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Comment by nanna | Hacker News Reader

RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if it was extended a little.

Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to something I can afford, while I'm at it? Bam, everything I could dream of doing this weekend, no Facebook and using a slightly modified version of a two-decade-old tech.

Similar functionality for shopping.

Why couldn't RSS be extended to something like this?

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It's really not that RSS couldn't handle (/be extended to handle) this use case, it's that the parties publishing this information do not want you to have that much control over the feed.

See how much effort Netflix puts into making their catalog hard to browse, to obfuscate the actual size of the catalog and promote specific things they need to show a large return on, or all the sponsorships/ad-deals/promotions that inevitably begin to clutter almost any commercial news feed.

We have the technology, but publishers will fight tooth and nail to keep control over the platform away from the end user.

But Netflix is different from a gigging band, venue and cinema, whose financial models are based on actual ticket sales not whatever the hell Netflix's is. It takes so much labour and money for them to get eyeballs filtered through social media and paper ads and to attract customers to their sites. So for them this would simply be almost a free extra way to drive traffic.

I think you're making a valid point about Netflix, but not seeing how it applies to more traditional financial models?

Remember the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all had almost open access to their 'social graphs', allowing people to grab content from one place, post to another, build connections using tools like Yahoo Pipes? I sometimes long for simpler days when companies were more open with their data. Didn't Netflix even have a more open api back in the day that you could rank and sort, and see new release dates, etc?

You realise what the most successful thing built on top of that open social graph was, right?

Cambridge Analytica.

The issue there was collection of massive amounts of public data by Facebook. Open data APIs can be used to build nice things, if the data isn't user information.

No, it was Cambridge Analytica using the old FB social graph API ("Open Graph") to build a network of people that they could make predictions on.

The app "This is your digital life" let people do a psychological profile linked to their FB profile. The Open Graph API then gave Cambridge Analytica to (some of) their friend's data as well,

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica...

https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-th...

https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/

The problem here is that we don’t really have a consensus on what should happen if people share the information they know about you with others without asking you, not that we should not have API access to our own content on social networks.

No particular argument there - just noting that the original comment was calling for return to "the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all had almost open access to their 'social graphs'".

Turns out that wasn't a great idea. Disappointing because it's what I wanted too.

This is it exactly. Realtors sued Zillow for essentially publishing MLS data. They lost, thank god.

The parties in that case would be the venues, cinemas, concert halls, etc. They don't to control any platform, they want that information to be freely available. They want lots of sites to show case them (remember, comoditize your complements).

From one direction 99% of the world's VCR clocks blinked "12:00" for the entire lifespan of that media format. The proposal is a lot of interactivity and cognitive load to demand from most of humanity. Only a very small segment of society, mostly engineers, can utilize parametric search. Even engineers are lazy or in a hurry sometimes, in theory investing time in a parametric search would benefit me, in practice I needed a USB cable and going to amazon for a generic search of "amazonbasics usb type-c cable" works well enough.

From the other direction there's not much middle ground between the proposal and a REST API. You're asking for developer.ebay.com, I've fooled around with that a little and its fun. Sometimes I think the business people don't understand how much the devs are exposing in their APIs, which makes me worry about the staying power of public APIs. There are businesses where their business model and front-end UI could all be replaced by a very small shell script and I don't think the business people understand that weakness. Of course an API can be shut off with the flick of a switch once it eats into profits.

Yes, yes, yes! This is such a good idea. Working at a University, I’ve often thought this would be the ideal way of advertising seminars. I suspect the problem is chicken and egg, the technological barrier is just a little too high for this to be implemented when RSS readers are not widely used.

You can publish an RSS feed for shopping search results.

You can put a future date in RSS for events.

To lazy to search for examples sorry.

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