cdixon: Twitter killed RSS (and that’s a bad thing)
Thorsten Claus
· 3 months ago
Nice catchy title, short enough to retweet ;)
Twitter is too noisy with other stuff. I also get lots of tweets of the same title - still not more relevant to me. Even worse, ten different URL shorteners point to the same destination. And I don't want to install and maintain a Firefox plugin for that.
about 30% of my RSS subscriptions are things I see very few tweets about. So do I have to go out and search for people who are not only interested in that topic but also tweet about it? Why? And will there be enough people who do exactly that so the story doesn't get drowned in the rest of the Twitter noise?
Tweets are also far from "recommendations" or "relevant". How can ONE user with 12,000+ followers "recommend" something that fits your interest, other than "hey, it's a gadget", or "it's about VCs"... it has to be a pretty focused user with some awesome aggregation, and I met only few of these.
Try and search for something that was inside an article you were pointed to, but not in the title of your tweet...
The list could go on and on, but probably all of the "gripes" for replacing an RSS reader with twitter are also really interesting startup opportunities: Search in content linked from twitter, ranked by your followers and same destination of URL-shorteners; analyze your link-click behavior, show a "like" bar on the top after you clicked, and later analyze which of your followees are tweeting the most interesting links; give certain topics or people a rank of importance, and then either color code, display an "importance bar", or plainly filter for importance below your custom threshold "x"; ... again the list could go on and on ;)
If only I had more money for funding...
RichardForster
· 3 months ago
Hi Chris
This is an interesting topic but one I have to disagree with you on.
RSS isn't going anywhere, it's the plumbing and Twitter can't replace that even with their latest investment round. Sure Google Reader might be dying but there's way too much noise on Twitter, it's too much effort to try and follow a lot of people.
Feedly is the best RSS reader I have come across, those guys rock and what they are doing without major investment is amazing.
The biggest problem with RSS is it is not consumer friendly most internet users wouldn't have clue what RSS is but then most internet users won't be using Twitter in the way you do to get their news.
It will take a brand to replace the "RSS logo" with some sort of defacto "click this button and you are subscribed so it will appear personalised for you at XXX website" but all that brand will be doing (and it could be Twitter because like you I think they have the brand kudos) is placing it in an RSS reader but average joe won't care or know that RSS is the plumbing behind it.
slayerboy
· 3 months ago
there is an alternative....called identica. The problem is twitter is so mainstream now, it's going to be hard to have any meaningful stuff on identica.
Dan Frommer
· 3 months ago
Twitter didn't kill RSS. Twitter killed the RSS reader. (At least, mine.) And that's okay with me.
RSS is still a good way for publishers to syndicate content from one place to another. But RSS readers are a dull user experience that most normal people would probably find unsatisfying.
And because of the terrible job Google has done with FeedBurner and AdSense for Feeds, RSS advertising is an insult to publishers. (In terms of revenue and analytics.)
Twitter, meanwhile, looks very nice in referrer logs, and generates pageviews, and therefore actual revenue.
chris dixon
· 3 months ago
Interesting. so RSS will live on as a pub-to-pub thing?
Dan Frommer
· 3 months ago
Definitely something XML/RSSy.
We send SAI content to several pubs directly via RSS today, and will be adding more. I don't see that going away any time soon, because there's no need for any more complex APIs.
erangalp
· 3 months ago
Twitter is a great resource for articles, but not all blogs are posting there. For those that are, RSS subscription gives me the confidence that I won't miss a post by not checking my stream at the right time (not everybody gets retweeted as religiously as you :)).
In the end, both twitter and RSS despite having a major usage base are still not nearly as dominant as regular web browsing. The overlap between the user bases is not that great either. Just today I had to explain both to a very technical person, which for me was a wake up call.
And before you quit using google reader in favor of twitter, you should try marrying them first using readtwit (http://readtwit.com - shameless plug).
Max Niederhofer
· 3 months ago
Might there be room for someone to build a reading interface that posts both to Twitter/FB and another, more open platform (perhaps a more sophisticated status.net)? There must be some hack to get around the network effects: using everyone's oauths to get you and your friends in, using some scraping to validate those relationships...
Tweetdeck et al would be well placed to attempt this. Of course Twitter may always turn you off but...
chris dixon
· 3 months ago
I think its over. We are all beholden to the Twitter/Facebook/Microsoft borg.
