Twitter as an RSS Reader
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Steve Gillmore announced the death of RSS, yesterday in a very informative post at the Techcrunch IT Blog.
Being a blogger that's seeking the hottest tech news and needs to be on top of everything constantly, I tend to agree with most of Steve's post. Except for the fact that I don't think RSS is dead at all, I think RSS readers are not well-known by those who get used to getting updates delivered by their friends instead of by their favorite reader. I actually wrote a post about the same issue a year ago, where I explained why I'm wasn't using my RSS reader(s) as much as before. A year later, I can honestly tell you that now I don't even open my RSS reader anymore at all.
I'm sure some of you will disagree, probably because you used to reading your RSS reader once a day or so. But if you use Facebook or Twitter or any of those services that stream you & your friend's daily updates, you must've felt a change in the way you are reading & tracking content over the web.
It's also about what really interests you. If you've followed people that post stuff you care enough to read about, then you don't really need to build your RSS reader, the content will eventually show up in your main Twitter page. In most cases, this will be faster than anything else, and the best part is that the content is filtered inherently by your friends, and because good stuff is always retweeted over and over again, you can't really miss it.
But what about all the noise that has no relation to posts and stuff that you actually want to read? Well, from my experience, I just learned to deal with it. Sometimes, I ignore things that I don't care about yet show up in my twitterstream, and sometimes, I track a conversation just because someone else replies. Bottom line, you can't have a live conversation from within your RSS reader. Today, with Twitter, you see links posted by your friends and can immediately create a discussion around it. The web was never as accessible as it is today.
One last thing, in my opinion the biggest change over the last year, is that people are tracking topics instead of sites. From this perspective, Twitter still look & feel like RSS Reader, but really, you follow updates from your chosen topics, which can be a person, a brand or anything you care about. Screenshot of my twitter vision:
Steve Gillmore announced the death of RSS, yesterday in a very informative post at the Techcrunch IT Blog.Being a blogger that's seeking the hottest tech news and needs to be on top of everything constantly, I tend to agree with most of Steve's post. Except for the fact that I don't think RSS is dead at all, I think RSS readers are not well-known by those who get used to getting updates delivered by their friends instead of by their favorite reader. I actually wrote a post about the same issue a year ago, where I explained why I'm wasn't using my RSS reader(s) as much as before. A year later, I can honestly tell you that now I don't even open my RSS reader anymore at all.
I'm sure some of you will disagree, probably because you used to reading your RSS reader once a day or so. But if you use Facebook or Twitter or any of those services that stream you & your friend's daily updates, you must've felt a change in the way you are reading & tracking content over the web.
It's also about what really interests you. If you've followed people that post stuff you care enough to read about, then you don't really need to build your RSS reader, the content will eventually show up in your main Twitter page. In most cases, this will be faster than anything else, and the best part is that the content is filtered inherently by your friends, and because good stuff is always retweeted over and over again, you can't really miss it.
But what about all the noise that has no relation to posts and stuff that you actually want to read? Well, from my experience, I just learned to deal with it. Sometimes, I ignore things that I don't care about yet show up in my twitterstream, and sometimes, I track a conversation just because someone else replies. Bottom line, you can't have a live conversation from within your RSS reader. Today, with Twitter, you see links posted by your friends and can immediately create a discussion around it. The web was never as accessible as it is today.
One last thing, in my opinion the biggest change over the last year, is that people are tracking topics instead of sites. From this perspective, Twitter still look & feel like RSS Reader, but really, you follow updates from your chosen topics, which can be a person, a brand or anything you care about. Screenshot of my twitter vision:
9 Comments:
"Noise" is the main reason why I don't use Twitter most of the time.
Once you reach around 200 to 300 active followers, it's already hard to even follow 10% of them because of the constant updating of active users.
As I commented on our blog, RSS Readers have sharply limited the potential reach and value of RSS.
Steve's comparison between RSS and Twitter is a bit extreme. He probably wanted to elicit reaction from his readers. He succeeded 8-).
My 2 cents on the matter...
"Twitter is an unfiltered stream of subjective sound-bites, drawn from sources of widely varying quality. It has vitality, energy and immediacy, unburdened by credibility or consistency.
As such, Twitter is perfect for informal communication, entertainment and as a pointer to where the more serious stories are located. As a conduit for high-quality information, RSS reigns supreme."
I have also started using Twitter more and more to keep track of my favorite blogs , most automatically update there twitter feed when they update there blogs and as you have mentioned Twitter seems to be updated fast as well , definitely more faster than RSS
Agree with you!
There is a new RSS reader in real-time, it's called FriendFeed. No spammers in there, just a group of high quality people across the globe who feed each other with the best up-to-date content and real-time discussions. No, you won't find Britney Spears in there but all the tech A-listers are definitely in.
No, I totally do not agree.
My RSS reader is where I find 99% of the content that I read. Most of my friends just don't go into all of the stuff that I read, so I don't get them tweeting about it.
Even if you can get updates on new blog posts in twitter, it's still a completely uncomfortable platform to use to actually _read_ the posts. You have to click on a link, for each post, it's just annoying. Google Reader, for example, lets you access everything from a single interface, simply scroll and scroll to read on (oh, and a click to move to the next feed).
Oh, and I can track conversations just fine on the reader - simply subscribe to the comments feed of the blog that you're reading, it's that easy.
The RSS reader also saves me from the various blogs' interfaces. Everything in one place, as (more or less) a stream of my favorite reading material - sorry, twitter can't do that!
Orli,
Your post was actually the inspiration for my own post on the subject, so first of all - thanks.
Secondly, I somewhat disagree with you (and Steve), as I said in my post. RSS is still alive, and continue to be, because it's part of the blogosphere, and not the micro-blogging-sphere. I can stay connected and read posts and articles (such as yours and Steve's) at delay - because I decided what you write is important and interesting.
I do agree that twitter has changed the conversation mode, transforming it entirely. But filtering the 'noise' from the 'gold' is still a difficult task (to me at least), but I'll master it, eventually.
Oh, and thanks for screen-capturing me.. ;-)
Sorry, but I don't find this to be true at all. Twitter might eventually supplant RSS, but I'm skeptical.
A quick scan of my feeds offers me far richer content leads than my Twitter stream, and although I'm following a small number of people they're high-quality sources of info. While they provide some great leads, there's far more good content out there than this group can find. And just because Chris Brogan or Guy Kawasaki doesn't tweet it doesn't make it of less value.
I'll buy the idea of a combination of RSS and Twitter, but one doesn't replace the other. I'll stick to a daily review of my Seesmic Desktop AND Google Reader, thanks.
There’s more than a hint of truth in this.
Years back, I followed the sites I liked by going through my bookmarks and visiting them each day (or whenever time allowed).
Later, daily site visits were replaced by e-mail newsletters (your choice of plain text or HTML).
I barely had all my e-mail subscriptions running smoothly before RSS/Atom Feeds began to take over.
Now, if I have a choice between scanning the day’s Tweets or the day’s Feeds, I’m finding more value in Twitter.
Twitter is definitely fast becoming my primary source, with feeds, e-mail newsletters and even site scraping there only to handle “legacy” sources.
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