

Twitter is the new RSS - pytrin
http://www.techfounder.net/2013/05/01/twitter-is-the-new-rss/

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swombat
No, it's not. RSS is a way to make sure you don't miss stuff from authors who
produce new content relatively rarely. Twitter drowns such content in a
torrent of crap.

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jfb
For me, Twitter is neither a useful communications channel, nor a social
network, nor an information discovery method. I find it aggressively useless
-- picking signal out of the 140 character noise is net energy negative --
whereas I find enormous amounts of great information via Reader.

A world with Twitter and without a decent RSS aggregator is a poorer one.

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wladimir
My main use case for Twitter is to find out whether other people are
experiencing/noticing something too (and if so, what's the scope). For
example, a site outage, or something that is happening locally such as a power
outage.

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jfb
Yeah, that makes sense. Still, I rarely care enough about anything that I need
to find out about it RIGHT NOW.

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unalone
What Twitter is awful at – _awful_ – is ensuring you see content from people
who don't update frequently. RSS is valuable not for following content
gluttons like Hacker News, but for following blogs by people who update only
once every three months, or even more rarely.

News gluttonry never needed RSS anyway – generally you only need one source of
neverending news as-is. RSS is for more selective reading, and its advantage
lies in how it gives equal weight to people who don't publish often as it
gives to people who post 50 new entries a day.

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rlvesco7
So True. It makes me wish there was a list of high quality people who post
rarely.... Or an aggregated twitter feed for slow posters.

Now that I think about it, it would be awesome if Google released stats from
Google Reader since they are killing it anyways. It could probably be used to
identify high-quality, but slow updaters, among other things....

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mschuster91
I disagree - for me Twitter is more a social network than a "news source".
It's hard enough to keep track of my current timeline (I already can't read a
backlog of more than 6 hours! Sucks!), I don't even want to imagine how my TL
would look like if I'd follow even one major news site.

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dantheman
You can use lists to manage that.

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protospork
None of the clients I've used have passable lists support. Bitlbee (my current
client of choice) doesn't have /any/ lists support.

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Bjoern
On a side note. Interestingly Twitter is retiring their public RSS feed.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543246>

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v0lta
If you just follow some people maybe. But with 100+ Follows it may be quite
time-consuming if you're trying not to miss something.

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bryanlarsen
The OP is right.

Twitter has replaced RSS for most people, most of whom never used RSS in the
first place.

That does not mean that Twitter is superior to RSS, though. I loathe Twitter
and love RSS. It makes me upset that Twitter is winning, but that doesn't mean
that the OP's headline is wrong.

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karterk
A new RSS should be about open standards and not about a single entity locking
down all data. Also, Twitter has too much noise. Even if you're careful about
following people who tweet good things, quite often you end up seeing
"pooping"-style tweets.

Having said that, Twitter should really be doing what Prismatic is doing. I
find the discover tab to be largely a #fail. With all the data that Twitter
has about me, they should be surfacing interesting things, but they don't.

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niyogi
true and not true.

rss is has no single "owner of platform" and poses no rate limits. twitter has
both.

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rtpg
For me twitter is more an indicator of what's happening now than anything
useful for what's happened over the past couple days. It's more or less the
internet equivalent to the water cooler

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nkozyra
In that Twitter is essentially "syndicated," sure. Beyond that?

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lucian1900
Except it's a terrible RSS reader. No thanks.

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EugeneOZ
Lol, it's so ridicoulos. Especially when read this news in RSS feed :)

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parnas
I'm reading this article on Feedly

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dysinger
No

