4 ms·

Why Twitter Can't Replace RSS

45 points by ElleS 12y ago

rabble 12y ago
When we built twitter we had also hacked up various forms of RSS readers. At the time nobody on the team really thought they were going after rss, news reading, or discovery. But it turns out that trying to solve that problem in parallel to the status update system. Twitter was for a long time very much built upon the RSS stack of technologies. It was a semi-open platform which worked better, unfortunately, than the fully open world of RSS & ATOM. In the end, now 8 years later, it's clear that twitter DID kill rss as a dominate category of apps & services. We went from being overwhelmed by unread counts on the 'readers' to having flow. I'm not sure it's better, but it did solve the problem of feeling like you needed to keep up. I think there's still more interesting work to be done in this space. Open social networks (that's what blogs are folks) plus users being able to control visibility of posts and frequency and open api's could do something which could unseat twitter/facebooks.
- brlewis 12y ago
  Unread counts are a UI feature orthogonal to the underlying syndication format. FriendFeed uses RSS and doesn't have unread counts.
  - masklinn 12y ago
    Meanwhile a number of twitter clients do have unread counts (Tweetbot certainly does)
VLM 12y ago
He's following the wrong accounts. Some human journalist is going to occasionally talk about cooking steak instead of technology or journalism. @melpa_emacs and @TinyToCS never talk about cooking steak. People and brands on twitter are just spam, not worth following. Focused announcements are surprisingly not bad...
- NeatoJn 12y ago
  then you've made the point. one needs to figure out what account to follow by discovering, while rss is usually marked with a predefined topic and way more intuitive for subscribing.
- smtddr 12y ago
  >>People and brands on twitter are just spam, not worth following. Your usage of twitter is completely opposite of mine. People & brands are the only things I follow on twitter.
josefresco 12y ago
RSS - technology Twitter - business Do we really need to discuss anything technical? Let's say Twitter created a "standard" based on their platform, that could be adopted for free by any organization - then, we might talk about it replacing RSS.
GoofballJones 12y ago
It's how you use Twitter though. Many people forget about Lists. I have a list dedicated to News tweets, such as the BBC, and Reuters, and NY Times...things like that. Then I have another list for Tech news, and put several different tech websites feeds on it. Then one just for tech journalists (where yes, sometimes you see off-subject tweets, but I _know_ that I may see that sometimes, but you can have a quick interaction on what they say. I open up a multi-pane client like TweetBot or TweetDeck, then have different lists per pane. I can go through a lot of information in a short amount of time this way.
skywhopper 12y ago
Twitter can serve as a replacement for a subset of RSS functionality, but even allowing for Twitter to grow that subset, the biggest difference is architectural: Tweets all run through twitter.com and your ability to retrieve the tweets you want or for the content owners to provide the information they wish depends on Twitter's continued willingness to provide the tools and/or API to do so and to allow you both to keep your accounts. Even assuming they will always want to facilitate this sort of thing and that neither you nor the content owners will do something to get kicked off Twitter, you can be sure that the tools and API will change relatively rapidly over the years ahead. Meanwhile RSS is (usually) hosted on the content owner's server. The format has been stable for 15+ years at this point. Tools that worked for aggregating and dealing with RSS in 2000 still work today. And only your ISP could potentially stop you from retrieving the content you wish, when you want it, how you want to.
digital-rubber 12y ago
Because twitter is a big setup which is hold together by paste, glue and dirty caches? :o)
smackfu 12y ago
"Even when you follow great people, you still have to wade through tweets that have little or nothing to do with news." Kottke is not a great example of this. He has separate personal and professional accounts. His professional account is essentially just an RSS feed of his blog. Complaining about personal tweets junking up the personal account is silly in this case. Account he should folllow: https://twitter.com/kottke https://twitter.com/kottke
nkozyra 12y ago
They are totally dissonant channels that have some overlap. Expecting Twitter to replace controlled curation is a recipe for noise. The value in RSS is some process or person is curating a defined set of data - the reliability of even organizational Twitter accounts doing that is such that doesn't work. Further, the buy-in on using Twitter as a transmission medium hasn't really reached the saturation point that RSS did at its peak. And finally, relying on a third-party - especially one with as dubious a history as Twitter - to maintain your data in foreseeable perpetuity is a bad plan in general. The benefit of RSS was that it was a standard, not a service itself.
- petercooper 12y ago
  Expecting Twitter to replace controlled curation is a recipe for noise. The value in RSS is some process or person is curating a defined set of data To a certain extent, this is why email newsletters have had a resurgence in recent years. They allow curation while using a delivery mechanism almost every Internet user uses and understands (email, instead of an RSS client/service).
programminggeek 12y ago
Twitter is the worst RSS reader ever because it assumes that only what is happening NOW is relevant or valuable.
sswaner 12y ago
Twitter has replaced RSS for me. For me, the value of Twitter is learning new things, similar to the value I place on HN. I am pretty good at filtering out the noise because I usually look for links in posts. I rarely read a series of tweets in a conversation, and usually scroll right by link-less posts without reading.
brador 12y ago
There's a delicate balance between serendipity and breaking the filter bubble, while maintaining quality. My solution- http://skimfeed.com http://skimfeed.com. I Focused on information density, speed, and hand picked sources. Let me know what you think!
dheera 12y ago
Twitter also killed it with their new API. The v1.0 API used to allow you to fetch tweets without authentication, which allowed you to effectively use it as an RSS feed, convert it to a feed in whatever format you wanted, or build converters and visualization methods for other people. I guess they want to control the ecosystem of what people do with Twitter data, which is completely contrary to the notion of RSS which is precisely to NOT control the ecosystem.
- rsnail 12y ago
  Sites like rssitfor.me still works to get RSS feeds for twitter IDs that you follow. Site seems overloaded most of the time though. http://rssitfor.me/getrss?name=wired http://rssitfor.me/getrss?name=wired
ThomPete 12y ago
Trying to pit the two against each other misses the underlying issue that none of them really solve. They are both nothing but feeds and I still can only read one feed item at the time. The actual curation done by others still don't satisfy me deep underlying need to have done the curation myself. In the end we don't know what we don't know but we know there are things we don't know. Thats what keeps us going and keeps us plowing through the various feeds, curated or not. Think about it like a bottleneck problem where I am the bottleneck because I am the slow interpreter: http://000fff.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/model_01.png http://000fff.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/model_01.png From: http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtime-weve-been-looking-for/ http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
- kamilszybalski 12y ago
  Thanks for including this article, it was a really good read. We're working to address aspects of this problem with www.discovle.com, would love to hear your thoughts.
jeena 12y ago
Twitter lacks one important feature which I have in all my RSS readers and it is marking a article as read/unread.

