It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.
I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.
Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. Pretty much every blog has an RSS feed, and aggregators like TechMeme spider RSS feeds as well as the original pages on the sites. I’ve wired up TCIT, the Gillmor Gang feed, and my YouTube feed on my FriendFeed, but that’s FriendFeed using RSS, not me. I believe FriendFeed outputs RSS, but I don’t use it.
RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. Before RSS, I patrolled the Web for news. Information didn’t exist until I found it. RSS let me identify people likely to write interesting things, and soon I stopped looking and switched to receiving. In this world, partial feeds were irritating, taking me out of my new pristine think tank and back to the hunt and peck methodology. Once back on the site, the goal was to keep me there, or link to partner sites.
This disconnect drove me away from partial feeds and toward the new owners of the blogosphere — the deep information space of those feeds that respected the reader container. From NetNewsWire on the Mac to Bloglines to Google Reader, I swam in the brisk waters of the RSS river, only returning to the classic Web from links embedded in posts or email newsletters. The fulltexters won, and in the process, sowed the seeds of RSS’s decline.
As fulltexting carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news, navigating outside the comfortable walls of RSS required some additional value proposition. Comments were that attractor, and particularly the active threads where the readers could interact with the authors. The result: The Statusphere. And in reaction, the need for social management of the ecosystem.
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. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS’ lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party.
Today, RSS is a shell of its former self, casually subsumed as the transport for 140+ content into the social stream. There, RSS items are fed into aggregators and husked for their behavioral signals, packaged as Tweets and sold for pennies on the whuffie dollar. The mainstream media, once cowed by the fulltexters, now masquerades as blog sites and competes for shortened URLs alongside the bloggers they deride under their breath.
I thought I’d miss RSS once Twitter took over, remembering how powerful a wave of innovation it triggered. Certainly it’s still here, burned into the circuits of the network, the memes coursing through its veins. But in the age of abundance it fostered, the core value has shifted from inspiration to the inspired, to the people behind the ideas.
The race for realtime is already won. Like the long shot in the Kentucky Derby, realtime has swept past the field as though the rest were sleep-walking. Realtime is the time for artists, for interpreting the stream and sending deeply nuanced signals with humor, music, respect for the dialogue but none for the chattering of the false debates of the cable networks.
This is the world RSS created. Now it needs to gracefully step back, blend into the scenery and find a new home in the rich depth we are looking for amid the noise. Decrying the tumult of realtime is a fool’s errand; it’s like complaining life is short. Instead, as Dylan said:
May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young.
Good stuff Steve.
RSS was much more effective as plumbing, yet, it was forced down the users throat as a consumption mechanism. Few know what RSS is, let alone an RSS reader and that certainly did not help.
As you correctly say, we needed services like FriendFeed and Techmeme to really show the power of RSS as a transport utility, as opposed to last mile consumption.
I wrote about this in the context of business usage: http://bit.ly/1QTnt
Sameer,
I am sure you are not using Outlook 2007 in Enterprise environment.
I find RSS to be very useful. It provides me full contents with ads in my inbox.
Twitter for me is more of a pebble on water, bouncing until blog sphere and media sea allow.
How can you read whole article without having to click and open the browser?
perhaps i might be missing some thing here.
Outlook 2007 allows me to skip through various blogs fast and much more efficiently.
Twitter may be useful when you want to keep in touch with a couple of guys (humans) but definitely not useful for reading blogs.
this article is nothing more than a flame bait – ridiculously stupid.
I second that… senseless…
In other news techcrunch fully supports this idea and RSS is being removed from the site because the 300,000+ people using it are obviously wrong?
+1: Stupid article. Will be amusing to see this already irrelevant technology journalist continue to do his job with twitter as his only source.
Total flame bait and it worked perfectly. Over 200 comments and counting. Well done!
omg, written by an old man purporting to be a young man who is sooo radical, totally ludicrous. yeah i agree twitter is good, but it to be a total replacement of news feeds when it is at such a to-be-refined stage is hyperbole, at its very least. almost as ridiculous as arringtons infamous ‘Twitter!’ post. calm down gillmor, u wont get too far on twitter’s one-half-and-hard-to-find-the-other-half conversations. there’s a better way coming, just take it easy
honestly, i just had to stop reading this man’s kak, “I swam in the brisk waters of the RSS river” u what mate!? i was actually feeling sick, i couldnt get to end, so melodramatic
totally agree. to think that Steve is not clued up enough to realize the only way to effectively track keywords on twitter is through RSS is unbelievable. i guess he just sits in front of his TweetDeck and watches the feed full time, haha !
As many have said before, this article is ridiculous, and obviously flame-bait. I do enjoy some of Techcrunch’s articles that are more entertainment/amusing rather than news, but this is straight-up junk. I am a bit disappointed to see an article like this.
Agreed, sounds like it was written by a 5 year-old.
