

The gradual decline of RSS readers - indy
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rss_reader_market_in_disarray.php

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aichcon
Seems like I've been hearing about the death of RSS a lot in the past two
years, but as an avid Google Reader user, I can't imagine not having RSS
today.

The article states: "I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however
I don't check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information
multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs
across a set of topics of most interest to me."

Anyone else do this? How would Twitter be a more useful way to monitor news?

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pavel_lishin
"How would Twitter be a more useful way to monitor news?"

Assuming that you follow interesting people who are interested in similar
things that you are, it's likely that you could be informed of a news story
that matters to you faster than by going through an RSS feed.

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barrkel
The fact that URLs are usually obscured, and the accompanying text on Twitter
is usually too brief to efficiently indicate the nature of the link, I
generally find Twitter not to be a very effective way of keeping track of
things I'm interested in.

And the speed at which I'm informed is usually not important to me. I don't
have a professional or personal need to be kept informed about time-critical
information. Instead, I'm much more interested in insight, opinion and
analysis.

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boundlessdreamz
From my personal experience, twitter is not a good medium for keeping track of
news. Unless you follow less than 100 people who tweet moderately, the volume
of tweets is overwhelming.

Often it takes more time to scan through tweets rather than articles because,
first the URLs have to opened by the browser which is an additional step from
RSS reader. Also in the case of RSS you know pretty much the kind of stories
that a site is going to post but when you follow someone you will most likely
get a wide variety of tweets, lot of which you will not be interested in.

When an important story breaks, twitter becomes an even bigger echo chamber
than RSS because some 10s of people will be linking to techcrunch, another
bunch will be linking to the nytimes coverage and weeding out these dupes is
painful

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bcl
Instead of calling this a decline I would call it a consolidation. Google
Reader does everything I need a RSS reader to do. It works on my desktop and
it works on my iPhone, need to synchronize between them since it is all on the
web. All the readers I tried on the iPhone sucked and I've never seen a need
to try one on the desktop.

As for using twitter, Facebook, etc. for following news -- that doesn't work
for me. Those kinds of services are good for news that your social circle are
interested in, but for following those uniquely valuable sites a RSS reader is
still essential.

