

Is Twitter Killing RSS? - kivivi
http://jeffnolan.com/wp/2009/04/01/is-twitter-killing-rss/

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mustpax
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.

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access_denied
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.

~~~
mustpax
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.

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dsims
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.

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silencio
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).

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akkartik
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?

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jlees
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.

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neilo
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.

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sjs382
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.

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wallflower
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

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dsims
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.

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

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dsims
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>

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

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

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vladocar
Yes

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TweedHeads
No, what kind of stupid question is that?

Can you follow hacker news updates on twitter?

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

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axod
It's just like RSS! But worse!