I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore. Mom picked me up from school today. Mom drives a silver Volvo.
RSS will slowly disappear be hey, let’s not write about it for it might anger some.
i third that!
Agreed – apples and oranges and further more I got so many useless interruptions from twits, I ditched it.
Maybe separate client RSS Readers are dead, or unnecessary, since RSS is part of all browsers and most portals, but RSS dead? Might as well say HTML is dead. Not used as standalone much, but RSS and HTML and XML are some of the bones needed to keep the sexier stuff (and fluff) from collapsing on the floor as a glob of amorphous, gelatinous goop. Flame rating – 5
Yeah I agree.. I did not like this article. It was very poorly written.
nice linkbait…
this article is ridiculous²
I agree – this article is completely retarded (and thus flamebait). Well done Techcrunch.. you are now REMOVED from my RSS reader… ironic really…
Unbelievable, wish I could adequately describe how much nonsense I think this is, really make it clear how unbiasedly crazy I think this post is.
If it wasn’t for RSS, I wouldn’t be reading what you had to say at TechCrunch.
And TechCrunch’s relevance continues to dwindle..
RSS missed the bus, it could have been doing what twitter is doing now. Like “feed” from celebrities, NASA, or social circle etc.
Maybe if it had html interface to its xml feed…
hahahahaha.
man, I needed a laugh on friday.
thanks.
yes this article is flame bait, and the guy obviously has no idea what he’s talking about.
Nice linkbait.
And obviously I dont quite agree.
RSS is fine tuned according to my interests. With twitter thats not quite possible. Yes, I follow people with common interests, but even then they like a lot of stuff which I dont care about (say Football). Twitter is good..its an excellent source of new info..but I still mainly rely on RSS to stay updated.
Stupid..I fire you!
I think your understanding of the word dead is a problem. Work on that.
http://www.ishatmypants.com
When will techcrunch die like CNET or some other I used to be somebody site?
Pages and pages of twitter & idiotic articles such as this. Please die a swift death.
I do feel validated for not visiting this site in 2 weeks as no real non-twitter content is here
jajaja funny but its the true.
I found this article in my RSS feed. I would not have found it otherwise. I have accounts on twitter, delicious, and facebook; but nobody in by networks have shared this article on their wall/stream, and neither will I.
Sameer said…
Few know what RSS
Hehe, I am one of those.
I don’t agree TechCrunch! RSS is alive and well suited to my needs, especially since I discovered Feedly for Firefox.
The issue with RSS is that users tend to oversubscribe and end up with a lot of unwanted junk. The Feedly way is to organise that in a beautiful digest format with ability to mark your favourite blogs.
Twitter on the other hand is available in a variety of applications that aren’t always complete. I have resorted to Tweetie for Mac that handles multiple accounts beautifully but not groups.
And Twitter comes a lot more junk! At least with RSS I chose to subscribe, where as Twitter I have no choice in knowing what my favourite blogger is having for dinner. Alas I still find them junk tweets amusing.
I completely disagree with the article and completely agree with Bernard. There is a lot more junk on Twitter, and stuff flies by too fast. I use Netvibes to aggregate all of my news sources via RSS. Twitter is for my friends – RSS though Netvibes is for my news, and I will never, ever want to combine the two.
I agree with Bernard and Cory. I use RSS in Outlook 2007 to keep up with this and other related industry sites. At home, Twitter keeps me up to date on my personal interests.
I think it’s another one of those – damned if you do; damned if you don’t cases.
If you have a site with RSS it also makes sense for people to subscribe to email updates as well as Twitter and possibly Facebook, etc.
It is becoming more important for the supplier to cater for how the consumer wants to receive the items rather than the supplier dictating how the consumer WILL get it.
In my case, my Twitter followers do outnumber my feed subscribers.
J
I obvioulsy meant “If you have a site with RSS it also makes sense for people to HAVE THE CHOICE TO subscribe via email updates as well as Twitter and possibly Facebook, etc.”
Doh!
anyone know how to automatically submit posts to twitter? like a tutorial.
boos helps me get down the stairs with style
http://www.epiclosers.com/load/8-1-0-309
I think Steve is making the classic mistake of taking the way *he* uses a technology and assuming that’s the way that *everyone* uses it.
Sometimes, information finds me. In that context, Twitter works. But for some things, I want to actively get information – and in that context, RSS and feed readers work.
If you use WordPress there’s a plug-in I use called Twitfeed :0)
J
RSS & Twitter are different products and cannot be treated as alternates to each other.
RSS is loved for its ability to Auto subscribe/publish content to/from Sites / Blogs. The way information has been standardized on RSS is yes to be achieved with Twitter.
RSS feed content lasts more, unlike a ‘Tweet’ that is lost in the public-timeline practically in less than 5 seconds.
Twitter will give you all tweets, even the ones you dont want. All links (small urls) without telling you where they belong and what they have., compare the same with RSS – you have the content right in there.
