Fading out RSS, Fading in Twitter

RSS is better than Twitter for keeping up with online reading. But that doesn't really matter, because Twitter has won. So I'm starting to share my posts via Twitter (@whimsley) and will increasingly be following your blog on Twitter or not at all.

I will continue to resist sharing anything on Facebook except snarky comments aimed solely at my friends.

Comments

[Bill Jacobson]

They're not mutually exclusive, and Twitter is a horrible tool for following blogs, especially at any scale. --@bjacobson

[greg claxton]

From a quick glance at your Twitter feed, calling out your posts as yours would be helpful, if you're really not supporting RSS anymore.

Also, Twitter recommends that I also follow Nina Garcia and Michael Kors.

[Kevin Arthur]

You may be right that twitter has won, but I'm sticking with both for now. Twitter became unmanageable for me once I was following more than 100 people, in the sense that I couldn't read everything. So now I just dip in occasionally (less and less, actually) which I assume is how most people use twitter anyway. So twitter is good for seeing what's buzzing right now but I miss a lot of stuff. With RSS I don't miss anything but the trouble is keeping up. I prefer reading in old-to-new order which means I'm always several days behind. I guess the problem is just too much stuff on the web.

[mtraven]

They aren't mutually exclusive...I use http://twitterfeed.com/ to gate my RSS feed to Twitter, so I get both with no work at all (and from Twitter it percolates to Facebook). Twitter is in no way an RSS replacement.

OTOH, another tool that I wrote (and is mostly unreleased and flakey) will help you subscribe to Twitter feeds that correspond to your blogs: http://twitlines.net/blogs Useful if your RSS feeder has hundreds of entries.

[tomslee]

@Kevin and mtraven, I'm also sticking with both. And I have a gut-level dislike of Twitter, especially since it announced it's starting to insert ads into its streams. I think my point was that RSS never really caught on beyond a relatively narrow audience, and Twitter has become mainstream whether we like it or not. To the extent that these technologies are coordination problems rather than "what's best", Twitter has won.

Here is the obvious Google Trends comparison: http://www.google.com/trends?q=rss,+twitter