Why I think twitter will not kill RSS'


Late for Work / Tarde pa'l trabajo
Originally uploaded by Eneas

Previously, Steve Gillmor, a famous technology journalist signed a blog post in TechCrunchIT with the title "Rest in peace RSS".

In this post, Steve explains why, now the time is for realtime Web and especially twitter and that the old static RSS is dead.
I've been using RSS for a long time to follow websites and blogs, and twitter for 5 months now.

My point is that twitter and rss are 2 complementary tools.

For me, the usages are different, both have good points, so I use and I'll continue to use both.

For twitter I'm user with around 220 followers, 190 followings.

I use it day to day but still don't really go in many discussions.

For RSS, I follow 133 (I've just checked this morning) RSS feeds in google reader.

They are properly organized by categories.
Part of these RSS feeds are ... twitter search (for my company for example) or to follow key people (like @lancearmstrong). This is a very rich and useful source of information.

What I like (love) in twitter is :

  • it's fast, immediate : when something happen, I can see, feel it. Today, the realtime Web" become more and more important. Tools like twitter, friendfeed really bring something totally new. I love it.
  • it's easy to find new people that are interesting for me : following the @ discussions, or using tools that suggest me people to follow, I can easily find new very interesting people
  • it's simple : no complicated features (except all these @replies parameters...), the usage is immediate as soon as you go on www.twitter.com
  • search is very powerfull : because people post their blog entries on google, because people discuss on google, the realtime search is very powerful and always bring me very good results and inputs. This is today my main reason to use twitter.

What I like (love) in RSS is :

  • it's reliable : no issue, it works
  • it's quiet. When you're in Google, there's a lot of noise (a lot of discussions that are not interesting for me). In my rss reader, I follow my favorite websites and just them. In a quick check (few minutes),I check information about my company, about me, about some hot topic. I cannot do that in twitter
  • I can organize information by categories. In twitter i cannot do that.
  • I can know what I've read / not read. For some blogs, I want to have a look (at least on the title) on every post, in Google reader, it's very easy
  • the information is immediately accessible. In twitter, I see a link, with a shorten url on which I've to click to see more. With RSS in Google reader, I see the title of the article in big, and immediately after, the post itself. It's very powerful to go throw a huge number of posts.
  • a lot of tools exist to manage RSS feeds. I use Google reader online, especially because i use several PCs, so it's important for me to be able to access MY feeds every time, everywhere, but other nice clients exist.
  • RSS can bring to me information from many sources : blogs, twitter, social networks like linkedin, ... in a single, coherent place.

Based on all these good points (I did not list the bad ones...), I'll continue to use both tools.

Twitter is just as it beginning, under construction, new services, features will come that will make it even better. I'm convinced real-time WEB is the future.

RSS is a base simple efficient format,(Really Simple Syndication) that answer to a need (the syndication) that we will still continue to have in future ... so it will stay, and even become more and more popular.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]