And hey.. Twitter too gives you a RSS feed for your followers – http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/19055557.rss :-))
RSS is here to stay (for long); but has not got its credit.
My thoughts exactly.
This article address’s just one point of view. Many people do not use twitter and it takes a certain mindset (closed) to accept that professional news comes best via twitter.
The web is consolidating, see http://www.ghq.com. The main use of RSS enables others to professionally aggregate the news for sophisticated users.
Dylan also said he ain’t goin’ around Maggie’s farm no more.
So?
Who cares about Twitter either?
Nicely written piece, and you can tell that you love RSS, which of course I do too. :-)
I’d like to get on the record predicting that RSS is just as dead as HTTP and SMTP are.
It’s part of the infrastructure. I’m actively writing software, and every day that involves parsing and generating RSS, because it is the way apps communicate with each other about change.
Google Reader took us in a bad direction, made promises for RSS that it couldn’t keep (in line with Sameer’s comment). Of course it’s not actually dead, software never was alive so it’s no more or less dead now that it was last week, month or year.
You know it would be interesting if one of the industry conferences invited me to speak about RSS someday. It’s never happened. This is the 10th year of RSS, we’ve learned a lot. I would love to share some of it, but this industry has never wanted to hear what I have to say. Or so it seems.
The true power of RSS is the ability to ignore the sheer volume of information more easily.
source: http://twitter.com/qthrul/status/1688525894
I agree, however I believe that it is very much easier to ignore the sheer volume of information using Twitter.
I use FeedDemon and frequently feel guilt when using the Panic button, often leaving unread items until I have a few spare hours at airport lounges, etc.
Twitter, IMHO, has little in the way of “I missed your tweet” guilt, if I missed it, I missed it…you can always re-tweet it if it’s that important. Similarly, others will re-tweet important messages over a different time-frame, hence I’m more likely to see it.
Rgs
–Craig
http://www.twitter.com/camurphy
The East River is very clean these days. It’s still busy enough with shipping traffic that most people don’t swim in it, but I see people fishing there every day, and many eat their catch. Let’s not perpetuate outdated ideas about the level of pollution of particular flows.
I once sailed up the East River with my father, and found myself parked at the bow with a long pike to fend off “fish” and other objects. Jumping into the river was frowned upon by authorities due to the high level of debris and bacterial substances, if you get my drift. Glad to hear it’s better, but I’ll still pass.
yea we get your drift. nonetheless, this flowery piece reads like you might have taken that dip after all.
might as well say move over indoor plumbing here comes twitter.
Hey Steve, I was following your post but all I was able to read in 140 characters was:
“It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of ”
Can you please tweet the rest, 140 characters at a time, until I have enough to read the entire article? Thanks, asshole!
I completely agree with Dave. RSS is here to stay as a plumbing for the transfer of information between applications.
RSS as a concept for consumption of information by the end user may be on its way out, in turn being replaced by a layer above and beyond (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed)…. but services like these will continue to rely on an underlying infrastructure driven by RSS. I continue to see new applications leverage RSS for this purpose and still see the value it provides.
Spot on, Dave! I’m guessing Steve is trying to get a rise out of everyone (which he is) and that he can’t possibly be as naive as this post makes him sound.
Yea, yea, Twitter is booming, and I am a HUGE fan of Twitter (see http://faseidl.com/public/item/230692), but the world wide adoption of (and investment in) RSS is staggering.
Back in 1989 I sold my PC-based version control company to a mainframe based software giant. Friends in my industry warned me against the sale saying that I was climbing on a sinking ship because the acquiring company had lots of COBOL offerings and C was taking over the world. (Glad I didn’t listen. ;-)
Twenty years later, C is old news and COBOL is even older–but still going strong.
I’m not really surprised you’ve never been asked to talk about RSS. It’s a shame in a way.
I remember talking to others I worked with about how good, and innovative, and useful RSS was about 5 years ago. Even most of the web designers I worked with back then, didn’t know what the heck I was on about.
A few have since gone on to adopt it.
I still use RSS myself, and in fact, for me, Feedly has given it a new lease of life here. I’m well aware it’s really icing on the top of Google Reader, but I like to useful functions such as being about to post comments directly into Friendfeed, or push a link to Facebook, or to Twitter.
I really like Twitter, and Friendfeed, but I’ll continue feed reading too right now.
Guys and girls, dumping RSS, email, blogs, etc for Twitter is pure idiocy. You are proposing we throw away open, vendor agnostic systems for lock-in! Why dump an open standard for a PROPRIETARY, PRIVATE COMPANY!? Wake up, fools! Despite how cool Ev and company are, its dangerous how people like Arrington are moving people. I can’t believe all the lemming behavior going on here! At this rate, in 5 years, Twitter will own all of you (and your bases). Somebody should punch you all in the face!
