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Sure, RSS isn't ideally suited for "news" when you can just hit an aggregation site or two. But it's extremely useful for following particular content you're in
by ldh 14y ago
Sure, RSS isn't ideally suited for "news" when you can just hit an aggregation site or two. But it's extremely useful for following particular content you're interested in regardless of popularity. If I come across a particularly insightful, well-written blog on some obscure programming topic I'd like to read more of what that person has to say without having to remember to check back at some point or cross my fingers that enough cool kids upvote it on an aggregator.
And the best part about Reader (and now The Old Reader, for me)? The comments come from people I mostly know or are vouched for by people I do, so there's a distinct lack of inane Reddit-y comments.
- marknutter 14y agoMost of the time the author has a Twitter account you can follow and they post not only links to their new articles but also random interesting thoughts you wouldn't necessarily get through RSS.
- Wilya 14y agoTwitter's single timeline format is very much not designed for following all updates from someone (which is what I'm interested in for a blog). There are ways around it (keeping your subscriptions count very low, list tricks, etc), but it's complicated compared to just using rss.
- sentenza 14y agoThe twitterverse is a very small subset of reality, although it is very easy to believe otherwise, as it is used by "us" and "our multipliers". As far as my (of course limited) observations go, twitter is filling the social communication need of a certain part of the population and is rejected because of practical considerations by the rest. If you wonder what the practical problems are, consider a person that has the (possibly job-related) constraint that they cannot look at their twitter client whenever they want. If that person now wants to stay informed about something without missing an update, they are essentially screwed with twitter and other information-stream based services. At this point I am very certain that what I just described is not an outlier but rather the reality for a large section of the general population.
- ldh 14y agoThat just plain isn't true. Even if it were, Twitter is singularly unsuited to that kind of information consumption. I don't need everyone to find RSS as useful as I do and I'm fine with the fact that others have different usage patterns and preferences. But I wish everyone saying "meh, what's the big deal" would realize that others find RSS to be the best fit for them and are well-justified in worrying about its decline.
- camus 14y agoyes,and i dont care the author tweeting about his daughter ,his car or his vacation. with a rss reader, noise => trashcan.