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Twitter is the new RSS

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Re: Twitter is the new RSS

#12
post #4

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.

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.

Re: Twitter is the new RSS

#13
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.

Re: Twitter is the new RSS

#14
post #12
post #4

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.

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.

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.

Re: Twitter is the new RSS

#15
post #10

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 advan…

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....

Re: Twitter is the new RSS

#16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Twitter is the new RSS

#18

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.

You can use lists to manage that.

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

Re: Twitter is the new RSS

#19
post #4

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.

Exactly. With Twitter, it's impossible to make sure I've at least glanced at the important stuff. With RSS, I can go through my list a couple of times a day, and know that I'm caught up.

Re: Twitter is the new RSS

#20
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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