Lemming behavior runs rampant in the tech world and I’m not even in it, I just keep up with the news…even so, it’s all about seeing positives of technological advances rather than spending even a second on the negatives that comes with blindly adopting them.
Twitter is no Godsend as TC claims but all it takes is a TC search for ‘twitter’ and you’ll see how much in bed they are.
More dangerous than Arrington & Co.’s love of Twitter is their unknowing love of the UN Agenda 21. They fully support the carbon taxation scam. One can care about the environment without falling into the trap set by Dr. Allegory and friends.
Adam,
You have far too much sense to waster your time here.
HA HA HA BUUURRRRP!
Shirley, you jest!
Thank you for this and wake up all! Do we want our complete communication be owned by facebook, twitter, google and microsoft? Hell no, use the tools (and others!) but don’t get brainwashed please.
Dave, I would attend that talk. I know there are others who would too. Not only do I use Google Reader everyday, I aggregate my activity feeds into a lifestream that dates back to mid 2002. The lifestream is only growing in usefulness over time.
Completely agree wth the “Father of RSS”, Dave Winer- RSS is just plumbing.
Don’t understand this at all.
Saying that Twitter replaces Google Reader is like saying email replaces the stack of print magazines I have sitting next to me right now.
Huh?
don’t know about email, but what stack?
Much of the coverage on the web today is about as useful for promoting progress as a stack of old magazines.
I haven’t seen Google rushing to scan the world’s periodicals just yet. Yet.
what periodicals? oh wait, the Kindle stream.
Oh, I meant aged periodicals.
The new version of the periodical is where the real action will be. 7-11 style anytime and anywhere you’ll have the Slushee machine of brain happy goop on tap and sold by the pull.
The cup will be called a Kindle instead of a BigGulp.
Google already has scanned in vast quantities of periodicals, (Google Books).
A related thought: If it doesn’t take a writer an order of magnitude or two (or three or four) longer to write than it takes me to read, then I’m not interested in it.
I’m a dinosaur, I guess.
Wow. No one has asked you to speak about RSS, Dave?
That just blows my mind.
I use a desktop client to read RSS. It can be on all the time, or just start it up when you want to check your favourite blogs/sites. I find it much easier to follow the people I want to keep up with than Twitter.
P.S.
You can add the RSS feed for your Twitter friends to your RSS reader, making it possible to keep up with people when offline.
I’m probably totally missing something or the point – often the case :-(
So Steve, you no longer get your info (links/news/etc) through RSS, you get pointers (links) to that via Tweets. If true, aren’t you being somewhat parasitic, letting others do the work of parsing/reading their feeds in order to even post those interesting links in Twitter/Friendfeed? Those links have to come from somewhere.
—–
What am I missing?
We at Obamacare.tv utilize RSS, Twitter, and a number of other services, platforms, sites, etc to gather raw data, filter it, and create original content from. Saying goodbye to RSS is like saying goodbye to the Air Force because you just kick ass in the tank.
We say this as an enthusiastic supporter of twitter power.
not much apparently, Px. Letting others do the work? Damn right.
Think about it! This is only something that somebody who really, REALLY wants Twitter to take over communication would propose. Its crazy.
I don’t have enough trust that my friends will find all the stuff I want to read to give up RSS. If I can “j” down the page, I’d rather at least see what I’m not reading in GoogleReader.
That’s exactly the way I see it too, Francine. I don’t want to be dependent on others to tell me what I want to read.
Well put. This article was a fair bit of nonsense masquerading as wisdom.
Twitter is a novelty; I won’t dispute it’s relevance and utility, but a replacement to RSS it is not…
Google Reader is an indispensable part of my daily routine and informs me in a way that Twitter is simply incapable of, or any of the other social platforms.
RSS empowers me to channel the stream, rather than the current pulling me where it wants to.
I agree. “j”ing down the page and “v”ing anything worth reading in full (or checking the comments for) is convenient. I can star a page for as long as I’m participating in its discussion.
For me, RSS is to Twitter as listening is to overhearing.
On point.
Nah! There’s life in the old dog yet.
RSS will always be a great format and data type, but it’s not as immediate and brief as Twitter, and it never will be.
Yes it will… “Show – Expanded/List”
The only times I’ve ever pulled a feed were when I saw on was available from my You Tube page.
What did I see?
A summary of my clips.
Twitter can hang. 1000 words isn’t enough fo me sometimes even if ONE SENTENCE suffices most of the time.
RSS while never really “sexy”, for the true information connoisseur will always be very much in use.
The majority of links Twittered or Friendfed (and I have RSS feeds which follow such things) are links to the “big” name sites. I don’t want that kind of information. I am looking for the boutique stuff, the opinions less held. The wheat not the chaff.
Nice try, but no banana I am afraid.
Can I join Allison’s fan club? Well said.
You’re not following the right people, but until Track returns you have an excuse.
Who are the right people?