Ben Atlas
· 3 months ago
I still find that reader gives me what I want without the noise. I separated Reader into groups/folders. Some I check all the time, other feeds only if I see an item in the stream. I find that noise to signal in Twitter is unacceptable.
giffc
· 3 months ago
I have to agree with Ben. An rss reader allows me to more efficiently categorize and prioritize interesting authors, and dip into various topics asynchronously when the time is right. I suppose it comes down to user behavior: I don't religiously peruse and backtrack on my Twitter stream, but rather dip in and out periodically. If that was my only source for blogs, I would miss too much.
davidu
· 3 months ago
Ironically, I grab RSS feeds of keywords from search.twitter.com and read them in Google Reader. I find that it's impossible to keep up with the stream of tweets from the people I follow.
Alex
· 3 months ago
RSS is still valuable as a capture/backstop mechanism to Twitter's stream in those instances when you can't follow the stream during the day because of meetings, travel, etc. Trending topics doesn't have the necessary depth or meta data to serve this purpose as of yet.
chris dixon
· 3 months ago
Yes, but you could imagine Twitter apps that could/will fix that soon.
Guest
· 3 months ago
ianrosenwach
· 3 months ago
Twitter is still niche (and 140 characters). You can link to content, but never have the choice to include a substantial amount of content in a Twitter update. RSS has that flexibility, and hence supports much richer and premium content. You can syndicate as much content as you'd like.
RSS just needs a makeover, or a better Reader. A RSS Reader that starts from scratch with an eye to Twitter. RSS is a social network, it just hasn't realized it - http://ianrosenwach.com/index.php/2009/09/rss-m...
chris dixon
· 3 months ago
Maybe the messaging system only needs to send headlines & links and the long form stuff can sit on blogs.
Twitter could be good for monetizing blogs since people like me are actually visiting their sites again.
ianrosenwach
· 3 months ago
Yes, this brings up the question of how much content Publishers should include in their RSS feeds, and the bigger issue of how to monetize an RSS feed. AdSense for Feeds (Feedburner) seems to be the standard but I don't see it as a big business just yet.
There is the delicate balance between driving traffic to a blog and syndicating content to a 3rd party. Twitter drives traffic AND is a place to read short content. One of these two forces will need to win, and I think it will be driving traffic. That's what was successful for Google. It's best to be a platform for discovery than a destination in itself. The platform is much more scalable.
chris dixon
· 3 months ago
Interesting. I think you are right that one of the two forces will win and it will probably be driving traffic.
vrikhter
· 3 months ago
Chris, I see your point, however, I've found it difficult to catch up on articles/posts if I miss a day or two on Twitter. The constant stream seems to take away posts that are more than a day or two old, any way you've found to fix this?
chris dixon
· 3 months ago
Being online constantly ;)
ShanaC
· 3 months ago
The thing is, that those links aren't storeable. Readers are a bit more storable. Since the day you subscribe, you see the old content. Is it necessary? Twitter asks that question of us. Right now we want to say yes, in reality, it's a very big question about the web itself. it's an ephemeral medium. How much of this is tangible is hard to describe.
One of the oddball things about the DNS structure, is that it semi-promotes this behavior anyway. Even if we want to save it, why should I bother, the information in it is dated by the time the twitter stream passes by. The link breaking just means that the link broke. It's not like we haven't embedded links in pages before, that have then broken. It just is much more apparent in front of us, because it streams by as it gives us information. We're just not used to the stream appearing in front of us so fast. If the links broke slowly, say over a few years, rather than rapidly, I don't think anyone would notice.
Part of this is next-gen-cloud problems. Do I need a location to even remember what I like, or is that ephemeral too? (I mean the purpose of a reader in some ways is an ever rolling bookmark, even if the ever rolling bookmark exists on the cloud)
So how much do we need to remember anyway? Or is it just that we need to digest the information in a now sense? Or do we want the web to have memory as we think of human or communal memory. That seems to be the real complaint here.
Apolinaras Sinkevicius
· 3 months ago
I think RSS (Google Reader here too) will live long, at least for me. Big problem with Twitter is that at least 50% of my contacts and people I follow are not on it and have no plans to join. Their blogs are also less known, but have some very deep info invaluable to me.
