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Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS

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Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS

#21
post #17

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 whic…

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

Re: Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS

#22
post #14
post #10

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…

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

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