Alas, it doesn't matter how well RSS works for its current users. What matters is how well it works for publishers. It's not merely that Twitter is easier to s

Alas, it doesn't matter how well RSS works for its current users. What matters is how well it works for publishers. It's not merely that Twitter is easier to subscribe to, that the feeds are easier to set up and serve (there's almost nothing to do; Twitter's engineers do all the work), that the Twitter link-sharing protocol is intuitively obvious, that Twitter has a legendary brand while nobody knows what RSS is, that Twitter clients show the actual rendered HTML of the linked page (complete with those ads) rather than an often-incomplete text teaser or a bunch of broken formatting. No, the killer feature of Twitter is the viral loop. Any individual tweet can be trivially forwarded, or trivially broadcast to an entire hashtag. And every tweet or retweet is also a self-contained advertisement for its author and a call to action: It takes only one click to bring up the entire history of its author's Twitter stream, and only one click to subscribe to that author's future Tweets.