Yes, I have discovered your blog through Twitter, but the vast majority of the blogs in the business operations space almost never show up on Twitter.
Elie Seidman
· 3 months ago
I have the same problem with noise that others have mentioned. The signal to noise ratio in twitter is bad relative to the subject headings in my RSS reader.
OurielOhayon
· 3 months ago
Although i agree there is an overlap i have 2 issues with killing RSS readers for Twitter. not all the blogs i read have a twitter account and if they do i am not aware of it (idea for a new service?). You need to be in Sync with twitter to keep track of news. Asynchronous reading is not convenient on twitter...and probably too cluttered.
I would say that RSS readers as we know them are going to die but there is a definite need for a simple reader enabling asynchronous reading
kevotheclone
· 3 months ago
@erangalp readtwit == intersting
Call me old school, but I still get a lot of value out of Awasu, a highly extensible Windows desktop feed reader. Awasu gives me Search Agents which monitor incoming feed traffic and Channel Hooks (event driven actions when interesting items are found). And of course feed items are sticky (@Alex); they won't drift away on a stream of tweets. So a "good" feed reader, with a combo of Twitter searches and selected tweeter's status message feeds make a great way to aggregate twitter content and filter the noise. And since I don't travel much (and when I do, the last thing I want to do is touch a keyboard or mouse) a web-based reader isn't a requirement; Awasu works great for me.
anonymouse
· 3 months ago
Twitter is a cluster f*ck.
Not sure how a normal person can replace following a few dozen RSS feeds in a reader with Twitter. i.e. read and un-read items, organizing by folder, alphabetical, tags, etc... Definitely not as many people interacting within the reader (just a few friends following and vice versa), but a hell of a lot more engaging and interesting (one person who tweets too much can ruin the entire Twitter experience....but hey, I follow tweets in the my reader)...
Luis
· 3 months ago
Hi,
It is too much saying that twitter killed the rss. rss and twitter are complementary being rss more automatic and twitter more human-made. There are many other microblogging sites coming out, and, it is said, facebook tends to be more like twitter.
Greetings,
Luis
parkparadigm
· 3 months ago
I agree that Google reader is a pretty crappy user experience. FWIW I use netvibes. I used to scan my various netvibe tabs religiously a few times a day but now admit that most of my day-to-day 'news' is curated via twitter links and RTs. That said, I still find netvibes (ergo RSS) extremely useful as an archive and when I need to do specific research on an area of interest (as I have collected a great group of expert blogs and newswires there, organized by topic and/or theme.)
As for twitter, perhaps they should split in two - putting the basic tweet stream into open source (twitter.org) and focusing commercial entity on add-value services and data monetization.
As for the social graph as a barrier to entry, this is obviously true but there are a handful of other companies who could eventually compete here if twitter were to stumble/go evil. ie Facebook, Skype (if they survive the lawsuit)...
William Mougayar
· 3 months ago
It's dissapointing to still see headlines like "Twitter killing RSS". These are 2 very different things. - Twitter has put a dent into the Readers, which were dismal to start with. - RSS and Twitter are symbiotic. You get RSS out of Twitter, RSS feeds Twitter, some sites (like ours) do smart/curated aggregation and send to a Twitter account (e.g. @nyctechnews) - Twitter is great for discovery and general purpose/tech news, but is quite shallow for several other topics (so far) - As Twitter grows, a user will start facing the same issues as with Readers. Instead of managing feeds, we'll soon be overwhelmed managing people & accounts to follow (although Twitter desktops are getting better, and aggregators again help)
As for Twitter being a single point of failure, that's definitely a current issue they will have to improve upon. Eventually, all statuses will be inter-twinned and transparent to each other.
ShanaC
· 3 months ago
Correct. Follow a long tail item and you realize how hard it is to get good information off of twitter. I still will just go to the top blog on the subject. Seriously.
aweissman
· 3 months ago
Twitter is the most open application people are currently using. It's open on the way in and the way out. The variety of applications using the Twitter api are astounding in that they cover many use cases.
Given that, why will Ashton and Oprah someday care?
chris dixon
· 3 months ago
URL shorteners are a phisher's dream.
Twitter is open for now but who knows in the future.
