This app turns the web into a scrollable feed (just don’t call it RSS)
As an elder millennial who still mourns the death of Google Reader (13 years ago this month, sigh) and uses the Feedly daily, I was intrigued by TechCrunch’s post: “A new app, HyperTexting, turns the open web into a scrollable social media-like feed.”
HyperTexting, launched on iOS on June 29, says its goal is “to make finding and following website feeds as easy as podcasting.”
This is RSS — but you won’t find HyperTexting’s parent company using that word anywhere. The app’s founder, Caleb Hailey, told TechCrunch the problem that “bothered [him] for so long about RSS” is “why don’t more people care about this?” In his view, it’s time to retire the terminology entirely.
In an email, Hailey told me:
The Facebook News Feed will turn 20 on September 5, 2026. Facebook didn’t invent the feed — open standards like RSS led the way in the late 90’s — but it did a much better job of introducing mainstream users to news feeds. And the Facebook News Feed was a seminal moment in internet culture history as it influenced everything that came after to the point that today’s internet is all feeds all the way down. So instead of leading with the underlying technologies (RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, and OPML) we’re conducting an experiment to meet people where they are and use terms like “news feed” and the “for you feed” instead of more technical terms that could alienate certain groups of people.
Hailey isn’t the only one attempting to introduce the technology formerly known as RSS to a younger generation. (Nieman Lab predictors have been saying this was coming for a few years now.) The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a guide last month to “a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable.”
And earlier this year, the engineer and developer Terry Godier launched Current as a “guilt-free” RSS reader that doesn’t display how many unread posts you have.
“Every RSS reader I tried made me feel bad. Not because the apps were ugly or broken (most were quite good) but because they all seemed to agree on something I didn’t. That reading the internet was a task,” Godier wrote. That articles were items to be processed. That falling behind was a failure state. I didn’t have a name for this yet. I just knew I wanted a reader that didn’t make me feel like I owed it something.”
By the way, Nieman Lab’s RSS feed is here.
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