After a busy week I sat down catching up with my RSS feeds, when these posts popped up, both talking about the ‘death of RSS‘ and the ‘re-birth of twitter as the new RSS‘. While I agree to some extent with both Orli Yakuel and Steve Gillmor that twitter definitely changed the way we consume and search for content, I disagree with their bottom-lines.
RSS is still in the game, and its ‘TOD‘ announcement was premature.
Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed – whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime CMS for the emerging media. Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. (Steve Gillmor)
And Orli:
Bottom line, you can’t have a live conversation from within your RSS reader. Today, with Twitter, you see links posted by your friends and can immediately create a discussion around it. The web was never as accessible as it is today. (Orli Yakeul)
Twitter has definitely changed the way we communicate with each other, much like cellphones or SMS did several years ago. A simple service, that is considered less-formal (but used for business daily), with a cool GUI and multiple integration points – has hooked us all, and got us thinking in 140 chars sentences.
RSS is still alive because:
- Not missing the action. Since leaving IBM, we have only 1 laptop at home (will change soon), my fiancee’s – I use it when she doesn’t. One of the things that bug me about twitter, is information overload. True, I choose who to follow, I create groups and searches in tweetdeck, but still, how many of you scroll down the column to see ‘the past’? I’m guessing very few. Twitter is about now, right now. If you missed it, it’s old news, not interesting.
- Various integration points. Same with twitter, RSS is accessible from a variety of applications: messaging (even IM), browsers, dedicated software, mobile and more.
- RSS will die when blogs will. RSS was born for blogs and news sites, and makes it easier to track stories and articles, in a slight delay. I first came to know Orli, Kfir, Lior, Ahuvah, Gal and the gang from their blog – which were (and still are) written elegantly, clear and to the point, with their own professional angle on things. The 3 tabs I always have open in FF are GReader, Facebook and Gmail.
Twitter will kill RSS in the future because:
- Micro-blogging will eventually rule. Don’t know if at 140 chars or more, but I definitely see a change in the read/write culture – people are talking in updates, even children. Try having a conversation with a teenager (<18)>
- Topics and not sites. If I had to choose one important change twitter introduced – it’s the fact we’re starting to track topics and not sites (like RSS). Obviously you can create a RSS for twitter search, but there’s nothing like the source. The hashtags (#) have made it easier for us to start a topic (tlvmarathon) and track a story (swineflu).
- Conversation. This is the heart of web 2.0, in any slide and presentation ever written about this term. We are no longer consuming content, we are conversing about content. And while GReader lets you ‘share on facebook’, ‘add to del.icio.us‘ and others, it does not compare to the instant discussion twitter enables us to do.
That’s my opinion. You’re welcome to comment with yours.
