Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you? And from the beginning of this episode, I'm going to get the cringe out of the way at the beginning and adopt an old, tiny voice just for the purposes of the intro. So, there are lots of different ways to access content on the web, and I know that's a lame and obvious thing to say, but I kind of start somewhere, and in ye olden days of the web, you used a browser on a desktop computer to navigate to a specific website. And in those old days, web pages were often unchanging. They were static. It was like open it up a book and reading the specific passage. You just put that book right back on the shelf and forget about it for years and come back to it. Open up that book, go to that bookmark that passage won't have changed because it's a book and books don't do that. Gradually, the web matured, New tools made it possible update web pages without having to reinvent the wheel each time. This meant there'd be a reason to return to a web page again and again. Okay, I'm gonna drive that now. But returning the web pages also created frustration. You might go to the trouble of typing in a web page as URL or following a bookmark if you were a civilized person, and you would discover that maybe the page hadn't been updated since the last time you were on, and you wasted all that time and effort going to a web page that hasn't changed since the last time you were there. Think of all the amazing things you could have done if you had already known there wasn't anything new there. Maybe you could have, I don't know, created a new hobby or something. Conversely, you might go to a web page after not having visited it for several weeks, and then you see that while you were gone, the web administrator held a really cool contest, and you totally would have won that contest, except it's already over now and you didn't know that there had been an update, and so you missed your chance. Curses. Fortunately, a new technology emerged in the late nineties that would make it easier to stay current with web page updates. On the user side of things. It also would make it possible to create a subscription model for content like podcasts. So this came out of the company Netscape. Originally, Netscape was the Mosaic Communications Corporation, and Netscape had introduced an early and incredibly popular web browser, the Netscape Navigator, and in the early to mid nineties, Netscape Navigator was the dominant web browser. However, by the late nineties, Netscape was taking a beating from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The story behind that gets into the Great Browser Wars of the late nineties, but that's really a matter for a different episode. Let's just say by the late nineties, Netscape Navigator was no longer the dominant web browser on the market. But around this time Netscape started to develop this new technology, and it also got a new corporate overlord. AOL announced in nineteen ninety eight that it would acquire Netscape, which it did in the spring of nineteen ninety nine. Around that time is also when Netscape introduced its technology it had been developing, which was called RSS. So what does RSS stand for, Well, it could stand for really simple syndication, or it stands for rich Site Summary, or with the original announcement, it actually stood for RDF Site Summary. RDF in turn stands for Resource Description Framework. So really it ends up depending upon whom you ask. So originally I guess you could say it was RDF site summary, but over time this changed. Whatever you say RSS stands for the technology's ultimate use would become the same. It ultimately made it easier for users to stay current with web page updates. That wasn't necessarily the intention when it was first being developed, but that's how it ended up being used. So a website that included an RSS feed was one where users could subscribe to that page and the page would syndicate updates to wherever the user had installed that subscription. We'll get to that in a little bit. Now. I'm skipping over a lot of early RSS stuff. There were lots of other elements at play in those early days, including a similar web syndication technology called scripting News, and some elements of scripting News would actually merge into the developing RSS technology as it would evolve from version to version. Then there became a disagreement within the RSS developer community about how to evolve the technology. You had one side that wanted to keep changes relatively small, primarily to adhere to this philosophy of maintaining a simple technology, the fear being if it gets too complicated, people won't use it. You had others in the community who wanted to build in a lot more functionality with RSS, but that would necessitate a more complex approach, and that could become a barrier for adoption. Interesting side note, one of the folks pushing for the more functionality side was a fourteen year old named Aaron Swartz, who would later co found Reddit. Tragically, Swarts would take his own life in twenty thirteen while the focus of aggressive prosecution from MIT and Massachusetts authorities, but that's a story for another day. The disagree between these two camps of developers led to a fork in RSS development. So on one side you had the more methodical and arguably conservative evolution of the technology. On the other you had the more extensive changes and additions, which would become RSS one point zero. And in two thousand and three, RSS would fork a second time, meaning now you had three competing versions, the third of which, however, would become known as ATOM, so it wasn't another confusing RSS designation. Eventually, the more conservative version of RSS would become the most widely adopted, and it would become known as RSS two point zero. So yeah, you had three different versions of RSS out there, although the two point zero one would become arguably the most ubiquitous. Now Over on the user side, the general public accessing the web