I am a devotee of the RSS feed, and I follow more than 100 feeds – and combined feeds – to trap as much information as I can. The announcement of the demise of Bloglines indicates that there is growing belief that RSS is not a good, consumer information tool. Among the many postings and articles I’ve seen in the last few days on the “death of RSS”, the authors make strong arguments that RSS is too difficult for most people to manage and filter. But is social media really a good alternative and can you use Twitter instead of RSS?I started using Twitter at the end of spring, after avoiding it because of the significant noise it seemed to generate. Twitter for me is primarily an alternative stream to RSS, so it needed to provide similar functionality. I couldn’t expect to follow 10,000 Twitterers and have any expectation of being able to stay on top of it. Similarly, I needed the kind of authority for who I followed, as I did for RSS feeds whose authors or publishers I trusted.
My own experience has been that Twitter works well as an alternate channel. I actually follow some people on Twitter and subscribe to their RSS feeds. The content is often different, and neither is necessarily always better than the other. I have not followed the Twitter etiquette of following everyone who follows me, because some of the really interesting people I would love to follow tweet far too much social information for me.
That is really the measurement. If you can create a Twitter stream that tends towards informational posts rather than social information posts, you can manage the stream pretty easily. I spend more time weeding my Twitter account, dropping people I have been following when they veer off into more heavy social sharing, and adding other people who seem to post the type of content I am seeking. With RSS, because so little of the content gets off the original topic, I rarely weed any newsfeeds unless the resource has itself died.
This is not to say that you can create a Twitter stream that is devoid of social information. Twitter is a social tool and people share all sorts of things that are not informational, but, like e-mail and other information sources, are easily scanned and skipped.
I’ll continue to rely on RSS for my deepest information awareness because the content tends to be more consistently high quality. Twitter has become an alternative source, where I recapture the serendipity – thanks to the network of people I follow – to find information that does not appear within my walled RSS garden. It takes more weeding but remains a great resource.
What if Google Reader goes the way of Bloglines? There are social media tools like HootSuite that provide tools for monitoring keywords and hashtags. This may be the future for RSS readers, where you are able to put limits on the information flow so as to identify the high-value content as it flows past.