If you have to ask…
Sorry, Alex, for being out of the loop. I’m brand new to this, only been following TechCrunch for about a month. Besides, looks like you’re twice my age, which has given you more time to enter that loop.
That’s the problem with Twitter. It’s too hipster, “in-crowd” for receiving information.
Interesting post. Twitter/Friendfeed offer a social organization of your information stream and Google Reader provides today a more topical organization of the stream. I think that people like to go back and forth between the two. I think that it will be all the more the case as twitter mature and the velocity of the stream increases.
In feedly (http://www.feedly.com), we are trying to best integrate those two concept and allow users to take advantage of both Twitter and Google Reader while keeping control of how the information is filtered and presented. Did you ever had the chance to try feedly?
I second the feedly.com plug. Feedly revolutionized GReader. It turned my once static and lifeless (yet over-full) RSS collection into a dynamic pot of information. It’s integration into social media is brilliant and can only grow better. Plus it pulls in your twitter content
I like twitter, but so many article/blog summaries cannot be fit into 140 characters plus RT references and links. on that front it falls short. If it is a personal recommendation that has been properly parsed, it is great, but lots of blogs force feed twitter and make it useless unless you already want to read the link. Ergo http://www.feedly.com.
Well, you are very lucky. Some people turn to drugs to get that expansion. We can still explain this to Paul and Ringo, thank goodness!
As I write this comment the top trending topics on Twitter are: Adam Lambert, KFC, American Idol, Allison, Oprah, Swine Flue, Danny Gokey, Star Trek, #ftsk and Mavs, none of which interest me personally. Now I go over to my Feedly powered Google Reader and I can look at a combination of search feeds and blog feeds specific to my interests all integrated with the social networking apps I use. If I find an article I like I can immediately see the related friendfeed conversations – it’s the best of both worlds. I really can’t see one without the other from the standpoint of being able to effectively filter content that’s relevant to me.
One more thing: under the hood Google Reader is an amazing platform which will allow Google to easily mutate x multiply the experience when they decide to do so.
Often overlooked, but very poignant. I think GOOG should just set the GReader API loose, and let companies like yours have at it. They can keep GReader for those that want to use it, but it should be made a platform with documented APIs (reverse-engineering the API is too much of a moving target).
But doesn’t someone need to check their RSS feeds in order to share interesting stories on Twitter? Like, otherwise where would it start…? I don’t want to click on every link that @so-and-so-blog pushes out… I want to scroll through it faster on my RSS feed to see whether it’s worth reading or not, or at least scan through it and know the news.
Maybe I got it all wrong.
RSS Is Dead?! (So Says The Web) Did You Ever Need It To Begin With? {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/4C4LLz9eNG_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”RSS Is Dead?! (So Says The Web) Did You Ever Need It To Begin With? ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/3ymXxFlZuI”}}}
I mostly use sources like NewsGang and TechMeme to compliment Twitter/FriendFeed. These days I follow more than subscribe.
Great post, but my question is this: Why the Beatles photo to accompany the post?
Why did the Beatles cross Abbey Road?
To get to the studio?
Carry on, dead man!
or something like that.
Paul was wearing thong slippers in that picture but he took them off prior to the crossing in the album cover picture. The bare feet were interpreted by some folks with bad, bad microdots as being related to a Sicilian thing about being dead.
Paul is DEAD they said, so he played on instead.
To avoid being hit by a lorrie!
Google Reader and Twitter are two different things. At least I use them for different things. The first to monitor news from sites I normally visit. The latter for monitoring the buzz on the web, what people are reading, thinking…
How convenient! The next item on my TODO list is “create an RSS feed for XXX”
create a friendfeed account and follow XXX.
What if XXX is NOT on friendfeed ?
Don’t make the assumption that everything in the world is able to provide data / information in a stream that’s a) accessible to you and / or b) that you access ?
To truly progress our minds, we need to get:
-) contrary messages,
-) messages outside our echo chamber,
-) messages from different taxonomy’s …
Examples are :
-) RSS is as dead as plumbing (i.e. consumer RSS v infrastrucre RSS)
-) I use RSS to track what is happening in the US and Europe business hours (overnight for me)
-) You appear to be tagging RSS as a consumer technology, where it is becoming less useful, rather than an infrastructure technology.
I think the first two are points that people have covered enough in the past (basically, its the echo chamber argument).
Hower, twitter and friendfeed won’t translate the cultural or linguistic differences. Think of what he roots for the Green Bay Packers means to someone outside North America. That’s assuming you see their posts, because of time zone differences.
BTW, did you Dave’ post the other day on what a first time twitter user sees ?
marketing and drivel… sounds like my local free-to-air TV :)
if XXX isn’t on friendfeed you can still subscribe… that’s the beauty of friendfeed, just make a group (choose public or private) and then add all the accounts/services/feeds that you want.
