RSS is Better Than Twitter
Patrick Howell O’Neill, writing for Gizmodo, sings the praises of Real Simple Syndication. He call it an “ancient and unsexy alternatives to Twitter,” which is weird because personally I don’t see Twitter and RSS really living in the same address.
Twitter is micro-blogging and you follow a bunch of different micro-blogs to see what they say. Feedly (one of the better RSS readers) is a way for users to follow a wide variety of posts. Personally, I don’t use my Instagram account, but I follow several Instagrammers via RSS. I could even do the same thing with Twitter accounts, but I don’t because I can’t then mute RTs and that is one of the secrets to taming ones Twitter feed.
O’Neill argues Twitter’s value proposition is up-to-the-second news and I guess that’s right if you simply follow news feeds on Twitter. I prefer to read the actual news on the news websites via RSS in Feedly than just see a link to read the same story in Twitter. RSS isn’t really slow. It just feels slower because Twitter is a continuous stream of hot takes.
I prefer a little of both. I follow plenty of people on Twitter, but I curate who and why and always mute RTs because I only want a specific person or entity’s thoughts not their curated RTs. Plus, with RSS and Feedly I get the news with time to actually process.
He also mentions email newsletters as the wave of the future. Curiouser and curiouser.