Twitter is the worst RSS reader ever because it assumes that only what is happening NOW is relevant or valuable.
Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
#12Twitter 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.
Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
#13There's a delicate balance between serendipity and breaking the filter bubble, while maintaining quality.
My solution- http://skimfeed.com. I Focused on information density, speed, and hand picked sources. Let me know what you think!
Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
#14When 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…
Unread counts are a UI feature orthogonal to the underlying syndication format. FriendFeed uses RSS and doesn't have unread counts.
Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
#15They 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 d…
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).
Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
#16He'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...
>>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.
Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
#17Twitter 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.
Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
#18Trying 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
From:
http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
#19Twitter lacks one important feature which I have in all my RSS readers and it is marking a article as read/unread.
Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS
#20Trying 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 kee…
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.