Is Twitter replacing RSS?
TechCrunch IT raises the question today in a post. The author notes that all the feeds that are in his Google Reader account are also streaming through his Twitter feed, making Google Reader neglected and obsolete.
It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.
I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.
Wait a minute there, wasn’t it just yesterday that we were arguing over whether a blog’s RSS feed should contain full posts or just partial ones, with some web purists declaring that they would refuse to subscribe to a blog’s feed if they couldn’t get the full post? In fact, that’s part of the allure of RSS, that it’s a one stop shop, allowing one to read and consume at one centralized location.
But Twitter is worse than partial feeds. At least the partial feeds would allow a headline and then maybe a paragraph or two to draw you in. With Twitter, a feed just contains a headline and that’s it, and it’s not a one-stop shop by any means. To read the article, you have to click into a new window.
In fact, there’s been a sizable pushback against media outlets using Twitter as just another feed. When I interviewed the twitter user Vanityfairer for a recent MediaShift article, she had this to say:
But Vanityfairer didn’t start the account as simply yet another outlet to link to new articles as they appeared on the magazine’s website. That kind of one-way broadcasting, she said, is antithetical to the nature of Twitter, and it annoys her when media outlets simply use their Twitter accounts as yet another feed.
I certainly don’t follow any feeds on Twitter, and almost always ignore follows from media outlets that view their Twitter accounts as a headline generator and nothing more.
Twitter is boring.
I don’t believe Twitter will fully replace RSS. Twitter is just too chaotic sometimes.
I put feeds I care less about on Twitter, feeds I actually care about on Google Reader. Twitter zooms by very fast, so if I’m not interested the second it pops up on my Twitterfox, then whatever. RSS, if I don’t have time to read it RIGHT THEN, I can save it, or star it, or keep it unread. Twitter isn’t going to replace that system any time soon.
Twitter search is looking into indexing links as well as tweets. Does that change your opinion?
http://mashable.com/2009/05/07/twitter-search-real/
May I point out something obvious?
Twitter is run by a private company that is convenient for users of the Iphone & Blackberry platform. Your data is essentially owned by them. Maybe they can do cool things with it, but that’s not the point. (The same applies to FB).
RSS is a generic technology available to everyone. I started broadcasting my main RSS feed to twitter a while back and thought was a good solution.
So what does it mean to follow twitter? This is link sharing; so what? We’re just talking about abbreviated scanning.
BTW, you might enjoy Robert Lanham’s syllabus for a 21st century writing class .