Only if I needed instant notification would I follow something in Twitter instead of a RSS reader (a steady news feed probably fits twitter better). It's actually much easier to miss a particular post on Twitter as the stream quickly flows by.
You can also add twitter feeds to Google Reader (Google apparently does not have to adhere to API limits). I do this for any twitter accounts <s>I stalk</s> that I don't want to miss.
The question is better asked: how quickly am I unfollowing content providers that double-post their content to Twitter? Just to be clear: pretty quickly.
Twitter serves a different purpose than blogs, Facebook status updates, etc. If you're shoehorning all your content into all possible channels for attention, well that's just spammy.
No it's not. You want to provide your content via every channel, so your audience has the choice on how to follow you, via email-sub, rss, twitter, whatever. And of course: if you follow via rss already, you don't want to follow via twitter too. So much is clear anyway.
My solution will be something similar to this. The company/whatever creates two twitter accounts, for instance: @Company & @CompanyNews. This way you can follow the one you are interested in, or both.
That's fair. I should explain myself better. I don't have a problem with twitter accounts that are exclusively clones of other feeds. Then I know what I'm signing up for, it wouldn't be fair to call it spammy.
But when I follow a regular twitter account I expect short, self-contained tidbits. When people decide to leverage their twitter followers to get traffic to other services, that's what I find annoying.
To be totally honest I only skimmed the article, but I just don't think Twitter as a service is a replacement for a format. Mostly the focus here is on the fickle ad/brand-dependent media sites whereas more often than not I find myself subscribing to places based on quality content. Of course given that Twitter can be viewed from a RSS Reader means one doesn't have to trump the other.
I suppose it's then weird if I use twitter's RSS feeds. There's some accounts that only talk about new releases and things like that, and it's easier for me to follow their twitter rss feed (and not their unavailable or spammy regular rss) than to follow them on twitter (where the one tweet gets drowned out by the rest of my following).
Exactly. I consume all my twitter followees by RSS.
It's a bit of a weird article. He's conflating notification mechanism with social network. What does it mean to kill RSS? Every blogger now uses a tweet widget instead of RSS?
Absolutely not. I use them differently. I get things I know I want via RSS and get random, interesting links via Twitter. (And use twitter as a sms-to-web gateway and as an IM, but that's beside the point).
Twitter AND RSS have taken over more than 50% of my browsing habits, though.
As with others, I don't get my RSS-level news from Twitter RSS-bots. But I have stopped checking RSS as often since I became pretty active on Twitter.
One of my side reasons for reading a ton of RSS feeds was entertainment, getting a feel for what's new and exciting in the world. When I get that information through Twitter in a faster, easier-to-digest form, why would I trawl through RSS feeds? Hence why I don't.
There are still some sites worth checking on a daily or near-daily basis, and I usually just read them in a browser.
However, none of this means the format's dead, just that RSS as a means of information aggregation might be slightly ill.
24 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 59.5 ms ] threadUnread (77)
Of course, this might require consumer-level eye ball tracking to see if you "read" one
I just stumbled up on this too, which is probably a better idea: http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/?p=408
Can you follow hacker news updates on twitter?
The stupid kind of question following stupid hypes.
Twitter serves a different purpose than blogs, Facebook status updates, etc. If you're shoehorning all your content into all possible channels for attention, well that's just spammy.
Even create multiple twitter acounts by topic.
But when I follow a regular twitter account I expect short, self-contained tidbits. When people decide to leverage their twitter followers to get traffic to other services, that's what I find annoying.
It's a bit of a weird article. He's conflating notification mechanism with social network. What does it mean to kill RSS? Every blogger now uses a tweet widget instead of RSS?
Twitter AND RSS have taken over more than 50% of my browsing habits, though.
One of my side reasons for reading a ton of RSS feeds was entertainment, getting a feel for what's new and exciting in the world. When I get that information through Twitter in a faster, easier-to-digest form, why would I trawl through RSS feeds? Hence why I don't.
There are still some sites worth checking on a daily or near-daily basis, and I usually just read them in a browser.
However, none of this means the format's dead, just that RSS as a means of information aggregation might be slightly ill.