> Blogs and RSS, the latter a system for subscribing to a collection of blogs, and being able to read their posts in a single chronological stream, almost exactly like Twitter, have been around forever.

> ...Setting up a blog at for example WordPress.com is not much more complicated than creating a new Twitter account. Readers can subscribe to your blog using any number of apps, for example the WordPress.com Reader or any other so-called aggregator, such as Inoreader or Feedly. Your list of subscriptions can be freely exported from one aggregator and imported into another.

"almost exactly like Twitter"..."not much more complicated"...

So the alternative is to sign up to a blog service, write posts that have content similar to tweets, sign up to a separate RSS service, subscribe to RSS feeds and hope other people you want to follow do the same?

Some coders really underestimate how much even a tiny bit of friction can stop ideas from going viral especially when there's an integrated and easy to use alternative. Regular people don't want to cobble together their own brittle solution.