largely remained unaware of RSS at all, no matter which fork you talked about. It just wasn't a technology that most people had heard about. But what would emerge over time is that the user would end up relying upon an aggregator called a feed reader. And this could be a desktop based application, so an actual program you would open up, kind of similar to a web browser, or it might be entirely web based, a website that you would go to in order to look for updates to all the web pages that you had subscribed to. The web pages would syndicate their content to these feeders, depending on whether or not you had added the RSS feed to that feeder. This idea didn't take off immediately, but when The New York Times added an RSS feed in the early to mid two thousands, I've seen some accounts say two thousand and two and others push it to two thousand and four. Anyway around that time that became a kind of tipping point for RSS technology. There were a lot of different feed readers that came out as a result of this, including some from really big web companies like Google. Google launched Google Reader in two thousand and five. So as a user, you could pop onto a web page that you liked. We're going to talk about how stuff Works in this episode, so I'll say, because that's where I started. You know, that's why tech stuff has stuff in the name. How stuff Works had an RSS feed still does technically, but we'll get there. So you would go to how Stuff Works and on the main splash page would see a little RSS icon and you could end up using that to subscribe to the page. Often that would involve copying a URL shortcut from that and then going to your aggregator of choice, whether it was a desktop app or a web based one, and then using the copied URL to subscribe to that particular web page, and then the next time you refresh your reader, the web page material would appear there, and from that point forward you could just go to your reader to see what stuff, if any, had been updated across all the different sites that you had subscribed to. So as long as a web administrator had incorporated an RSS feed and made it accessible so that you knew that it was there, you could subscribe to it, and that meant that you had a centralized location you could go to to quickly scan for updates to sites that you enjoyed, without having to go to each individual site to look for stuff that was new. The aggregator really cut down on that frustration, right. It removed the need to visit every page individually, So for stuff like news, it meant that users could go to their single source, their reader, and get a quick rundown of what's going on across multiple publications. You could subscribe to all of them, and it would be kind of like browsing a news stand and looking at all the headlines before deciding which, if any, paper or magazine you were going to really dive into. The feed readers typically had some other features that made them useful. For example, they could keep track of which items you had clicked through to read, and the reader would then know you'd already seen that update, so it wouldn't show you that upon subsequent visits, So it's kind of like a mark as red feature. That way, you know you wouldn't pop onto your reader and just see a bunch of stuff that you had already looked at. You could also, however, with most readers anyway, you could flag a piece of content that you really liked and essentially book market so that it wouldn't disappear from the reader. On subsequent visits, you would still be able to get to it, so it was kind of like saving an article. So it acted like kind of like a bookmark. But if you hop around the web now, you might notice that that little RSS icon doesn't show up that frequently. When we come back, I'll talk a bit about why that is and what has happened as a result, But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, so I mentioned already my old stomping grounds of HowStuffWorks dot com. On that website, we used to have an RSS icon right there on the landing page when you got there. If you looked in the top of the page, you would see a little RSS icon that you could use to subscribe to How Stuff Works and see updates as they were posted. I actually had to use the wayback machine to make sure I wasn't imagining this that I was remembering it incorrectly. You have to remember I haven't worked for how stuff Works for several years. I've had the same job, kind of like I've been working at the same position since two thousand and seven, but I've had different companies around me. It's a wild thing. Anyway, I haven't been with How Stuffworks for a while, and if you go to how stuffworks dot com today, you will not see that RSS icon on the landing page. Now, I want to make it clear, How stuff Works does still have RSS feeds. In fact, it has a few different RSS feeds, but you have to go to the actual page that hosts those feeds to be able to subscribe to them. I had to go through Google to find it. Actually. Also side note, I need to say something about my former employer. I think I mentioned this maybe in a news episode or something not too long ago, but from what I understand, recently, How Stuffworks essentially laid off the entire editorial staff after pivoting to using AI generated content instead of employing actual writers to write the articles. So if you go to some of the articles on HowStuffWorks dot com right now, which, by the way, when I last checked, didn't have any articles posted since late June. Anyway, articles now have a notification that explains an editor fact checks the articles, but that those articles have some or perhaps all, content generated courtesy of AI. I heard that the editorial staff had been pushing back on this, moved toward AI, and that subsequently they were let go. I should stress this is what I have heard, and I could be wrong because I haven't actually heard it from anyone who was working at house Stuff Works at the time. I have lost touch with the folks who were working at house Stuff Works, so