45 points by ElleS 12y ago

When we built twitter we had also hacked up various forms of RSS readers. At the time nobody on the team really thought they were going after rss, news reading, or discovery. But it turns out that trying to solve that problem in parallel to the status update system. Twitter was for a long time very much built upon the RSS stack of technologies. It was a semi-open platform which worked better, unfortunately, than the fully open world of RSS & ATOM. In the end, now 8 years later, it's clear that twitter DID kill rss as a dominate category of apps & services. We went from being overwhelmed by unread counts on the 'readers' to having flow. I'm not sure it's better, but it did solve the problem of feeling like you needed to keep up. I think there's still more interesting work to be done in this space. Open social networks (that's what blogs are folks) plus users being able to control visibility of posts and frequency and open api's could do something which could unseat twitter/facebooks.

brlewis 12y ago
Unread counts are a UI feature orthogonal to the underlying syndication format. FriendFeed uses RSS and doesn't have unread counts.
- masklinn 12y ago
  Meanwhile a number of twitter clients do have unread counts (Tweetbot certainly does)

VLM 12y ago

He's following the wrong accounts. Some human journalist is going to occasionally talk about cooking steak instead of technology or journalism. @melpa_emacs and @TinyToCS never talk about cooking steak. People and brands on twitter are just spam, not worth following. Focused announcements are surprisingly not bad...

NeatoJn 12y ago
then you've made the point. one needs to figure out what account to follow by discovering, while rss is usually marked with a predefined topic and way more intuitive for subscribing.
smtddr 12y ago
>>People and brands on twitter are just spam, not worth following. Your usage of twitter is completely opposite of mine. People & brands are the only things I follow on twitter.

josefresco 12y ago

RSS - technology Twitter - business Do we really need to discuss anything technical? Let's say Twitter created a "standard" based on their platform, that could be adopted for free by any organization - then, we might talk about it replacing RSS.

