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

What we are trying to do with microplaza is to filter noise from twitter by showing only those tweets with links, not only from the public timeline but what's more important from your personal/Twitter network.

ShanaC says: “The thing is, that those links aren't storeable”
Well they are, use the Bookmark option and you'll always have them over there.

Ben Atlas says: “I still find that reader gives me what I want without the noise. I separated Reader into groups/folders.”

Yes, grouping and categorizing is a step beyond dealing with noise. What we did for instance is to give users the possibility to create groups (we call them Tribes) and enroll ppl to those groups…and then when you click on a tribe you get every single url retweeted by the members of that tribe, along with a thumbnail and associated tweets. If you prefer, you can also grab the RSS and follow your tribes on Feedly for instance (imho, the best RSS reader out there, but I'm a visual learner so that might do the trick).

@Wolfy: thanks for the Microplaza mention, are you combining MP with RSS readers?

@clarkethomas: “There's no easy way to group or have a history of posts in twitter”

Well yes by combining tribes creation + bookmarks.

Right now we are in the process of developing a more stable/robust Microplaza, v2.0, and apart from the backend improvements we are definitely trying to listen to ppl needs (our own as well, since we also use RSS and Twitter for own purposes) & come up with a better personalized app, forthcoming features are being evolved around the tribes idea (if you want to stay tuned, you can also follow @microplaza or subscribe to our blog)

The personalized real-time is the next thing, it's always like that, when a given technology hits the mainstream and there's a plethora of (dis)information and resources etc…the next stage is to provide users with filtering tools, and the stage after that is to provide the personalization of filtering. And real-time…which is even harder due to the crazy activity on Twitter.

-M

The protocol is used for way, way more than just a way for client readers to subscribe to content. It acts as the plumbing for a lot of CMS integration these days, as one example.

URL shorteners were a niche novelty pre twitter. Bad guys wouldn't waste their time on them. History suggests its only a matter of time before someone penetrates twitter accounts or url shortener to create a major, web-delivered malware attack. URL shorteners could get ahead of this by thinking about security sooner rather than later.

RSS subscriber count of my blog is still growing steadily. I did notice that instead of commenting on my blog, some readers started to send me direct messages via Twitter regarding my blog posts.

I do think that RSS could become more powerful if more identifiable information can be added (e.g. i like to know who is subscribing to my blog.) But, I think RSS is here to stay, and Twitter will complement it, but not kill it.

If the postings were short titles that you can quickly scan through, would that save your impression of Google Reader?

There is the delicate balance between driving traffic to a blog and syndicating content to a 3rd party. Twitter drives traffic AND is a place to read short content. One of these two forces will need to win, and I think it will be driving traffic. That's what was successful for Google. It's best to be a platform for discovery than a destination in itself. The platform is much more scalable.

There is the delicate balance between driving traffic to a blog and syndicating content to a 3rd party. Twitter drives traffic AND is a place to read short content.

One of these two forces will need to win, and I think it will be driving traffic. That's what was successful for Google. It's best to be a platform for discovery than a destination in itself. The platform is much more scalable.

Twitter could be good for monetizing blogs since people like me are
actually visiting their sites again.

As to URL shorteners – I am so unobjective here as to be worthless – but they have been around for a decade without a material phishing problem. Not that it cant happen – but its an issue was beyond url shorteners – and it can and has been majorly minimized

Twitter is open for now but who knows in the future.

Mor importantly, the only way to have true reliability is to have
institutional redundancy (this requires more explanation-I'll write a
post about it)

Given that, why will Ashton and Oprah someday care?

Twitter is too noisy with other stuff. I also get lots of tweets of the same title – still not more relevant to me. Even worse, ten different URL shorteners point to the same destination. And I don't want to install and maintain a Firefox plugin for that.

about 30% of my RSS subscriptions are things I see very few tweets about. So do I have to go out and search for people who are not only interested in that topic but also tweet about it? Why? And will there be enough people who do exactly that so the story doesn't get drowned in the rest of the Twitter noise?

Tweets are also far from “recommendations” or “relevant”. How can ONE user with 12,000+ followers “recommend” something that fits your interest, other than “hey, it's a gadget”, or “it's about VCs”… it has to be a pretty focused user with some awesome aggregation, and I met only few of these.

Try and search for something that was inside an article you were pointed to, but not in the title of your tweet…

The list could go on and on, but probably all of the “gripes” for replacing an RSS reader with twitter are also really interesting startup opportunities: Search in content linked from twitter, ranked by your followers and same destination of URL-shorteners; analyze your link-click behavior, show a “like” bar on the top after you clicked, and later analyze which of your followees are tweeting the most interesting links; give certain topics or people a rank of importance, and then either color code, display an “importance bar”, or plainly filter for importance below your custom threshold “x”; … again the list could go on and on

If only I had more money for funding…

As for Twitter being a single point of failure, that's definitely a current issue they will have to improve upon. Eventually, all statuses will be inter-twinned and transparent to each other.

As for twitter, perhaps they should split in two – putting the basic tweet stream into open source (twitter.org) and focusing commercial entity on add-value services and data monetization.

As for the social graph as a barrier to entry, this is obviously true but there are a handful of other companies who could eventually compete here if twitter were to stumble/go evil. ie Facebook, Skype (if they survive the lawsuit)…

This is an interesting topic but one I have to disagree with you on.

RSS isn't going anywhere, it's the plumbing and Twitter can't replace that even with their latest investment round. Sure Google Reader might be dying but there's way too much noise on Twitter, it's too much effort to try and follow a lot of people.

Feedly is the best RSS reader I have come across, those guys rock and what they are doing without major investment is amazing.

The biggest problem with RSS is it is not consumer friendly most internet users wouldn't have clue what RSS is but then most internet users won't be using Twitter in the way you do to get their news.

It will take a brand to replace the “RSS logo” with some sort of defacto “click this button and you are subscribed so it will appear personalised for you at XXX website” but all that brand will be doing (and it could be Twitter because like you I think they have the brand kudos) is placing it in an RSS reader but average joe won't care or know that RSS is the plumbing behind it.

It is too much saying that twitter killed the rss. rss and twitter are complementary being rss more automatic and twitter more human-made.
There are many other microblogging sites coming out, and, it is said, facebook tends to be more like twitter.

Greetings,

Luis

Not sure how a normal person can replace following a few dozen RSS feeds in a reader with Twitter. i.e. read and un-read items, organizing by folder, alphabetical, tags, etc… Definitely not as many people interacting within the reader (just a few friends following and vice versa), but a hell of a lot more engaging and interesting (one person who tweets too much can ruin the entire Twitter experience….but hey, I follow tweets in the my reader)…

Call me old school, but I still get a lot of value out of Awasu, a highly extensible Windows desktop feed reader. Awasu gives me Search Agents which monitor incoming feed traffic and Channel Hooks (event driven actions when interesting items are found). And of course feed items are sticky (@Alex); they won't drift away on a stream of tweets. So a “good” feed reader, with a combo of Twitter searches and selected tweeter's status message feeds make a great way to aggregate twitter content and filter the noise. And since I don't travel much (and when I do, the last thing I want to do is touch a keyboard or mouse) a web-based reader isn't a requirement; Awasu works great for me.

I would say that RSS readers as we know them are going to die but there is a definite need for a simple reader enabling asynchronous reading