&gt; <i>The tragedy isn&#x27;t some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It&#x27;s a slow and creeping death, but it&#x27;s a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense.</i><p>It&#x27;s certainly painful, made all the more painful by the death of Yahoo! Pipes which was helpful in turning these (once rare) non-RSS sites into something usable.<p>The closing of Reader signalled this change (which is why so many of us lamented it so much; not for the product itself, but for what it meant for the web). If you fight hard enough, you can still turn all of this garbage into RSS and toss it into your feed reader (I like tt-rss), but RSS as a <i>mainstream</i> tool is already dead (outside of a few niches, like podcasts, which are also slowly moving into walled gardens of their own).