Phanfare Blog - Latest Comments in Is Twitter replacing RSS?

Re: Is Twitter replacing RSS?

Darryl — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:04:45 -0000

Feh. Twitter.

Andrew wrote "My point was that Twitter is succeeding where Google Reader/RSS failed to catch on. Like you, I tried to teach famiy how to track blogs using Google Reader and they just found it too complicated."

So Andrew is your family on Twitter?

Also: If Twitter is great for the publisher, driving traffic to originating sites, and Twitter clients are important (nay essential) for managing the flood of poorly organized tweets...

Then how does Twitter itself stay in business? If everybody uses a client, ads on Twitter.com are useless, as are "recommendations". SMS fees and server upgrades aren't free, nor are the costs easily passed on to reader or publisher (unless they somehow decide to differentiate between the "professional" and "amateur" tweeters).

Also, when I see actual 140-character information (not links) passed along on Twitter, I see plenty of commenting happening there, *not* on some forum. The crappy thing about this (aside from nobody making any money off of this), is that the threads are near impossible to follow after the fact. There is no deep search/threading of old conversations on Twitter. It is super-annoying to try and follow a possibly informative/interesting discussion between two people using @notation because of all the extra chaff in between.

I suppose this could be solved by a well-written client/search engine, but it drives me freaking crazy at the moment.

Re: Is Twitter replacing RSS?

DavidMc — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:22:45 -0000

Readtwit does part of the GoogleReader/Twitter merge. Not perfect, but a good first step.

- Dave

Re: Is Twitter replacing RSS?

tslow — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:11:38 -0000

"Aggregation technology"?

With a 160 character limit? Transient data with detached context?

That's not aggregation. It's consume and discard. Both RSS and Twitter do that.

Twitter and RSS both fail to "catch on" at large (a la Walter Cronkite or Amazon.com) save for the spin precisely because they do not "aggregate". They cannot filter the overload of information. They do the opposite, so the data points eventually become linear and meaningless.

To make sense of them, we all will need a personal librarian!

Re: Is Twitter replacing RSS?

DavidMc — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:43:55 -0000

Hi Andrew,

Of course, what makes Google Reader work for me, far more than the particulars of RSS, is their seamless integration of Google Wireless Transcoder. Integrating something similar into Twitter would make the "cost" of clicking on a link with a slow cell connection much lower and therefore make it much easier to use Twitter as a RSS substitute.

BTW, if you know of any Twitter iPhone apps that use similar link compression, I'd be very interested. :-)

- Dave

Re: Is Twitter replacing RSS?

erlichson — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:46:57 -0000

I agree. RSS is glue technology for the web. Twitter lives at a higher level and uses similar glue technologies underneath.

My point was that Twitter is succeeding where Google Reader/RSS failed to catch on. Like you, I tried to teach famiy how to track blogs using Google Reader and they just found it too complicated.

I dont know the exact numbers of users of twitter vs google reader and the like, but I do know that mainstream media actively advertises their twitter handle on TV but does not try to get their audience to subscribe to their content via RSS.

There is RSS the technology and then there is RSS combined with google reader or similar that allows consumers to track a whole bunch of media sources at once. I would argue that twitter is going to be more successful than RSS was at the latter.

But as I said, I don't think RSS will go away but I believe that in terms of direct use by consumers, twitter will be more successful than RSS combined with readers.

Of course, MyYahoo might be bigger today than Twitter is and that is all based on RSS. So maybe this all takes a while.

And I stand by my last question. Can we think of other things that geeks do with great effort that are an opportunity for simplication as a consumer play. If you look at geek behavior, you can often find the seeds of a future product. For example, my friends were building NATD routers out of old PCs running freeBSD at least 3 years before broadband routers from linksys came out that shrunk the whole thing into a small appliance.

Re: Is Twitter replacing RSS?

rlieving — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:17:07 -0000

Putting aside the irony that Twitter itself is just a giant RSS feed for a moment, I wonder if this point is well made.

RSS is not a discovery technology. RSS is not a promotion technology, per se. It is a publishing technology and an aggregation technology.

A better question would be to ask whether the Twitter page (and clients) will replace other aggregation technologies. After reading your post a couple of times, I could see your point that a Twitter page could (possibly) replace Google Reader, Blogline or possibly even My Yahoo! or iGoogle for a limited number of people. Twitter has made it easy to aggregate data from multiple sources - even easier than other places.

I think you may have hit on an important point, though. As a person who has tried to explain and set up Google Reader on people's machines, the benefits are often hard to easily explain versus the multiple steps (find RSS, add to reader, organize) it takes to get a feed set up. So, my conclusion is that RSS just needs a better aggregation methodology.

One last point where I think you got something wrong. You said:

"I wonder what other services that are successful with the geek set but largely ignored by the mainstream can be popularized by fixing the deficiencies and integrating the various parts under one roof."

Twitter, in itself is a geek medium that is not well understood or adopted by most internet users. I bet if you looked at the statistics of people on the internet who use Twitter vs. those who use RSS (on purpose or accidentally), you would find that RSS adoption dwarfs Twitter.

Anyway, good post. I think it misses the mark a bit. But it is thought provoking.