XXX is EVERYWHERE, ya freak ;-p
“Never instead of. Always in addition” – Rabbi Joseph Gelberman
Twitter is the fad app of the moment. It’s also a great way to get lots of hits from the relationship managmenet/ 2.0 is god crowd. There is no 2.0 please go back to your homes.
RSS is still far more useful than twitter and much more widespread. While I’m sure you are a nice person, I find your article to be populist drivel capitalizing on a crap fad to get hits, you should team up with Scoble. Good day.
I definitely agree that it’s easy to get caught up inside a Feed Reader and miss out on native blog comments and conversation, which is the biggest weakness of RSS consumption at the moment – the same could be said of Twitter/Friendfeed etc, until the likes of Disque and Backtype unite everything together somewhere…
But I do disagree that RSS is dead – for starters, it never really became a mainstream consumption tool. It still might, though, as it’s simple to use compared to the brilliant but overwhelming amount of options on Friendfeed.
And realtime doesn’t always win – I tend to catch up on RSS in mornings or evenings when I’ve got time to read, blog, think etc, rather than during the working day – which would mean missing a lot of Twitter content unless it’s as an @reply. Instead, I can quickly skip through content I might have already seen via trips to Twitter etc throughout the day, and still find things which might have slipped through my network’s nets.
Plus I quite often find things via RSS which serve as a starting point for me to hopefully add some value to when I research, write about it and add to it – and being able to find previous articles quickly and easily via RSS is a lot easier than indexing every single thing I might ever need in Delicious, or searching the entire web every time….
For me, it’s horses for courses…
disagree that RSS isn’t mainstream. Twitter is the response to RSS ubiquity, tilting the filter from topic to people. Async follow + Track + aggregated RSS (FriendFeed) beats RSS.
It’s asymmetrical (chronous implies time).
Shame on you for not linking to Winer, Obasanjo, or Wired, all of which published highly relevant posts in the last couple days (or in Winer’s case 3+ yrs ago on Realsimplesyndication.com. Good reasearch ;)
thanks, a typo which I’ll leave in. Only read Dare’s post when I saw mine related to it on TechMeme. Wired I missed. Winer I’ve read every day since I met him at the .Net rollout in Redmond. He invented the shit I’m talking about. Haven’t you heard?
Are you talking about web sites, activities, or delivery formats?
I suspect you’re either trying to say that you like one web site (Twitter) better than another (Google Reader), or that you like one activity (microblogging) better than another (full text blogging).
Fail.
You’re just saying you like Twitter as an RSS reader (over Google reader). It’s not RSS that you’re abandoning, but Google Reader.
When you start liking something besides Twitter as an aggregator, you’ll probably find this useful:
http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/15361
It’s ludicrous to throw the baby (RSS Readers) with the bath water (RSS). If RSS readers have failed us, it doesn’t mean RSS is bad.
The part of the logic I don’t understand is that- those same new social channels that you’re enamored by (Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, people-based) also have RSS-out.
What we need is a better way to configure what we want to read daily that cuts across people and subject filters and social & traditional media sources.
We’re just coming out of stealth at Eqentia- providing a personalized semantic aggregator, and would love to configure one for you where every link brought-in will be relevant.
Sorry, I meant Baby= RSS, Bath water=RSS Reader. Too bad we can’t edit Comments here, like with Disqus.
I read this post via RSS on my iGoogle homepage – i’d much rather have that than a stream of nonsense via twitter. Maybe i’m “Old School” – but I prefer the long form content (image that – blog posts now considered long form, in depth content! – thanks twitter!)
:)
RSS is great for receiving content, and allowing your content to be shared w/ other platforms – i think it will be around for a while…..
Exactly. I read this post via RSS. In Google Reader.
RSS isn’t dead. It hasn’t even scraped the surface of mainstream enterprise IT usage yet.
Steve, I don’t disagree about the value of Twitter and the extent to which it works as a sort of randomized delivery system… and I wasn’t using RSS much at all. However, earlier today I installed RSS Ticker, a Firefox plugin, and it feels like a great way to make RSS useful again. I’m also digging Friendfeed as a way to fish the ocean of information. We have an embarrassment of riches, I think.
To be honest…the best thing about RSS is the lack of social connectivity. Give me what I want without any information bias.
there is no such thing as no information bias.
is plumbing dead? {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/vP0KKSB7m1_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”is plumbing dead? ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/3MYGVqbYIP”}}}
Even the swine that had some slight taint of flu is dead, deadlier and deadliest now. So what now, die an even deadlier death?
I’ll bet both RSS and Twitter will outlive the swine, though…..
In some places of the world RSS is still a new concept for many people. I use it 365 and I use Twitter 365.
RSS 365 = Tweeter 365
I use twitter from Google Reader
I added Betwittered to my Google Reader.
Problem Solved.
Funny thing – I use RSS (GoogleReader) to parse, grep and organize my Twitter feeds; Full feed (including @Replies), Fully-configurable grouping (via labels), and FULLY-searchable using Google’s search tools. I’m not done with RSS yet. Certainly not the sexiest of tools, but like the unsexy 16oz Claw Hammer – no tool box is complete without one.
