
Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS - ElleS
http://blog.flowreader.com/twitter-cant-replace-rss/
======
rabble
When we built twitter we had also hacked up various forms of RSS readers. At
the time nobody on the team really thought they were going after rss, news
reading, or discovery. But it turns out that trying to solve that problem in
parallel to the status update system. Twitter was for a long time very much
built upon the RSS stack of technologies. It was a semi-open platform which
worked better, unfortunately, than the fully open world of RSS & ATOM.

In the end, now 8 years later, it's clear that twitter DID kill rss as a
dominate category of apps & services. We went from being overwhelmed by unread
counts on the 'readers' to having flow. I'm not sure it's better, but it did
solve the problem of feeling like you needed to keep up.

I think there's still more interesting work to be done in this space. Open
social networks (that's what blogs are folks) plus users being able to control
visibility of posts and frequency and open api's could do something which
could unseat twitter/facebooks.

~~~
brlewis
Unread counts are a UI feature orthogonal to the underlying syndication
format. FriendFeed uses RSS and doesn't have unread counts.

~~~
masklinn
Meanwhile a number of twitter clients do have unread counts (Tweetbot
certainly does)

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nkozyra
They are totally dissonant channels that have some overlap. Expecting Twitter
to _replace_ controlled curation is a recipe for noise. The value in RSS is
some process or person is curating a defined set of data - the reliability of
even organizational Twitter accounts doing that is such that doesn't work.

Further, the buy-in on using Twitter as a transmission medium hasn't really
reached the saturation point that RSS did at its peak.

And finally, relying on a third-party - especially one with as dubious a
history as Twitter - to maintain your data in foreseeable perpetuity is a bad
plan in general. The benefit of RSS was that it was a standard, not a service
itself.

~~~
petercooper
_Expecting Twitter to replace controlled curation is a recipe for noise. The
value in RSS is some process or person is curating a defined set of data_

To a certain extent, this is why email newsletters have had a resurgence in
recent years. They allow curation while using a delivery mechanism almost
every Internet user uses and understands (email, instead of an RSS
client/service).

------
programminggeek
Twitter is the worst RSS reader ever because it assumes that only what is
happening NOW is relevant or valuable.

------
josefresco
RSS - technology Twitter - business

Do we really need to discuss anything technical?

Let's say Twitter created a "standard" based on their platform, that could be
adopted for free by any organization - then, we might talk about it replacing
RSS.

------
skywhopper
Twitter can serve as a replacement for a subset of RSS functionality, but even
allowing for Twitter to grow that subset, the biggest difference is
architectural:

Tweets all run through twitter.com and your ability to retrieve the tweets you
want or for the content owners to provide the information they wish depends on
Twitter's continued willingness to provide the tools and/or API to do so and
to allow you both to keep your accounts. Even assuming they will always want
to facilitate this sort of thing and that neither you nor the content owners
will do something to get kicked off Twitter, you can be sure that the tools
and API will change relatively rapidly over the years ahead.

Meanwhile RSS is (usually) hosted on the content owner's server. The format
has been stable for 15+ years at this point. Tools that worked for aggregating
and dealing with RSS in 2000 still work today. And only your ISP could
potentially stop you from retrieving the content you wish, when you want it,
how you want to.

------
ThomPete
Trying to pit the two against each other misses the underlying issue that none
of them really solve.

They are both nothing but feeds and I still can only read one feed item at the
time. The actual curation done by others still don't satisfy me deep
underlying need to have done the curation myself.

In the end we don't know what we don't know but we know there are things we
don't know. Thats what keeps us going and keeps us plowing through the various
feeds, curated or not.

Think about it like a bottleneck problem where I am the bottleneck because I
am the slow interpreter:

[http://000fff.org/wp-
content/uploads/2009/12/model_01.png](http://000fff.org/wp-
content/uploads/2009/12/model_01.png)

From:

[http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-
realtim...](http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtime-
weve-been-looking-for/)

~~~
kamilszybalski
Thanks for including this article, it was a really good read. We're working to
address aspects of this problem with www.discovle.com, would love to hear your
thoughts.

------
GoofballJones
It's how you use Twitter though. Many people forget about Lists. I have a list
dedicated to News tweets, such as the BBC, and Reuters, and NY Times...things
like that.

Then I have another list for Tech news, and put several different tech
websites feeds on it. Then one just for tech journalists (where yes, sometimes
you see off-subject tweets, but I _know_ that I may see that sometimes, but
you can have a quick interaction on what they say.

I open up a multi-pane client like TweetBot or TweetDeck, then have different
lists per pane. I can go through a lot of information in a short amount of
time this way.

------
smackfu
"Even when you follow great people, you still have to wade through tweets that
have little or nothing to do with news."

Kottke is not a great example of this. He has separate personal and
professional accounts. His professional account is essentially just an RSS
feed of his blog. Complaining about personal tweets junking up the personal
account is silly in this case.

Account he should folllow:
[https://twitter.com/kottke](https://twitter.com/kottke)

------
dheera
Twitter also killed it with their new API.

The v1.0 API used to allow you to fetch tweets without authentication, which
allowed you to effectively use it as an RSS feed, convert it to a feed in
whatever format you wanted, or build converters and visualization methods for
other people.

I guess they want to control the ecosystem of what people do with Twitter
data, which is completely contrary to the notion of RSS which is precisely to
NOT control the ecosystem.

~~~
rsnail
Sites like rssitfor.me still works to get RSS feeds for twitter IDs that you
follow. Site seems overloaded most of the time though.

[http://rssitfor.me/getrss?name=wired](http://rssitfor.me/getrss?name=wired)

------
sswaner
Twitter has replaced RSS for me. For me, the value of Twitter is learning new
things, similar to the value I place on HN. I am pretty good at filtering out
the noise because I usually look for links in posts. I rarely read a series of
tweets in a conversation, and usually scroll right by link-less posts without
reading.

------
jeena
Twitter lacks one important feature which I have in all my RSS readers and it
is marking a article as read/unread.

------
brador
There's a delicate balance between serendipity and breaking the filter bubble,
while maintaining quality.

My solution- [http://skimfeed.com](http://skimfeed.com). I Focused on
information density, speed, and hand picked sources. Let me know what you
think!

------
VLM
He's following the wrong accounts.

Some human journalist is going to occasionally talk about cooking steak
instead of technology or journalism.

@melpa_emacs and @TinyToCS never talk about cooking steak.

People and brands on twitter are just spam, not worth following. Focused
announcements are surprisingly not bad...

~~~
smtddr
_> >People and brands on twitter are just spam, not worth following._

Your usage of twitter is completely opposite of mine. People & brands are the
only things I follow on twitter.

------
digital-rubber
Because twitter is a big setup which is hold together by paste, glue and dirty
caches? :o)

