…and Twitter killed it.
For example, to subscribe to the RSS feed from BBC News, I could:
- Go to the BBC News Homepage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/
- Click the RSS feed link.
- Add the RSS feed to my favorite RSS reader.
- Uh… which reader should I use? reader.google.com? a desktop app? my web browser?
- Watch and wait for my RSS reader to refresh the feed.
Or, I could:
- Go to http://twitter.com/bbcnews
- Click Follow
- Use the twitter.com website or whatever twitter client I’ve already got installed to view both friend updates and BBC news updates.
For me the choice is pretty clear.
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3 Comments
I understand what you are saying but don’t agree with you. I prefer using a RSS reader to gather my news instead of relying on Twitter.
Couldn’t you also go through the same scenario with twitter when it comes to how updates are viewed? Does one use the web browser? Use a desktop application?
In my opinion twitter has become, for me, more of marketing tool then as a tool to receive news. Granted, for breaking news twitter wins hands down but when it comes to following or staying current with news then I prefer RSS.
It’s funny that you did this blog posting because I recently did way in favor of RSS over Twitter. I have even thought of following select twitter feeds via RSS. I played around with this for a bit with twitter search results and it seemed to work pretty good.
http://jdoublea.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/twitter-i-cant-tweet-it-anymore/
Twitter killed blog commentary too, I think – since most people are happy to react to the 140 character teaser on a post rather than actually reading said post.
If Disqus would just find a way to get lazy people to post to blogs, I’d get way more readers.
i’d also like it if there were a way to integrate all the facebook based blog comments i get. perhaps a blog comment aggregator?