Mor importantly, the only way to have true reliability is to have institutional redundancy (this requires more explanation-I'll write a post about it)
aweissman
· 3 months ago
I am all for openeness - more than most people - but even if it were not as open - what's the negative affect on users? Redundancy can mean business wise or application wise - so I eagerly await your post ;-)
As to URL shorteners - I am so unobjective here as to be worthless - but they have been around for a decade without a material phishing problem. Not that it cant happen - but its an issue was beyond url shorteners - and it can and has been majorly minimized
chris dixon
· 3 months ago
I mean redudancy of institutions - what I think you mean by businesses. I'll write more about it shortly.
URL shorteners were a niche novelty pre twitter. Bad guys wouldn't waste their time on them. History suggests its only a matter of time before someone penetrates twitter accounts or url shortener to create a major, web-delivered malware attack. URL shorteners could get ahead of this by thinking about security sooner rather than later.
Guest
· 3 months ago
Yes, this brings up the question of how much content Publishers should include in their RSS feeds, and the bigger issue of how to monetize an RSS feed. AdSense for Feeds (Feedburner), but that seems to be the standard but I don't see it as a big business just yet.
There is the delicate balance between driving traffic to a blog and syndicating content to a 3rd party. Twitter drives traffic AND is a place to read short content.
One of these two forces will need to win, and I think it will be driving traffic. That's what was successful for Google. It's best to be a platform for discovery than a destination in itself. The platform is much more scalable.
Rathan
· 3 months ago
I wonder if its more of a UX/UI problem with Google Reader rather than the death of RSS. It seems like Twitter is easier to follow because the interface isn't clunky, and you can scan a lot of information quickly, where as Google Reader, you have to actually scroll past the entire article.
If the postings were short titles that you can quickly scan through, would that save your impression of Google Reader?
GeekMBA360
· 3 months ago
I'm not so sure that Twitter killed RSS.
RSS subscriber count of my blog is still growing steadily. I did notice that instead of commenting on my blog, some readers started to send me direct messages via Twitter regarding my blog posts.
I do think that RSS could become more powerful if more identifiable information can be added (e.g. i like to know who is subscribing to my blog.) But, I think RSS is here to stay, and Twitter will complement it, but not kill it.
Scott Paley
· 2 months ago
I would at least say that RSS 'the protocol' isn't going anywhere, but MAYBE RSS 'the client reader app' is in trouble. That said, IMO RSS Readers scale better for following lots of blogs. There is so much noise on Twitter and unless you are following your stream constantly, it's really easy to miss anything that was posted more than an hour or two earlier - especially when you start following more than just a few hundred people.
The protocol is used for way, way more than just a way for client readers to subscribe to content. It acts as the plumbing for a lot of CMS integration these days, as one example.
Wolfy
· 2 months ago
Twitter is too hard to filter and you have to monitor it in real time to get value out of the links. Microplaza is good, but I find myself relying on my feed reader more than ever. I use Google Reader and Feedly. And by now I have all the same articles in my reader as are being tweeted, and Feedly makes it easy to find them.
-M
ValleyDriver
· 2 months ago
i think i get your point. but that implies one uses Twitter. i gave up on Twitter months ago. just don't need to know that quickly. i use Google Reader to accumulate posts to my favorite websites and posts. then when i am in the mood i go to Reader and catch up - once a day or may ever two or three days.
Bruce Warila
· 2 months ago
Think this through. If everyone moved from RSS to Twitter, some critical mass of humans still have to read the stuff they tweet about. As a first-consume (before you share) technology, Twitter doesn't scale to everyone. As you approach all-of-humanity on the adoption curve, the curve that represents the dumbing down of humanity begins to rise proportionately.
clarke thomas
· 2 months ago
twitter may replace the AP steam, but I don't see it displacing RSS. There's no easy way to group or have a history of posts in twitter. With RSS I can be offline for awhile & return to data from several days, twitter is more real-time.
Dave F
· 2 months ago
RSS doesn't have to die but innovation must return to that medium... Twitter frustrates me because it is a simple concept which is useless proved so by Admins back in the day but repackaged and made accessible via smart phones - the only reason it has caught on. Patience will see twitter die, when replaced by a useful solution but that may be years out do to the limited ability of the mass public.
terrycojones
· 2 months ago
Is there a reason why you don't tweet links to your new blog posts? I completely stopped using Google reader a year ago, in favor of Tweeted links. I follow you, would be happy to read the majority of your blog posts, but am not going to start in with GReader again.
chris dixon
· 2 months ago
I always tweet my new blog posts. maybe you just missed them?
