Bring back the feed reader

You know what busts silos? Syndication. It's no accident that Google killed Reader and brought up the feedless Plus, or that Facebook recently dumped what few feeds they ever provided.

It is also no accident that I put up an atom feed as fast as I could here.

I have been trying to persuade my 14yo to start using the family Tiny Tiny RSS installation, but he hasn't seen the benefit yet. Clearly I'm going to have to set up some sample feeds and make it his Firefox home page to get him to catch on, but I think once he does he'll be sold. Paired with a service like Page2RSS that builds a changelog feed for sites that don't have them (or just for pages that you want to monitor), it would save him from so much "Oh! I didn't know [that game I was interested in] actually released!"

If I could convince my family members to use feed readers, I could quit having to post stuff on Facebook - and they would quit having to "like" everything to keep Facebook from relegating me to their "only show stuff from this person when there aren't any paid things to show" bin.

Of course, there's still the problem that a web-based feed reader itself can be a silo. We run our own TTR because we have our own server, and because we got spoiled by GReader's caching and whatnot. But there are plenty of in-browser or standalone options for non-technical types. I should really learn how to use one of them, because probably everyone should have that in their "things I set up when doing tech support for relatives" along with the virus scanners and whatnot.