What Is RSS - A Quick Look At The History Of This Internet Phenomenon

Back in the mid 1990s website administrators were struck with an interesting problem, how can their users get their content quickly and easily? Because of this issue, Internet syndication formats were born.

Several syndication formats existed before RSS, for example Apple’s Meta Content Framework (MCF), and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). However, RSS was quite different. RSS, which was then known as RDF Site Summary, made its debut in 1999 and was used primarily on My Netscape. This was essentially RSS version .90.

Around the time of the acquisition of Netscape by AOL, the RSS feed on My Netscape was removed, which stirred up a bit of controversy among XML enthusiasts. A mailing list and user group was formed to continue the development of RSS, their name was RSS-DEV. In December, 2000 they released RSS 1.0.

Now, during this time several other RSS versions were released by Dave Winer, who is a really big XML supporter and contributor. After the battle of the RSS versions, Winer released version 2.0 in 2002, which is what is in use today. He was also the person who wanted RSS to mean “Really Simple Syndication.”

During the period from 2002 to 2005 several big name web sites began using RSS feeds, The New York Times, for example. In 2005, feed readers seemed to pop out of nowhere. Apple released Safari 2.0, which included built in RSS support, and soon after many other browsers gained similar functionality.

In 2006 RSS became the format of choice for podcasting, and I suspect photocasting (on Apple’s iPhoto software) uses RSS as well, although I am not 100% sure.

There is no exact figured on the number of RSS users worldwide, but the current estimates are between 200 and 300 million users. So you do have a lot of incentive to make RSS feeds.

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