I haven't heard it from a direct source. So it does make me very sad. And like I said, tech stuff wouldn't be called tech stuff if it weren't for hou Stuff Works, so I definitely wouldn't have the job I have now if the robots had been writing articles back in two thousand and seven when I first joined that company. Anyway, let's get back to RSS. As I mentioned, RSS technology made it possible for creators to make audio podcasts that users could subscribe to, so a podcatcher essentially acts like an RSS reader. It notifies the user when there's a new episode, which is just an update to the RSS feed, and the user can then listen to that episode. But apart from podcasts and a few other uses, why has RSS largely disappeared from the web. Well, in many ways, you can map the decline of RSS with the rise of social networks. People migrated away from using stuff like aggregators. Google shut down Google Reader in twenty thirteen, which is a very Google thing to do. That is to introduce a tool, gradually remove direction and support for that tool, and then ultimately shut the tool down. Now, you might scavenge the tool for parts that you might use in later stuff, or maybe the whole thing just fades away over time. But generally speaking, people began to rely more on platforms like Facebook or Twitter to find stuff they wanted to read, or they would go to platforms like Reddit to do that. Before that, dig web developers had fewer reasons to incorporate an RSS feed at all, and I would argue another big reason for this is that a lot of web based sites and services began to pivot toward building out mobile apps once the consumer smartphone became a dominant way that folks were accessing the web and web services. Why would you spend all your time building out web pages if the average person is accessing content on a phone where web pages aren't necessarily easy to read or navigate, why not develop an app that could push notifications directly to the owner when there's an update. So a lot of stuff got moved over to the app ecosystem rather than to RSS. Now that's not to say that no one uses RSS today. It's not a dead technology. There are people who liken it to dead languages like Latin, and by that they mean that, sure, there are still people who are using RSS, just like there are still people who understand Latin. But you're not seeing active development in RSS, especially not like we did back in the early two thousands, and certainly there's not a groundswell of support to make RSS a ubiquitous technology anymore. It's still power stuff like podcatchers, and there's sites where you can actually find the RSS feeds, like how stuff Works. And there are even a couple of RSS readers that are still out there, but most of them are gone at this point. When I was researching this episode, I found an article that had a list of readers, so out of curiosity, I tried to track them down. I followed different URLs and stuff. A lot of URLs just led to blank pages, you know, saying like this domain is ready to be to be purchased. So that clearly shows that the business that that created that reader has long since gone out of business. Out of all the ones I checked, I only found two that are still around, and out of those two, only one of them is still an RSS aggregator. The other one has become more of a portal website that curates content for you, but it doesn't give you the control of, you know, choosing which RSS feeds to subscribe to. So in other words, they're doing all the choosing and you just, you know, you get whatever they've served up. We've also seen web browsers drop support for RSS. There was a time when you could use RSS feeds to create stuff like bookmarks that would flag when a site updated, but that kind of functionality isn't really a thing in most web browsers anymore. Also, the web has become a lot more centralized over time, with fewer companies controlling more of the web landscape. So back in the early days of the web, there was this kind of dream that the web was going to be this democratized, decentralized thing where you had all these different little pockets that were interesting and independent and could evolve on their own And it's almost like visiting different neighborhoods in a city, with each neighborhood having kind of its own personality. But as it unfolded, what really happened was that we had companies get bigger and bigger and consolidate more and more of the web. And these days you can look and say like, well, there's some of the massive companies that essentially dominate the web. You know, your Googles, your Amazons, your your you know, facebooks, that kind of stuff or meta I should say, not Facebook, but you get the idea. And it's a very different view of what the web is based compared to what we first thought about back in the nineties. Really, and so RSS has arguably lost a lot of its relevance as a result of that, which is a shame because I actually really liked having aggregators. I love that. I love being able to go to specific sites where I could do, you know, subscribe there, and be able to keep up with what was going on. It's really useful when you're doing stuff like just trying to keep an eye on things like tech news. Now that's not to say that there aren't still some examples out there. There are. I mean I still use feed lee for example, to be able to look quick at recent articles across different uh you know, uh spectrums of content. Or I go to Reddit, where it's all you know, user generated and user submitted stuff that you know, the articles that they have discovered wherever they happen to roam. But it's not. It's not as prevalent as it could have been, which is sort of a shame. