Even Though RSS Never Went Away, Could It Be Coming Back as a Facebook Sinker?

Long time readers will know I was – am – a huge fan of RSS and Atom, simple feed based protocols for syndicating content and attachment links, even going so far as to write a manifesto of a sort at one point (We Ignore RSS at OUr Peril).

This blog, and the earlier archived version of it, are full of reports and recipes around various RSS experiments and doodles, although in more recent years I haven’t really been using RSS as a creative medium that much, if at all.

But today I noticed this on the official Facebook developer blog: Publishing Instant Articles Directly From Your Content Management System [Instant Article docs]. Or more specifically, this:

When publishers get started with Instant Articles, they provide an RSS feed of their articles to Facebook, a format that most Content Management Systems already support. Once this RSS feed is set up, Instant Articles automatically loads new stories as soon as they are published to the publisher’s website and apps. Updates and corrections are also automatically captured via the RSS feed so that breaking news remains up to date.

So… Facebook will use RSS to synch content into Facebook from publishers’ CMS’.

Depending on the agreement Facebook has with the publishers, it may require that those feeds are private, rather than public, feeds that sink the the content directly into Facebook.

But I wonder, will it also start sinking content from other independent publishers into the Facebook platform via those open feeds, providing even less reason for Facebook users to go elsewhere as it drops bits of content from the open web into closed, personal Facebook News Feeds? Hmmm…

There seems to be another sort of a grab for attention going on too:

Each Instant Article is associated with the URL where the web version is hosted on the publisher’s website. This means that Instant Articles are open and compatible with all of the ways that people share links around the web today:

• When a friend or page you follow shares a link in your News Feed, we check to see if there is an Instant Article associated with that URL. If so, you will see it as an Instant Article. If not, it will open on the web browser.
• When you share an Instant Article on Facebook or using email, SMS, or Twitter, you are sharing the link to the publisher website so anyone can open the article no matter what platform they use.

Associating each Instant Article with a URL makes it easy for publishers to adopt Instant Articles without changing their publishing workflows and means that people can read and share articles without thinking about the platform or technology behind the scenes.

Something like this maybe?

Which is to say, this?

Or maybe not. Maybe there is some enlightened self interest in this, and perhaps Facebook will see a reason to start letting its content out via open syndication formats, like RSS.

Or maybe RSS will end up sinking the Facebook platform, by allowing Facebook users to go off the platform but still accept content from it?

Whatever the case, as Facebook becomes a set of social platform companies rather than a single platform company, I wonder: will it have an open standard, feed based syndication bus to help content flow within and around those companies? Even if that content is locked inside the confines of a Facebook-parent-company-as-web attention wall?

PS So the ‘related content’ feature on my WordPress blog associates this post with an earlier one: Is Facebook Stifling the Free Flow of Information?, which it seems was lamenting an earlier decision by Facebook to disable the import of content into Facebook using RSS…?! What goes around, comes around, it seems?!