Adam Turner:
The great thing about RSS is that no-one controls it — you can’t buy it, block it or ban it. It adheres to one of the web’s founding principles; “information wants to be free”. Meanwhile Twitter, Facebook and Google’s founding principles are closer to; “information needs to be monetised”.
Removing RSS support from Mountain Lion is one of, if not the, worst user-facing feature decisions I’ve seen out of Apple in a long time. And I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that it comes right when OS X gets built-in support for Twitter and, with a feature update coming this fall, Facebook. Did you notice Google has been slowly deemphasizing Reader as a product, long before it gutted Reader and ripped out all its sharing features?
Apple seems to have capitulated to these companies in not just giving them a Sauron-sized magnifying glass with which to observe more and more of what we do on the web, but ripping out OS X’s once-great support for our only alternative.
[via Final Boss Form]
Sigh.
Paranoia, much?
Look, I honestly get that you liked the built-in RSS support. And I’m not exactly the best person to comment, since I’ve tried RSS multiple times and never kept up for longer than a few weeks. But before diving headfirst into conspiracy theories, maybe you ought to at least consider the possibility that they were removed because they weren’t being used much, and Apple honestly thought third parties could better handle a pretty specialized market?
I tried multiple clients in my attempts to love RSS, including Safari’s; NetNewsWire and NewsFire were the ones I stuck with the longest. And at least for me, Safari’s was by far the worst; primitive and barely useful. I didn’t try it for long, and it actually became an active (if minor) annoyance. (In particular, the unread counts for RSS bookmarks in bookmark folders, and accidentally popping up an RSS page when I clicked on an RSS link.) So for me, at least, it’s perfectly plausible that it was dumped for a reasonable cause, not as some kind of ‘war on RSS.’
As for Twitter/Facebook support… well, DUH. Whether you like the idea or not (and I don’t particularly), those are the services that are actually being used. What’s Apple supposed to do, ignore them?