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to look back on OURSS and kind of look at what caused it to not become a more you know, common technology today. I hope you found this interesting. I hope you are all well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeart Radio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you? And from the beginning of this episode, I'm going to get the cringe out of the way at the beginning and adopt an old, tiny voice just for the purposes of the intro. So, there are lots of different ways to access content on the web, and I know that's a lame and obvious thing to say, but I kind of start somewhere, and in ye olden days of the web, you used a browser on a desktop computer to navigate to a specific website. And in those old days, web pages were often unchanging. They were static. It was like open it up a book and reading the specific passage. You just put that book right back on the shelf and forget about it for years and come back to it. Open up that book, go to that bookmark that passage won't have changed because it's a book and books don't do that. Gradually, the web matured, New tools made it possible update web pages without having to reinvent the wheel each time. This meant there'd be a reason to return to a web page again and again. Okay, I'm gonna drive that now. But returning the web pages also created frustration. You might go to the trouble of typing in a web page as URL or following a bookmark if you were a civilized person, and you would discover that maybe the page hadn't been updated since the last time you were on, and you wasted all that time and effort going to a web page that hasn't changed since the last time you were there. Think of all the amazing things you could have done if you had already known there wasn't anything new there. Maybe you could have, I don't know, created a new hobby or something. Conversely, you might go to a web page after not having visited it for several weeks, and then you see that while you were gone, the web administrator held a really cool contest, and you totally would have won that contest, except it's already over now and you didn't know that there had been an update, and so you missed your chance. Curses. Fortunately, a new technology emerged in the late nineties that would make it easier to stay current with web page updates. On the user side of things. It also would make it possible to create a subscription model for content like podcasts. So this came out of the company Netscape. Originally, Netscape was the Mosaic Communications Corporation, and Netscape had introduced an early and incredibly popular web browser, the Netscape Navigator, and in the early to mid nineties, Netscape Navigator was the dominant web browser. However, by the late nineties, Netscape was taking a beating from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The story behind that gets into the Great Browser Wars of the late nineties, but that's really a matter for a different episode. Let's just say by the late nineties, Netscape Navigator was no longer the dominant web browser on the market. But around this time Netscape started to develop this new technology, and it also got a new corporate overlord. AOL announced in nineteen ninety eight that it would acquire Netscape, which it did in the spring of nineteen ninety nine. Around that time is also when Netscape introduced its technology it had been developing, which was called RSS. So what does RSS stand for, Well, it could stand for really simple syndication, or it stands for rich Site Summary, or with the original announcement, it actually stood for RDF Site Summary. RDF in turn stands for Resource Description Framework. So really it ends up depending upon whom you ask. So originally I guess you could say it was RDF site summary, but over time this changed. Whatever you say RSS stands for the technology's ultimate use would become the same. It ultimately made it easier for users to stay current with web page updates. That wasn't necessarily the intention when it was first being developed, but that's how it ended up being used. So a website that included an RSS feed was one where users could subscribe to that page and the page would syndicate updates to wherever the user had installed that subscription. We'll get to that in a little bit. Now. I'm skipping over a lot of early RSS stuff. There were lots of other elements at play in those early days, including a similar web syndication technology called scripting News, and some elements of scripting News would actually merge into the developing RSS technology as it would evolve from version to version. Then there became a disagreement within the RSS developer community about how to evolve the technology. You had one side that wanted to keep changes relatively small, primarily to adhere to this philosophy of maintaining a simple technology, the fear being if it gets too complicated, people won't use it. You had others in the community who wanted to build in a lot more functionality with RSS, but that would necessitate a more complex approach, and that could become a barrier for adoption. Interesting side note, one of the folks pushing for the more functionality side was a fourteen year old named Aaron Swartz, who would later co found Reddit. Tragically, Swarts would take his own life in twenty thirteen while the focus of aggressive prosecution from MIT and Massachusetts authorities, but that's a story for another day. The disagree between these two camps of developers led to a fork in RSS development. So on one side you had the more methodical and arguably conservative evolution of the technology. On the other you had the more extensive changes and additions, which would become RSS one point zero. And in two thousand and three, RSS would fork a second time, meaning now you had three competing versions, the third of which, however, would become known as ATOM, so it wasn't another confusing RSS designation. Eventually, the more conservative version of RSS would become the most widely adopted, and it would become known as RSS two point zero. So yeah, you had three different versions of RSS out there, although the two point zero one would become arguably the most ubiquitous. Now Over on the user side, the general public accessing the web largely remained unaware of RSS at all, no matter