Google recently announced that they are soon to relaunch Google Reader with a new design and are "going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles." Although I am not a huge fan of Google+ (Aside from the coolness of Hangouts, I haven't seen a reason to convert from Twitter and Facebook; my social circles don't see to be active in Google+), one of the things that has griped me about Reader is that there has been no way to share RSS items with my Plus circles. If nothing else, that will soon change.

Something else that will change is that the Google Reader API (an unofficial, undocumented, and formally unsupported API) will at some point be phased out. This doesn't make a difference to users of the Google Reader web site, but does matter for anyone who has been using Google Reader to track what has been read in applications like FeedDemon and others.

If you want to get your data from Google, they will continue to offer an OPML download of your feeds, but will be augmenting the list of subscribed feeds with your other personal data, including your shared items, friends, likes, and starred items. What you do with them then is your business.

A recent research report by Hillary Mason of Bit.ly explores the lifespan of a link shared through social media. Her findings are that links shared via Twitter, Facebook, etc., have remarkably short life spans. She measured the half-life of shared links (the amount of time it took for a link to receive half as many clicks as in the previous time period) and learned that, for most links, the half life is two-three hours. (The outlier exception is links shared from YouTube, where the half life of a shared link is a whopping 7.4 hours.)

Graphs and the full report are available on the bitly blog.

Of course, this post is immortal, because as we all know, blog posts never die. Right?

There has been another incarnation of the "RSS is dead" meme in the past weeks, with posts at TechCrunch and GigaOM debating the point. The conclusion of these posts seems to be that RSS is continuing its gradual evolution from being perceived as an end-user tool to being viewed as plumbing. And this is probably a good thing.

While I still consume most of my "blog-like" news and commentary via an aggregator, I rely more on recommendations through my social networks for learning what's new. Perhaps that's because I've become lazy about actively following lots of sources, and prefer the crowd to do the filtering for me. Perhaps its because the blogs and news sources I follow are less frequently updated (I know this blog falls in that category). Whatever the reason, I know my consumption patterns have changed. And I'll wager that most people feel too busy to sift through everything published in every publication they like, and prefer instead to find like-minded individuals who share things of interest. Again, much like I do.

Still, if you're curious to learn how your feed is consumed (and don't use Feedburner or the equivalent), take a look at RSS4Lib's YourStats log file analysis program. If you upload your publication's log files and tell it what your RSS feed URL is, it will show you where your RSS feed is consumed -- providing a good guess at your RSS readership. You may find the numbers surprising (high or low).

Bloglines, the venerable RSS reader that I -- and tens of thousands of others -- have used since 2005 is shutting down on October 1, 2010. Bloglines is making it easy to continue your feedreading habit elsewhere, replacing their front page with the 3 simple steps to export your folders and subscriptions in OPML format:

The inevitability of this, in retrospect, seems enormous, and I'm surprised my fondness for Bloglines' simplicity has made me put up with its quirky behavior. (Quirky, of course, means almost constant brief outages on their perpetual beta version.) Bloglines' move into selling advertisements on its front page (see Bloglines Succumbs to Advertising from September 2008) was obviously not enough to bring in the revenue needed to keep the service. When your only serious competitor is Google, I suspect almost nothing can save you.

In the blog post announcing the shut down, the trend behind the news is made clear:

The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year, being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology - the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn't the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.

I made a similar point about the phase change in RSS from being a commodity in itself to being a transport mechanism in September 2009. Just as soundbite reporting in television and radio news changed that medium, so has 'textbite' exchange of information on the Internet. The overwhelming force of the conversation in Twitter and Facebook -- where the granularity of information exchange is much smaller and seems to permeate the Internet with greater fluidity -- has changed the game.

I'm not giving up on my RSS feeds (from blogs, news services, and other sources), but I'm switching to the only other game in town: Google Reader.

A recent survey of WebJunction users showed some interesting statistics on use of various online tools by librarians (the write-up is at at "Library Staff Report Their Use of Online Tools").

The trend from the survey indicates that social media (such as Facebook) is making inroads on email as a communication tool. Of particular interest to me is the finding that RSS feeds are used daily or weekly by only 24% of respondents and used never by 50%. Blogs are used daily or weekly by only 27%, and never by 40%.

I know I spend much less time reading blogs (and, as those of you who read RSS4Lib in its native blog for or via RSS might notice, writing for one). I do wonder how much RSS usage is un-noticed or un-recognized by respondents; as RSS (and XML in general) become the way data move, do its consumers care how the data appear where they're consumed?

The survey results highlight differences between academic and public librarians (academic librarians are more likely to use online tools than their public counterparts) and a series of interesting differences between urban and rural librarians.