On Twitter, Instagram, Facebook closing RSS feeds and the imminent death of Google Reader.

The official line from Twitter is that RSS is “infrequently used today.” That’s the same justification that Google has given for shutting down Google Reader. It reminds of the joke about the shopkeeper responding to a request for something with “Oh, we don’t stock that—there’s no call for it. It’s funny though, you’re the fifth person to ask today.”

RSS is plumbing. It’s used all over the place but you don’t notice it.

It might be that RSS is the canary in the coal mine for my data on the web. I think that the presence or absence of an RSS feed (whether I actually use it or not) is a good litmus test for how a service treats my data. If those services don’t trust me enough to give me an RSS feed, why should I trust them with my data?