which fork you talked about. It just wasn't a technology that most people had heard about. But what would emerge over time is that the user would end up relying upon an aggregator called a feed reader. And this could be a desktop based application, so an actual program you would open up, kind of similar to a web browser, or it might be entirely web based, a website that you would go to in order to look for updates to all the web pages that you had subscribed to. The web pages would syndicate their content to these feeders, depending on whether or not you had added the RSS feed to that feeder. This idea didn't take off immediately, but when The New York Times added an RSS feed in the early to mid two thousands, I've seen some accounts say two thousand and two and others push it to two thousand and four. Anyway around that time that became a kind of tipping point for RSS technology. There were a lot of different feed readers that came out as a result of this, including some from really big web companies like Google. Google launched Google Reader in two thousand and five. So as a user, you could pop onto a web page that you liked. We're going to talk about how stuff Works in this episode, so I'll say, because that's where I started. You know, that's why tech stuff has stuff in the name. How stuff Works had an RSS feed still does technically, but we'll get there. So you would go to how Stuff Works and on the main splash page would see a little RSS icon and you could end up using that to subscribe to the page. Often that would involve copying a URL shortcut from that and then going to your aggregator of choice, whether it was a desktop app or a web based one, and then using the copied URL to subscribe to that particular web page, and then the next time you refresh your reader, the web page material would appear there, and from that point forward you could just go to your reader to see what stuff, if any, had been updated across all the different sites that you had subscribed to. So as long as a web administrator had incorporated an RSS feed and made it accessible so that you knew that it was there, you could subscribe to it, and that meant that you had a centralized location you could go to to quickly scan for updates to sites that you enjoyed, without having to go to each individual site to look for stuff that was new. The aggregator really cut down on that frustration, right. It removed the need to visit every page individually, So for stuff like news, it meant that users could go to their single source, their reader, and get a quick rundown of what's going on across multiple publications. You could subscribe to all of them, and it would be kind of like browsing a news stand and looking at all the headlines before deciding which, if any, paper or magazine you were going to really dive into. The feed readers typically had some other features that made them useful. For example, they could keep track of which items you had clicked through to read, and the reader would then know you'd already seen that update, so it wouldn't show you that upon subsequent visits, So it's kind of like a mark as red feature. That way, you know you wouldn't pop onto your reader and just see a bunch of stuff that you had already looked at. You could also, however, with most readers anyway, you could flag a piece of content that you really liked and essentially book market so that it wouldn't disappear from the reader. On subsequent visits, you would still be able to get to it, so it was kind of like saving an article. So it acted like kind of like a bookmark. But if you hop around the web now, you might notice that that little RSS icon doesn't show up that frequently. When we come back, I'll talk a bit about why that is and what has happened as a result, But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, so I mentioned already my old stomping grounds of HowStuffWorks dot com. On that website, we used to have an RSS icon right there on the landing page when you got there. If you looked in the top of the page, you would see a little RSS icon that you could use to subscribe to How Stuff Works and see updates as they were posted. I actually had to use the wayback machine to make sure I wasn't imagining this that I was remembering it incorrectly. You have to remember I haven't worked for how stuff Works for several years. I've had the same job, kind of like I've been working at the same position since two thousand and seven, but I've had different companies around me. It's a wild thing. Anyway, I haven't been with How Stuffworks for a while, and if you go to how stuffworks dot com today, you will not see that RSS icon on the landing page. Now, I want to make it clear, How stuff Works does still have RSS feeds. In fact, it has a few different RSS feeds, but you have to go to the actual page that hosts those feeds to be able to subscribe to them. I had to go through Google to find it. Actually. Also side note, I need to say something about my former employer. I think I mentioned this maybe in a news episode or something not too long ago, but from what I understand, recently, How Stuffworks essentially laid off the entire editorial staff after pivoting to using AI generated content instead of employing actual writers to write the articles. So if you go to some of the articles on HowStuffWorks dot com right now, which, by the way, when I last checked, didn't have any articles posted since late June. Anyway, articles now have a notification that explains an editor fact checks the articles, but that those articles have some or perhaps all, content generated courtesy of AI. I heard that the editorial staff had been pushing back on this, moved toward AI, and that subsequently they were let go. I should stress this is what I have heard, and I could be wrong because I haven't actually heard it from anyone who was working at house Stuff Works at the time. I have lost touch with the folks who were working at house Stuff Works, so I haven't heard it from a direct source. So