ElenaBRuiz
· 2 months ago
Hi Chris If you wanna go 'open', try identi.ca I've gone thru all comments, extremely interesting to us, here @microplaza.
What we are trying to do with microplaza is to filter noise from twitter by showing only those tweets with links, not only from the public timeline but what's more important from your personal/Twitter network.
ShanaC says: "The thing is, that those links aren't storeable" Well they are, use the Bookmark option and you'll always have them over there.
Ben Atlas says: "I still find that reader gives me what I want without the noise. I separated Reader into groups/folders."
Yes, grouping and categorizing is a step beyond dealing with noise. What we did for instance is to give users the possibility to create groups (we call them Tribes) and enroll ppl to those groups...and then when you click on a tribe you get every single url retweeted by the members of that tribe, along with a thumbnail and associated tweets. If you prefer, you can also grab the RSS and follow your tribes on Feedly for instance (imho, the best RSS reader out there, but I'm a visual learner so that might do the trick).
@Wolfy: thanks for the Microplaza mention, are you combining MP with RSS readers?
@clarkethomas: "There's no easy way to group or have a history of posts in twitter"
Well yes by combining tribes creation + bookmarks.
Right now we are in the process of developing a more stable/robust Microplaza, v2.0, and apart from the backend improvements we are definitely trying to listen to ppl needs (our own as well, since we also use RSS and Twitter for own purposes) & come up with a better personalized app, forthcoming features are being evolved around the tribes idea (if you want to stay tuned, you can also follow @microplaza or subscribe to our blog)
The personalized real-time is the next thing, it's always like that, when a given technology hits the mainstream and there's a plethora of (dis)information and resources etc...the next stage is to provide users with filtering tools, and the stage after that is to provide the personalization of filtering. And real-time...which is even harder due to the crazy activity on Twitter.
Mike Henderson
· 2 months ago
I just use MP for the twitter link tracking. I haven't really dug into it too much more than that.
For feeds I use GReader and the Feedly plugin for Firefox. Really like that combo.
-M
Elena Benito-Ruiz
· 2 months ago
I also use the feedly + greader combo to read feeds, including Microplaza's! I would welcome you to dig into MP or wait for the MP2.0 :)
burtlo
· 2 months ago
Before RSS was a much bigger deal, I didn’t understand how it was a game changer in terms of reading the net. I had friends way ahead of me in this game.
I learned from that now and have a well populated Google Reader. I continue to hear that Twitter has now made this extinct but I haven’t gotten that impression. However, that is mostly because I’m using the vanilla-based twitter through the web and there you have no great tools to stay on top of trending topics.
It wasn’t until I found myself at a conference that #blahblah and trending topics became important because they weren’t just trending topics they were live chat rooms, live feeds of data, or streams.
I really saw a benefit to Twitter for the first time. Individuals had these streams of data of all types and if the #trended it or used the right keywords there was amazing use. I could now pipe in data from all these sources about the topic I wanted. It was a disjointed forum that erupts out of communication. Which is better than trying to get people to come to a temporal place to act as a forum.
So I just downloaded Tweetdeck and I see where it is in some ways an awesome tool that far outstrips RSS as a discovery tool. But I still can’t see it replacing RSS for me because there is far too much duplication and spam.
So I see Twitter as a great discovery tool, I can pull twitter searches into Google Reader and then use those to find the blogs/info that I eventually want add as permanent RSS feeds.
I see it as a compliment, not as a replacement.
Problems:
* ReTweets are awesome if you are trying to expose your audience to the information. However, to those within the same circle, say at an event, it is a duplication of the previous tweet.
* Duplication (in general) of posts in a given space, like when people quote people at a particular event. An event has a measurable echo here and the larger the personality the larger the echo.
* Spam from outside individuals that are adding negative value to the space (compared to a repost which is perhaps considered neutral or only slightly negative).
Some things I need for twitter to gain more value:
* There are no decent tools to deal with the duplication. You don’t want the streams of data to be blocked, you want clients to manage it. I imagine that a tool that compares posts 140 character posts might have a good shot at dealing with the duplication.
