Is Twitter Killing RSS? | Hacker News Reader

Is Twitter Killing RSS?

jeffnolan.com

18 pointskivivi24 comments

The question is better asked: how quickly am I unfollowing content providers that double-post their content to Twitter? Just to be clear: pretty quickly.

Twitter serves a different purpose than blogs, Facebook status updates, etc. If you're shoehorning all your content into all possible channels for attention, well that's just spammy.

I'd like everbody to post their stuff to twitter, because I don't use RSS readers anymore.

No it's not. You want to provide your content via every channel, so your audience has the choice on how to follow you, via email-sub, rss, twitter, whatever. And of course: if you follow via rss already, you don't want to follow via twitter too. So much is clear anyway.

That's fair. I should explain myself better. I don't have a problem with twitter accounts that are exclusively clones of other feeds. Then I know what I'm signing up for, it wouldn't be fair to call it spammy.

But when I follow a regular twitter account I expect short, self-contained tidbits. When people decide to leverage their twitter followers to get traffic to other services, that's what I find annoying.

My solution will be something similar to this. The company/whatever creates two twitter accounts, for instance: @Company & @CompanyNews. This way you can follow the one you are interested in, or both.

Even create multiple twitter acounts by topic.

Only if I needed instant notification would I follow something in Twitter instead of a RSS reader (a steady news feed probably fits twitter better). It's actually much easier to miss a particular post on Twitter as the stream quickly flows by.

I suppose it's then weird if I use twitter's RSS feeds. There's some accounts that only talk about new releases and things like that, and it's easier for me to follow their twitter rss feed (and not their unavailable or spammy regular rss) than to follow them on twitter (where the one tweet gets drowned out by the rest of my following).

Exactly. I consume all my twitter followees by RSS.

It's a bit of a weird article. He's conflating notification mechanism with social network. What does it mean to kill RSS? Every blogger now uses a tweet widget instead of RSS?

As with others, I don't get my RSS-level news from Twitter RSS-bots. But I have stopped checking RSS as often since I became pretty active on Twitter.

One of my side reasons for reading a ton of RSS feeds was entertainment, getting a feel for what's new and exciting in the world. When I get that information through Twitter in a faster, easier-to-digest form, why would I trawl through RSS feeds? Hence why I don't.

There are still some sites worth checking on a daily or near-daily basis, and I usually just read them in a browser.

However, none of this means the format's dead, just that RSS as a means of information aggregation might be slightly ill.

To be totally honest I only skimmed the article, but I just don't think Twitter as a service is a replacement for a format. Mostly the focus here is on the fickle ad/brand-dependent media sites whereas more often than not I find myself subscribing to places based on quality content. Of course given that Twitter can be viewed from a RSS Reader means one doesn't have to trump the other.

Absolutely not. I use them differently. I get things I know I want via RSS and get random, interesting links via Twitter. (And use twitter as a sms-to-web gateway and as an IM, but that's beside the point).

Twitter AND RSS have taken over more than 50% of my browsing habits, though.

As a sometimes-OCD, I'd like an unread tweets feature e.g.:

Unread (77)

Of course, this might require consumer-level eye ball tracking to see if you "read" one

You can also add twitter feeds to Google Reader (Google apparently does not have to adhere to API limits). I do this for any twitter accounts <s>I stalk</s> that I don't want to miss.

Can you only add individual accounts? Doesn't seem possible to add all of the people I follow as a single feed.

I used this http://decafbad.com/2009/01/twitter-friend-faves-opml/ to create an OPML file, and then edited it so it contained status feeds instead of favorites.

I just stumbled up on this too, which is probably a better idea: http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/?p=408

Use Tweetdeck. A lot of other clients have this feature too.

Thanks. I've been avoiding Tweetdeck/clients (only use Tweetie or web at the moment)

Does it matter? All it's doing is providing yet another method of sydication. Roll with it.

I'm hoping someone invents a new tech meme to kill the "killer" meme.

Yes

No, what kind of stupid question is that?

Can you follow hacker news updates on twitter?

Not by me, but https://twitter.com/newsycombinator

It's just like RSS! But worse!

No, what kind of stupid question is that?

The stupid kind of question following stupid hypes.

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