it does make me very sad. And like I said, tech stuff wouldn't be called tech stuff if it weren't for hou Stuff Works, so I definitely wouldn't have the job I have now if the robots had been writing articles back in two thousand and seven when I first joined that company. Anyway, let's get back to RSS. As I mentioned, RSS technology made it possible for creators to make audio podcasts that users could subscribe to, so a podcatcher essentially acts like an RSS reader. It notifies the user when there's a new episode, which is just an update to the RSS feed, and the user can then listen to that episode. But apart from podcasts and a few other uses, why has RSS largely disappeared from the web. Well, in many ways, you can map the decline of RSS with the rise of social networks. People migrated away from using stuff like aggregators. Google shut down Google Reader in twenty thirteen, which is a very Google thing to do. That is to introduce a tool, gradually remove direction and support for that tool, and then ultimately shut the tool down. Now, you might scavenge the tool for parts that you might use in later stuff, or maybe the whole thing just fades away over time. But generally speaking, people began to rely more on platforms like Facebook or Twitter to find stuff they wanted to read, or they would go to platforms like Reddit to do that. Before that, dig web developers had fewer reasons to incorporate an RSS feed at all, and I would argue another big reason for this is that a lot of web based sites and services began to pivot toward building out mobile apps once the consumer smartphone became a dominant way that folks were accessing the web and web services. Why would you spend all your time building out web pages if the average person is accessing content on a phone where web pages aren't necessarily easy to read or navigate, why not develop an app that could push notifications directly to the owner when there's an update. So a lot of stuff got moved over to the app ecosystem rather than to RSS. Now that's not to say that no one uses RSS today. It's not a dead technology. There are people who liken it to dead languages like Latin, and by that they mean that, sure, there are still people who are using RSS, just like there are still people who understand Latin. But you're not seeing active development in RSS, especially not like we did back in the early two thousands, and certainly there's not a groundswell of support to make RSS a ubiquitous technology anymore. It's still power stuff like podcatchers, and there's sites where you can actually find the RSS feeds, like how stuff Works. And there are even a couple of RSS readers that are still out there, but most of them are gone at this point. When I was researching this episode, I found an article that had a list of readers, so out of curiosity, I tried to track them down. I followed different URLs and stuff. A lot of URLs just led to blank pages, you know, saying like this domain is ready to be to be purchased. So that clearly shows that the business that that created that reader has long since gone out of business. Out of all the ones I checked, I only found two that are still around, and out of those two, only one of them is still an RSS aggregator. The other one has become more of a portal website that curates content for you, but it doesn't give you the control of, you know, choosing which RSS feeds to subscribe to. So in other words, they're doing all the choosing and you just, you know, you get whatever they've served up. We've also seen web browsers drop support for RSS. There was a time when you could use RSS feeds to create stuff like bookmarks that would flag when a site updated, but that kind of functionality isn't really a thing in most web browsers anymore. Also, the web has become a lot more centralized over time, with fewer companies controlling more of the web landscape. So back in the early days of the web, there was this kind of dream that the web was going to be this democratized, decentralized thing where you had all these different little pockets that were interesting and independent and could evolve on their own And it's almost like visiting different neighborhoods in a city, with each neighborhood having kind of its own personality. But as it unfolded, what really happened was that we had companies get bigger and bigger and consolidate more and more of the web. And these days you can look and say like, well, there's some of the massive companies that essentially dominate the web. You know, your Googles, your Amazons, your your you know, facebooks, that kind of stuff or meta I should say, not Facebook, but you get the idea. And it's a very different view of what the web is based compared to what we first thought about back in the nineties. Really, and so RSS has arguably lost a lot of its relevance as a result of that, which is a shame because I actually really liked having aggregators. I love that. I love being able to go to specific sites where I could do, you know, subscribe there, and be able to keep up with what was going on. It's really useful when you're doing stuff like just trying to keep an eye on things like tech news. Now that's not to say that there aren't still some examples out there. There are. I mean I still use feed lee for example, to be able to look quick at recent articles across different uh you know, uh spectrums of content. Or I go to Reddit, where it's all you know, user generated and user submitted stuff that you know, the articles that they have discovered wherever they happen to roam. But it's not. It's not as prevalent as it could have been, which is sort of a shame. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to look back on OURSS and kind of look at what caused it to not become a more you know, common technology today. I hope you found this interesting. I hope you are all well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeart Radio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you you listen to your favorite shows.