I'm re-thinking RSS now
scripting.com
scripting.com
It doesn't?
> People were disappointed when they stopped publishing tweets via RSS. But this was the right thing to do, in hindsight. It wasn't working.
Why wasn't it working?
I'll admit I've never used Twitter's RSS feeds—because at the time it was around, I was a teenager with no use for RSS. But I can't imagine why RSS as a protocol would be unable to represent tweets.
Whether any given RSS reader has an optimal UI for displaying tweets is another matter. But the great thing about interoperable protocols is that the content and client are separate. The client can be adapted and improved to fit your needs, if you want.
Anyway, it seems to me you should leave those fields out if they aren't applicable.
It's not so much "is it possible to push arbitrary text in RSS" as it is "is it possible to push the writing flow in RSS".
Anyway, what Twitter did is repeat the body of the tweet in the title and description sub-elements of item.
The reason they did this is probably that the dominant reader of the day, Google Reader, pretty much required titles. So when you'd read a tweet in a feed reader you'd see the text of the tweet twice. Not a good user experience.
The problem isn't with RSS, because it allows for titleless items, rather with the reader.
And that problem is still with us today because there isn't much consistency among the readers other than the Google Reader model. They are all following GR, not RSS.
And that makes tweet-like-things-in-RSS pretty much a non-starter.
For examples, look at my blog on any given day most of what's there is too short to have a title, like a tweet.
Hope this helps.