The gradual decline of RSS readers
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
The article states: "I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don't check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me."
Anyone else do this? How would Twitter be a more useful way to monitor news?
Assuming that you follow interesting people who are interested in similar things that you are, it's likely that you could be informed of a news story that matters to you faster than by going through an RSS feed.
On the other hand, I subscribe to a bunch of photoblogs that would not work well as a Twitter feed. I also subscribe to a bunch of blogs that create their own unique articles of content. That is just not something that can be put into 140 characters.
Generally speaking, I use twitter as a way to come across content not already in my RSS feed. If an article passed through Twitter is from an interesting author, I may add that author to my RSS feed for future articles.
And the speed at which I'm informed is usually not important to me. I don't have a professional or personal need to be kept informed about time-critical information. Instead, I'm much more interested in insight, opinion and analysis.
2. Individual RSS Readers will never die because there will always be a small market for them and they're painfully easy to write. From the programming side every language I know of has a free library available to parse RSS/Atom. So even if Google discontinued Reader (unlikely btw) there would be someone to jump in and fill the void.
I think that it's because heavy twitter usage has other points of appeal to the tech blogger crowd, most of which are, let's be honest, webcocks. The average internet user, or the average hacker, has no interest whatsoever in following 1-5k twitter users, and no real interest in trying to amass that many users themselves. But the 'social media expert' devotes a large amount of his time and energy to gathering followers, subscribers, commenters, etc., so he has some reason to spend an absurd amount of his time in twitter.
Often it takes more time to scan through tweets rather than articles because, first the URLs have to opened by the browser which is an additional step from RSS reader. Also in the case of RSS you know pretty much the kind of stories that a site is going to post but when you follow someone you will most likely get a wide variety of tweets, lot of which you will not be interested in.
When an important story breaks, twitter becomes an even bigger echo chamber than RSS because some 10s of people will be linking to techcrunch, another bunch will be linking to the nytimes coverage and weeding out these dupes is painful
As for using twitter, Facebook, etc. for following news -- that doesn't work for me. Those kinds of services are good for news that your social circle are interested in, but for following those uniquely valuable sites a RSS reader is still essential.