I learned from that now and have a well populated Google Reader. I continue to hear that Twitter has now made this extinct but I haven’t gotten that impression. However, that is mostly because I’m using the vanilla-based twitter through the web and there you have no great tools to stay on top of trending topics.

It wasn’t until I found myself at a conference that #blahblah and trending topics became important because they weren’t just trending topics they were live chat rooms, live feeds of data, or streams.

I really saw a benefit to Twitter for the first time. Individuals had these streams of data of all types and if the #trended it or used the right keywords there was amazing use. I could now pipe in data from all these sources about the topic I wanted. It was a disjointed forum that erupts out of communication. Which is better than trying to get people to come to a temporal place to act as a forum.

So I just downloaded Tweetdeck and I see where it is in some ways an awesome tool that far outstrips RSS as a discovery tool. But I still can’t see it replacing RSS for me because there is far too much duplication and spam.

So I see Twitter as a great discovery tool, I can pull twitter searches into Google Reader and then use those to find the blogs/info that I eventually want add as permanent RSS feeds.

I see it as a compliment, not as a replacement.

Problems:

* ReTweets are awesome if you are trying to expose your audience to the information. However, to those within the same circle, say at an event, it is a duplication of the previous tweet.

* Duplication (in general) of posts in a given space, like when people quote people at a particular event. An event has a measurable echo here and the larger the personality the larger the echo.

* Spam from outside individuals that are adding negative value to the space (compared to a repost which is perhaps considered neutral or only slightly negative).

Some things I need for twitter to gain more value:

* There are no decent tools to deal with the duplication. You don’t want the streams of data to be blocked, you want clients to manage it. I imagine that a tool that compares posts 140 character posts might have a good shot at dealing with the duplication.

* There are no good community tools to assist with positively reinforcing good posts and negatively reinforcing spam/bad posts.

For feeds I use GReader and the Feedly plugin for Firefox. Really like that combo.

-M