RSS is alive and well, thank you

Twitter

I’ve been wanting to write this entry for a while now. I haven’t had the chance because I’ve been busy with other things, but I finally found some time.

I’m an avid reader of TechCrunch and usually read only their blog’s RSS feed through Viigo on my BlackBerry, mostly because if I’m on my desktop or laptop, it is very likely that I’m doing something else. A couple of weeks ago they posted an outrageous entry called “Rest in Peace, RSS”. In this entry, Steve Gillmor pretty much said that Twitter is the new RSS.

Twitter is not the new RSS at all.

How they work

RSS is an incredibly useful tool to read exactly what you want and when you want. The way it works is pretty simple: your RSS reader checks the RSS feed every once in a while and downloads the new stuff on the feed. I like to think of it as pull technology.

On the other hand, Twitter is a push product. It pushes every single update to you the instant it gets sent out by the original publisher.

Use & comparison

The main advantage that RSS has is that it is neatly stored in your reader until you have time to read it. It comes to you and waits for you.

Twitter pretty much comes to you and, if you’re not paying attention, it is gone. It is too fast and too dynamic. This is good for several reasons, but not for the ones we’re discussing here. Tweeting out a 140-character message is far easier than writing a 140-word blog post. Twitter is based on immediacy.

RSS is an email; Twitter is a phone call.

If you’re working on something and you get an email, you don’t necessarily have to stop what you’re doing to read it. It is not going anywhere and will be there when you have time to read it. Twitter is a phone call; it is something that requires your immediate attention or it will go away. It will go away because it will be buried by other tweets half an hour later.

Twitter users & “spam”

Take a user like Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki). He’s a very popular Twitter user. He also tweets 39 times per day, on average. 39 times a day! To be honest, I had to stop following him because it would constantly annoy me while working, especially since most of his tweets also spammed me with his website, Alltop. However, if I create my own Alltop channel and subscribe to the RSS feed, I don’t need Guy’s constant Twitter updates anymore. I get the exact information I want and can read it when I have the time to do so.

If you’re a busy person, you cannot constantly monitor Twitter. You just cannot have the luxury of following more than five people that tweet more than ten times per day and not miss out on anything.

The bottom line

RSS and Twitter are too far apart to be able to compare them. While they both serve the function of getting information to you, the way they do it is entirely different.

RSS patches you through directly to the publisher while Twitter patches you a URL-forwarder and then to the publisher. Let’s face it: Twitter is unreliable. It has a history of fail whales and random errors. In fact, as I type this, I’m trying to upload a new avatar to Ahlera’s account (@ahlera) and it doesn’t work, so now we’re avatarless.

RSS is more than practical and wins against Twitter when you compare them in regards to how the exact news you want gets to you. If you’d like to read more points of view on the matter, all you need to do is look at the comments of Gillmor’s post.

All this doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t an amazing tool for other things, but that’s a separate blog post…

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