* There are no good community tools to assist with positively reinforcing good posts and negatively reinforcing spam/bad posts.
Doug Camplejohn
· 1 week ago
RSS, the protocol, isn't dead it's just time for it to fade into the woodwork, just like other protocols/standards. I don't ask you what HTML Browser you use, or what SMTP server your company uses, these are just the building blocks that average users don't need to know about. RSS is a great technology, but a crap user experience for the average user. It's time for the RSS acronym to disappear, and the RSS icon and reader to be replaced with a better and more valuable user experience.
All Comments
Twitter is too noisy with other stuff. I also get lots of tweets of the same title - still not more relevant to me. Even worse, ten different URL shorteners point to the same destination. And I don't want to install and maintain a Firefox plugin for that.
about 30% of my RSS subscriptions are things I see very few tweets about. So do I have to go out and search for people who are not only interested in that topic but also tweet about it? Why? And will there be enough people who do exactly that so the story doesn't get drowned in the rest of the Twitter noise?
Tweets are also far from "recommendations" or "relevant". How can ONE user with 12,000+ followers "recommend" something that fits your interest, other than "hey, it's a gadget", or "it's about VCs"... it has to be a pretty focused user with some awesome aggregation, and I met only few of these.
Try and search for something that was inside an article you were pointed to, but not in the title of your tweet...
The list could go on and on, but probably all of the "gripes" for replacing an RSS reader with twitter are also really interesting startup opportunities: Search in content linked from twitter, ranked by your followers and same destination of URL-shorteners; analyze your link-click behavior, show a "like" bar on the top after you clicked, and later analyze which of your followees are tweeting the most interesting links; give certain topics or people a rank of importance, and then either color code, display an "importance bar", or plainly filter for importance below your custom threshold "x"; ... again the list could go on and on ;)
If only I had more money for funding...
This is an interesting topic but one I have to disagree with you on.
RSS isn't going anywhere, it's the plumbing and Twitter can't replace that even with their latest investment round. Sure Google Reader might be dying but there's way too much noise on Twitter, it's too much effort to try and follow a lot of people.
Feedly is the best RSS reader I have come across, those guys rock and what they are doing without major investment is amazing.
The biggest problem with RSS is it is not consumer friendly most internet users wouldn't have clue what RSS is but then most internet users won't be using Twitter in the way you do to get their news.
It will take a brand to replace the "RSS logo" with some sort of defacto "click this button and you are subscribed so it will appear personalised for you at XXX website" but all that brand will be doing (and it could be Twitter because like you I think they have the brand kudos) is placing it in an RSS reader but average joe won't care or know that RSS is the plumbing behind it.
RSS is still a good way for publishers to syndicate content from one place to another. But RSS readers are a dull user experience that most normal people would probably find unsatisfying.
And because of the terrible job Google has done with FeedBurner and AdSense for Feeds, RSS advertising is an insult to publishers. (In terms of revenue and analytics.)
Twitter, meanwhile, looks very nice in referrer logs, and generates pageviews, and therefore actual revenue.
We send SAI content to several pubs directly via RSS today, and will be adding more. I don't see that going away any time soon, because there's no need for any more complex APIs.
In the end, both twitter and RSS despite having a major usage base are still not nearly as dominant as regular web browsing. The overlap between the user bases is not that great either. Just today I had to explain both to a very technical person, which for me was a wake up call.
And before you quit using google reader in favor of twitter, you should try marrying them first using readtwit (http://readtwit.com - shameless plug).
Tweetdeck et al would be well placed to attempt this. Of course Twitter may always turn you off but...
RSS just needs a makeover, or a better Reader. A RSS Reader that starts from scratch with an eye to Twitter. RSS is a social network, it just hasn't realized it - http://ianrosenwach.com/index.php/2009/09/rss-m...
the long form stuff can sit on blogs.
Twitter could be good for monetizing blogs since people like me are
actually visiting their sites again.
There is the delicate balance between driving traffic to a blog and syndicating content to a 3rd party. Twitter drives traffic AND is a place to read short content. One of these two forces will need to win, and I think it will be driving traffic. That's what was successful for Google. It's best to be a platform for discovery than a destination in itself. The platform is much more scalable.
