above image) on Dave Winer's site, and more on the Blog Herald.

P.S. on the other hand, there's the point made on Google's API page: To prevent abuse, Google places limits on API requests. Because (and I know this from personal experience) remote services (aka spammers) will slam the services with millions of requests.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 24, 2024 07:52 a.m.

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