I attune Twitter and RSS as like those dreaded dinosaurs, The newspapers. Twitter is quick to the pace, RSS is kind of like your Sunday paper, for more details on the drill, I think a mix of them would be good, because as cool as Twitter is, I don’t want to know where you ate, what concert you went to and how your kid is a menace. give quick grasp info that people can appreciate. It is interesting albeit unfortunate how many RSS feeds appear to be dying though.
Disagree 100%. RSS is far from dead. You seriously think twitter is a replacement? Surely this is some knid of joke?
npoe
Techcrunch has lost its mind lately. It is becoming stupid day by day. Comparing RSS with Twitter. What a stupid guy?
How to organize, search, manage, save content with Twitter like u can do with RSS?
and moreover twitter is not built for taking over the functionality of RSS. it is just an update service. not a content syndication technology.
do u even deserve to be a technology blogger?
why dont u shut down techcrunch instead of showing ur stupid side to the world
why don’t you shut your pretty mouth?
Here’s the point: I get my web links from twitter now, not from Google reader.
Why does his mouth elicit sentiments of beauty when you elaborate and evaluate?
Do these feelings elicit joy?
Enquiring minds wanna blog…
Steve,
The usefulness of RSS depends on who you talk to and how they consume information.
Take tech news bloggers, for example. I know at least a few of the guys at Mashable continue to comb RSS feeds for the less prevalent information.
I’ve seen a trend of casual users who don’t frequently use Twitter but check RSS feeds and – gasp – chat forums on a daily basis.
I haven’t checked my Google Reader in half a year either. I do subscribe to RSS feeds on occasion, with the mentality that “I’ll check it later,” but never end up returning to Google Reader.
My replacement for RSS is primarily the blogroll that I hand selected for my own blog, marissalouie.com. My customized Friendfeed groups are a distant second. And I stopped using Twitter as an information pulling service after I followed more than 400 people. It’s only an information pulling service when I manually look up a friend’s Twitter name – at which point the RSS comparison ceases for me. (It’s like manually typing in techcrunchit.com versus receiving it in a reader or by following your tweets about techcrunchit updates @stevegillmor).
There will always be a need to enable RSS and email subscriptions, as you mentioned. Otherwise we would lose valuable blog and website readers for as long as RSS and email shall live. This highlights that when it comes to RSS consumers, “to each his own.”
There is indeed room for improvement in RSS so that it becomes more pervasive and in-your-face. Perhaps your blog post will help launch a new RSS paradigm.
intersting how many admit they have dropped Google Reader even as they keep adding feeds. I in fact click on twitter urls as they appear, following those who filter the network efficiently for me. RSS may be used by some, but less and less.
I guess that depends on who you’re following now doesn’t it. I’m pretty sure YOU select your RSS feeds, so you are filtering your own information no differently then you choose who you want to follow to filter out who’s had what for breakfast and who’s headed to so and so for such and such conference..
No way! :) {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/uQOPtxMmGz_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”No way! :) ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/gvSgOca7g1″}}}
I am a reatime social media and news junky. I believe RSS still has it’s place. RSS is like reading the NY Times Sunday edition. It’s an event, not a process through which I (at times) obtain valuable information. At the very least its a form of entertainment. RSS allows me to slow down, to think critically, and to respond without the added distraction of parsed realtime bits of information about emerging media, breaking news and other and real time content.
Tabs replaced Google Reader.
No – they didn’t.
Google Reader is a single consolidated page of the information I want. If I opened the equivalent number of tabs as articles I scan in Google Reader, my browser would be brought to it’s knees.
And for scanability, tabs in their current state can’t possibly compete with a feed aggregator.
I HATE tabs…they are the biggest pain in the ass in IE. I don’t want to click and go through menus to find my stinking page again and they REALLY don’t help if you want to use multiple eBay pages to enter a series of bids rapidly, for example.
“…. is dead” always were the best-selling covers at Byte Magazine. Same as it ever was.
I have to join in the chorus of “Huh?”.
Twitter is an attention Ponzi scheme. Its only really useful for the early adopters and the popular bloggers. For us lower on the food chain its not terribly useful.
The only way I make twitter usable is to create categories in TweetDeck. However in this case all I’ve succeeded in doing is recreating Google Reader in another tool.
True until Track returns. Then the tools will improve dramatically. If Google Reader is so useful, why are they trying to reverse engineer Twitter social dynamics. Because they are being blown past by Twitter et al.
Twitter and RSS do different things, they can both do things that the other can’t, why do you keep trying to compare them?
I don’t use RSS nearly as often either. But it still serves a distinctly different purpose for folks who want a more methodical, less ADD-like focus.
I enjoyed this post as I too have been wondering why I am spending less time in Google Reader – admittedly I have too many subscriptions and need to clean that up.