One of the oddball things about the DNS structure, is that it semi-promotes this behavior anyway. Even if we want to save it, why should I bother, the information in it is dated by the time the twitter stream passes by. The link breaking just means that the link broke. It's not like we haven't embedded links in pages before, that have then broken. It just is much more apparent in front of us, because it streams by as it gives us information. We're just not used to the stream appearing in front of us so fast. If the links broke slowly, say over a few years, rather than rapidly, I don't think anyone would notice.
Part of this is next-gen-cloud problems. Do I need a location to even remember what I like, or is that ephemeral too? (I mean the purpose of a reader in some ways is an ever rolling bookmark, even if the ever rolling bookmark exists on the cloud)
So how much do we need to remember anyway? Or is it just that we need to digest the information in a now sense? Or do we want the web to have memory as we think of human or communal memory. That seems to be the real complaint here.
Yes, I have discovered your blog through Twitter, but the vast majority of the blogs in the business operations space almost never show up on Twitter.
I would say that RSS readers as we know them are going to die but there is a definite need for a simple reader enabling asynchronous reading
Call me old school, but I still get a lot of value out of Awasu, a highly extensible Windows desktop feed reader. Awasu gives me Search Agents which monitor incoming feed traffic and Channel Hooks (event driven actions when interesting items are found). And of course feed items are sticky (@Alex); they won't drift away on a stream of tweets. So a "good" feed reader, with a combo of Twitter searches and selected tweeter's status message feeds make a great way to aggregate twitter content and filter the noise. And since I don't travel much (and when I do, the last thing I want to do is touch a keyboard or mouse) a web-based reader isn't a requirement; Awasu works great for me.
Not sure how a normal person can replace following a few dozen RSS feeds in a reader with Twitter. i.e. read and un-read items, organizing by folder, alphabetical, tags, etc... Definitely not as many people interacting within the reader (just a few friends following and vice versa), but a hell of a lot more engaging and interesting (one person who tweets too much can ruin the entire Twitter experience....but hey, I follow tweets in the my reader)...
It is too much saying that twitter killed the rss. rss and twitter are complementary being rss more automatic and twitter more human-made.
There are many other microblogging sites coming out, and, it is said, facebook tends to be more like twitter.
Greetings,
Luis
As for twitter, perhaps they should split in two - putting the basic tweet stream into open source (twitter.org) and focusing commercial entity on add-value services and data monetization.
As for the social graph as a barrier to entry, this is obviously true but there are a handful of other companies who could eventually compete here if twitter were to stumble/go evil. ie Facebook, Skype (if they survive the lawsuit)...
- Twitter has put a dent into the Readers, which were dismal to start with.
- RSS and Twitter are symbiotic. You get RSS out of Twitter, RSS feeds Twitter, some sites (like ours) do smart/curated aggregation and send to a Twitter account (e.g. @nyctechnews)
- Twitter is great for discovery and general purpose/tech news, but is quite shallow for several other topics (so far)
- As Twitter grows, a user will start facing the same issues as with Readers. Instead of managing feeds, we'll soon be overwhelmed managing people & accounts to follow (although Twitter desktops are getting better, and aggregators again help)
As for Twitter being a single point of failure, that's definitely a current issue they will have to improve upon. Eventually, all statuses will be inter-twinned and transparent to each other.
Given that, why will Ashton and Oprah someday care?
Twitter is open for now but who knows in the future.
Mor importantly, the only way to have true reliability is to have
institutional redundancy (this requires more explanation-I'll write a
post about it)
As to URL shorteners - I am so unobjective here as to be worthless - but they have been around for a decade without a material phishing problem. Not that it cant happen - but its an issue was beyond url shorteners - and it can and has been majorly minimized
URL shorteners were a niche novelty pre twitter. Bad guys wouldn't waste their time on them. History suggests its only a matter of time before someone penetrates twitter accounts or url shortener to create a major, web-delivered malware attack. URL shorteners could get ahead of this by thinking about security sooner rather than later.
There is the delicate balance between driving traffic to a blog and syndicating content to a 3rd party. Twitter drives traffic AND is a place to read short content.
One of these two forces will need to win, and I think it will be driving traffic. That's what was successful for Google. It's best to be a platform for discovery than a destination in itself. The platform is much more scalable.
