Twitter Replacing Traditional RSS Feeds?
May 22, 2008 | Author: Rob | Filed under: Blogging
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
This may seem kinda crazy but is twitter replacing traditional RSS feeds? Someone who subscribes to your RSS feed just subscribes to posts from a blog. Someone subscribing to your twitter feed is subscribing essentially to YOU. They want to hear what you have to say or at least they want to hear most of it.
With the advent of TwitterFeed you can have it set so that any blog post you make on any blog you own is automatically tweeted into twitter. You may have 50 subscribers on your humor blog, 230 on your business blog and 35 on your health blog. Traditionally you’d send that info to your subscribers and that’s it. Realistically if someone likes the way you handle and write things in one domain they could enjoy your work from others.
Imagine you had 2,000 twitter followers. Each time you make a post it’s sent to them. Sure it’s not in a feed reader but many with feed readers have them jammed with other feeds or don’t necessarily check them each day. Also people on twitter are a different breed to some extent. It’s people that are actively interacting, sharing etc… Also if someone likes your post they will most likely retweet it by sending it off to their followers list. Write something great and it can go viral really fast thanks to social media; twitter in particular.
I will say use twitterfeed cautiously and only if your blogs are somewhat related. If you make 5-10 posts a day on all your blogs it will look like link spamming ESPECIALLY if you aren’t active. If you make 70 tweets a day and 8 are links to your blog who cares. If you make 12 a day and it’s basically just links to your blog I don’t think you’ll retain your new friends very long. How would you like to basically just get a stream of links from someone? I wouldn’t.
If you want to send lot’s of links be smart about it. Send links that aren’t yours but of substantial value to anyone in the online world and of course mix some of yours in there. People aren’t stupid and your twitter friends are just that; people. Send them useful things and engage in conversations. If something you wrote is helpful than by all means send it; if not don’t bother.
Ultimately I see twitter as an active RSS feed rather than a passive one. Passive could be compared to a 1 way communication channel such as a radio or television. Twitter is like a telephone; you send out info but each subscriber can answer back at their leisure.
With all this being said do you think that twitter and the similar services start sprouting up may lead the charge to eventually replace the traditional RSS? I’ll be posting something in the not to distant future about my experience with twitter after ~1 month of use. If you aren’t already on twitter; just do it.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.
Join me on Twitter
- Blogging
- Business Advice
- Design
- Funny
- Money Matters
- SEO and Marketing
- Technology
- Time Management
- Uncategorized
- What I am Doing
- Working at Home
- Get Your Children in Debt to Keep Them Out of It!
- TOP 10 Yay PLURK Nay TWITTER Reasons
- Great Work at home message boards
- Making No Money? This Could Be Why!
- Carnival of Blogging Sucess
- Investment Opportunity - Self Storage
- 5 Reasons why Your Home-Based Business Website Should Not have AdSense
- Only in America
- Twitter Replacing Traditional RSS Feeds?
- Quality First - Quantity Distant Second
7 people have left comments
There’s an asynchronous aspect of RSS which can’t be overemphasized: if you tweet about your blog post, but I’m not online at the moment to catch it, it’s gone. If (on the other hand) you publish it via RSS, I can catch it whenever.
RSS also delivers a lot more content, which means I can “skim” my RSS feeds in a way that I can’t do with tweet links.
Jaiku may solve this problem. We’ll see.
Hi Robert,
Thanks for the comment. The reason I think twitter will take over / it is already for me is because it isn’t asynchronous.
Regarding reading older RSS feeds you can still do that with twitter. It may be more difficult if you’re following 1000 people but flip side is if you had 1000 RSS subscriptions in your reader it would be somewhat cumbersome as well.
I posted this on twitter a minute ago and already receiving YES and NO’s.
Some say twitter already has replaced RSS while others say no and others say they use RSS in folders and have all their favorite topics in those folders and only view those folders if they want something on the topic.
Not sure if it will totally replace traditional RSS but I much prefer this method and I guess it’s giving people an alternative. I like the idea of subscribing to a person over just a part of them.
Thanks for the comment and see you on twitter
VERY interesting! I’m not so sure about it actually replacing feeds, because, as mentioned above there is still some advantages to reading full feeds as opposed to getting the jist via Twitter. That being said, now that I’m on Twitter I’m finding my need to go through my feeds for blog content dwindling.
Good post. Dugg.
I actually think that you have a good point here. I read blogs that are tweeted before I check blogs that I subscribe to.
People enjoy Twitter because it lets them see another side of other bloggers and it allows for instant (almost) response.
[…] again in the last couple of paragraphs? No. Well here is another reason to be using twitter. twitter replacing traditional RSS feeds? Home Biz Blogger is asking the question and I am going to say, it is to a point replacing RSS. I do […]
[…] RSS read in a reader. Many don’t check the reader that often where most check their twitter. Twitter Replacing Traditional RSS Feeds? » Home Business Blog Wrote that in May… __________________ - Rob - Blogs For Sale | Home Business Blog | Blogging […]
Nope - not a replacement. In fact I think Twitter has its own feeds. Check out my blog’s right sidebar - you’ll be able to see my own Twitter feeds.