I love the “embarassment of riches” we have right now with communication tools available – my favourites are Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. I don’t like managing my “web presence” on each network separately, it seems inefficient. I am thinking that FriendFeed is perhaps the most interesting “content aggregator” right now and am keen to learn more.
Some great comments are appearing here too – so part of my reason for leaving this comment is to subscribe to followup comments so I can continue learning about how best to manage the content we’re consuming and the content we want to make available to out networks.
Cheers,
Tony
Tony,
FriendFeed is something you will want to dive into (deeply) and pronto. The aggregation is what got me in, but the real-time is what got me to stay.
The whole site is fully real-time. Post appear in real-time, as well as comments on those posts. The search is (soon to be) real-time and very powerful with all the metadata that you can use as extra options for your search. Group funtionality is also powerful, and can be private (the old imaginary friends on ff) or public/semi-public.
Then there’s the moderation. It’s decentralized, so you control items under your posts and when you block someone they no longer see you and you no longer see them – anywhere.
Basically you can pipe any of the 57+ services plus any rss/atom feed into FriendFeed as either something that is under your username and others who subscribe to you will see, or as a group where depending on your group’s privacy settings it will be seen by only you or anyone who happens upon the group.
There’s a lot more in the ‘little things’ department about FriendFeed that make it so great (and if I’ve missed anything speak up), but as far as I can see it’s FriendFeed 24/7/365.25 for me.
~Chris Heath (ccheath)
Feed Readers never went mainstream, maybe because feeds like flowers need care and are not everlasting.
I had a similar experience and I scrapped NetNewsWire and Google Reader and built to other tools.
Hushchamber.com a linkblog aggregator for the .NET and ruby communities (mostly). The .NET space had gotten increasingly saturated with link bloggers.
Most recently I’ve created http://urlagg.com to basically keep track of del.icio.us/popular for tags you’re interested in, and only show new ones. The theory is you’re getting mostly good links because people are actually bookmarking them to come back to them and you’ll only see them (on the front page) the first time they’re new.
Once again Gillmor has a very good point, but I think calling something dead has jumped the shark (which has also jumped the shark). Ecosystems are fluid points that don’t necessarily die but evolve.
In any regard, we should thank Dave Winer for giving the system life.
I think I disagree Steve. Different use cases, different models. Twitter is like watching CNN – breaking news all the time. RSS feeds (at least mine) are like sitting down to the read the Economist. You’re going to need some time and some brainpower to digest the stuff coming at you.
I read posts like this and think that you all have a 3.2 second attention span. 3.25 if you’re on the tech short bus.
E-mail is too much, RSS is too much. Do we give it a year before you are all overwhelmed with too many tweets? Maybe we’ll bring it all down to monosyllabic grunts. Ha! No, wait, that’s verbal. Too inefficient perhaps.
It’s like a bunch of pre-teens furiously typing away text messages. It rarely communicates anything except a momentary emotion. There’s so little effort out there. It’s amusing. Twitter makes the echo chamber louder. Quick, I need a URL shortener…
I just ran into this interesting comic: http://twitpic.com/4n72w Sorry for the quality.
(I know that when you say twitter, you mean sophisticated track…but this is too funny to pass :-) )
I use RSS … on the bookmark bar on my Firefox.
I still use RSS several times a day. I would never think of trying to replace my RSS with Twitter. Now a service like Friend Feed might be a klunky replacement, but not really ready for something like that just yet.
Direct usage of RSS is far from being replaced, but I could see it happening someday. Just not this year.
I disagree – they’re 2 different formats. Twitter is essentially real-time in that if you’re away from Twitter for a few hours, you miss out – whereas with RSS, it’s easy to go back.
You’re right, but the best thing about twitter is if you’re away for hours you really technically didn’t miss anything WORTH going back for.
Stupid is as stupid does. RSS is an infrastructure aggregation protocol that benefits the front end…comparing it to Twitter is like comparing fish to trees.
5 stars 4 ya
Agree. The author of this post will probably be thinking about the possibility of twitter replacing operating systems or computer languages in the near future.
I couldn’t agree more. It is ridiculous to compare RSS and Twitter. I am dumbfounded that this article was written and even more surprised that it was published.
Also agreeing with Kyle. This is one of the stupidest articles on Techcrunch that I have seen.
RSS is like Twitter without the noise or commentary. My RSS serves it’s purpose, it’s just Twitter adds some elements that aren’t always fit for my patience level.
Absolutely right. The noise is the right thing to point out in twitter which is the main annoyance. RSS is much more clean and affective. You don’t have to consume news like a dog, all the time with your tongue out.
RSS readers have done wonders to news and the way news are delivered. You can read the whole article, watch a video and number of photos inside the RSS reader.
Well there is pointless to dish out hundreds of advantages to this type or article where there is no scope of comparison left. Good luck with twitter.