If the postings were short titles that you can quickly scan through, would that save your impression of Google Reader?
RSS subscriber count of my blog is still growing steadily. I did notice that instead of commenting on my blog, some readers started to send me direct messages via Twitter regarding my blog posts.
I do think that RSS could become more powerful if more identifiable information can be added (e.g. i like to know who is subscribing to my blog.) But, I think RSS is here to stay, and Twitter will complement it, but not kill it.
The protocol is used for way, way more than just a way for client readers to subscribe to content. It acts as the plumbing for a lot of CMS integration these days, as one example.
-M
If you wanna go 'open', try identi.ca
I've gone thru all comments, extremely interesting to us, here @microplaza.
What we are trying to do with microplaza is to filter noise from twitter by showing only those tweets with links, not only from the public timeline but what's more important from your personal/Twitter network.
ShanaC says: "The thing is, that those links aren't storeable"
Well they are, use the Bookmark option and you'll always have them over there.
Ben Atlas says: "I still find that reader gives me what I want without the noise. I separated Reader into groups/folders."
Yes, grouping and categorizing is a step beyond dealing with noise. What we did for instance is to give users the possibility to create groups (we call them Tribes) and enroll ppl to those groups...and then when you click on a tribe you get every single url retweeted by the members of that tribe, along with a thumbnail and associated tweets. If you prefer, you can also grab the RSS and follow your tribes on Feedly for instance (imho, the best RSS reader out there, but I'm a visual learner so that might do the trick).
@Wolfy: thanks for the Microplaza mention, are you combining MP with RSS readers?
@clarkethomas: "There's no easy way to group or have a history of posts in twitter"
Well yes by combining tribes creation + bookmarks.
Right now we are in the process of developing a more stable/robust Microplaza, v2.0, and apart from the backend improvements we are definitely trying to listen to ppl needs (our own as well, since we also use RSS and Twitter for own purposes) & come up with a better personalized app, forthcoming features are being evolved around the tribes idea (if you want to stay tuned, you can also follow @microplaza or subscribe to our blog)
The personalized real-time is the next thing, it's always like that, when a given technology hits the mainstream and there's a plethora of (dis)information and resources etc...the next stage is to provide users with filtering tools, and the stage after that is to provide the personalization of filtering. And real-time...which is even harder due to the crazy activity on Twitter.
For feeds I use GReader and the Feedly plugin for Firefox. Really like that combo.
-M
I would welcome you to dig into MP or wait for the MP2.0 :)
I learned from that now and have a well populated Google Reader. I continue to hear that Twitter has now made this extinct but I haven’t gotten that impression. However, that is mostly because I’m using the vanilla-based twitter through the web and there you have no great tools to stay on top of trending topics.
It wasn’t until I found myself at a conference that #blahblah and trending topics became important because they weren’t just trending topics they were live chat rooms, live feeds of data, or streams.
I really saw a benefit to Twitter for the first time. Individuals had these streams of data of all types and if the #trended it or used the right keywords there was amazing use. I could now pipe in data from all these sources about the topic I wanted. It was a disjointed forum that erupts out of communication. Which is better than trying to get people to come to a temporal place to act as a forum.
So I just downloaded Tweetdeck and I see where it is in some ways an awesome tool that far outstrips RSS as a discovery tool. But I still can’t see it replacing RSS for me because there is far too much duplication and spam.
So I see Twitter as a great discovery tool, I can pull twitter searches into Google Reader and then use those to find the blogs/info that I eventually want add as permanent RSS feeds.
I see it as a compliment, not as a replacement.
Problems:
* ReTweets are awesome if you are trying to expose your audience to the information. However, to those within the same circle, say at an event, it is a duplication of the previous tweet.
* Duplication (in general) of posts in a given space, like when people quote people at a particular event. An event has a measurable echo here and the larger the personality the larger the echo.
* Spam from outside individuals that are adding negative value to the space (compared to a repost which is perhaps considered neutral or only slightly negative).
Some things I need for twitter to gain more value:
* There are no decent tools to deal with the duplication. You don’t want the streams of data to be blocked, you want clients to manage it. I imagine that a tool that compares posts 140 character posts might have a good shot at dealing with the duplication.
* There are no good community tools to assist with positively reinforcing good posts and negatively reinforcing spam/bad posts.