GoofballJones 12y ago

It's how you use Twitter though. Many people forget about Lists. I have a list dedicated to News tweets, such as the BBC, and Reuters, and NY Times...things like that. Then I have another list for Tech news, and put several different tech websites feeds on it. Then one just for tech journalists (where yes, sometimes you see off-subject tweets, but I _know_ that I may see that sometimes, but you can have a quick interaction on what they say. I open up a multi-pane client like TweetBot or TweetDeck, then have different lists per pane. I can go through a lot of information in a short amount of time this way.

skywhopper 12y ago

Twitter can serve as a replacement for a subset of RSS functionality, but even allowing for Twitter to grow that subset, the biggest difference is architectural: Tweets all run through twitter.com and your ability to retrieve the tweets you want or for the content owners to provide the information they wish depends on Twitter's continued willingness to provide the tools and/or API to do so and to allow you both to keep your accounts. Even assuming they will always want to facilitate this sort of thing and that neither you nor the content owners will do something to get kicked off Twitter, you can be sure that the tools and API will change relatively rapidly over the years ahead. Meanwhile RSS is (usually) hosted on the content owner's server. The format has been stable for 15+ years at this point. Tools that worked for aggregating and dealing with RSS in 2000 still work today. And only your ISP could potentially stop you from retrieving the content you wish, when you want it, how you want to.

digital-rubber 12y ago

Because twitter is a big setup which is hold together by paste, glue and dirty caches? :o)

smackfu 12y ago

"Even when you follow great people, you still have to wade through tweets that have little or nothing to do with news." Kottke is not a great example of this. He has separate personal and professional accounts. His professional account is essentially just an RSS feed of his blog. Complaining about personal tweets junking up the personal account is silly in this case. Account he should folllow: https://twitter.com/kottke https://twitter.com/kottke

nkozyra 12y ago

They are totally dissonant channels that have some overlap. Expecting Twitter to replace controlled curation is a recipe for noise. The value in RSS is some process or person is curating a defined set of data - the reliability of even organizational Twitter accounts doing that is such that doesn't work. Further, the buy-in on using Twitter as a transmission medium hasn't really reached the saturation point that RSS did at its peak. And finally, relying on a third-party - especially one with as dubious a history as Twitter - to maintain your data in foreseeable perpetuity is a bad plan in general. The benefit of RSS was that it was a standard, not a service itself.

petercooper 12y ago
Expecting Twitter to replace controlled curation is a recipe for noise. The value in RSS is some process or person is curating a defined set of data To a certain extent, this is why email newsletters have had a resurgence in recent years. They allow curation while using a delivery mechanism almost every Internet user uses and understands (email, instead of an RSS client/service).

programminggeek 12y ago

Twitter is the worst RSS reader ever because it assumes that only what is happening NOW is relevant or valuable.

sswaner 12y ago

Twitter has replaced RSS for me. For me, the value of Twitter is learning new things, similar to the value I place on HN. I am pretty good at filtering out the noise because I usually look for links in posts. I rarely read a series of tweets in a conversation, and usually scroll right by link-less posts without reading.

brador 12y ago

There's a delicate balance between serendipity and breaking the filter bubble, while maintaining quality. My solution- http://skimfeed.com http://skimfeed.com. I Focused on information density, speed, and hand picked sources. Let me know what you think!

dheera 12y ago

Twitter also killed it with their new API. The v1.0 API used to allow you to fetch tweets without authentication, which allowed you to effectively use it as an RSS feed, convert it to a feed in whatever format you wanted, or build converters and visualization methods for other people. I guess they want to control the ecosystem of what people do with Twitter data, which is completely contrary to the notion of RSS which is precisely to NOT control the ecosystem.

rsnail 12y ago
Sites like rssitfor.me still works to get RSS feeds for twitter IDs that you follow. Site seems overloaded most of the time though. http://rssitfor.me/getrss?name=wired http://rssitfor.me/getrss?name=wired

ThomPete 12y ago

Trying to pit the two against each other misses the underlying issue that none of them really solve. They are both nothing but feeds and I still can only read one feed item at the time. The actual curation done by others still don't satisfy me deep underlying need to have done the curation myself. In the end we don't know what we don't know but we know there are things we don't know. Thats what keeps us going and keeps us plowing through the various feeds, curated or not. Think about it like a bottleneck problem where I am the bottleneck because I am the slow interpreter: http://000fff.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/model_01.png http://000fff.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/model_01.png From: http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtime-weve-been-looking-for/ http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...

kamilszybalski 12y ago
Thanks for including this article, it was a really good read. We're working to address aspects of this problem with www.discovle.com, would love to hear your thoughts.

jeena 12y ago

Twitter lacks one important feature which I have in all my RSS readers and it is marking a article as read/unread.