I got up this morning, launched Tweetdeck and suddenly realised that shock, horror…my morning routine has changed. Forgetting for a moment the various toiletries and consumption that usually happens before 9am (ok 10am), my geek routine generally consisted of;
1. check email accounts
2. check RSS reader
3. check social networks (LinkedIn and Facebook in case you’re wondering)
4. Sniff around forums
Overnight, Twitter has jumped to number 1 spot. Which surprised me, because, frankly, I’ve been ‘humouring’ Twitter for a couple of months, without really ‘getting’ it. And then today the penny dropped:
Twitter is my new RSS reader, giving me headlines for both what my friends, and what my ‘sources’ have been up to since I last checked in.
I’ve never really been a huge fan of RSS (except on my mobile phone, where it’s my main news source). On the web, I have bookmarks, and I can simply visit my trusted news sources to check the headlines as easily as checking them in my feed reader.
And if we’re honest, it’s never really gone ‘mainstream’. As with any technology, do the ‘ask your mum’ test with RSS and you’ll see it’s definitely still in the domain of the geek. With a name like RSS, that’s hardly surprising (no honestly, it’s really simple), and it’s not a ‘simple’ concept to explain.
Unless you call it ‘status updates’. Thanks to Facebook, Myspace et al, everyone gets ‘status updates’. Twitter is the champion of status updates, and for the first time, users are mixing business with pleasure, happy to read tweets from their friends, then skip to tweets from brands, publishers, and god knows who else.
So could Twitter kill RSS? Or could it save it? One tool I’ve been playing with is Ping.fm, a clever RSS distribution tool which re-posts your blog posts onto social networks including Twitter (although annoyingly, it’s double posting on twitter… my apologies, I will work it out). As soon as I post on my blog, a shortened version of my blog post appears on Twitter (and Facebook, and LinkedIn). Which in turn, drives more traffic to my blog. Another tool is Twitterfeed which provides a similar function.
All of a sudden, the potential for thousands of people who would never get RSS (and more importantly, get my RSS feed) are getting my headlines, immediately, in their inbox.
And so, finally, I get it. I will be taking Twitter more seriously from now on.
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Will Twitter kill RSS?
I got up this morning, launched Tweetdeck and suddenly realised that shock, horror…my morning routine has changed. Forgetting for a moment the various toiletries and consumption that usually happens before 9am (ok 10am), my geek routine generally consisted of;
1. check email accounts
2. check RSS reader
3. check social networks (LinkedIn and Facebook in case you’re wondering)
4. Sniff around forums
Overnight, Twitter has jumped to number 1 spot. Which surprised me, because, frankly, I’ve been ‘humouring’ Twitter for a couple of months, without really ‘getting’ it. And then today the penny dropped:
Twitter is my new RSS reader, giving me headlines for both what my friends, and what my ‘sources’ have been up to since I last checked in.
I’ve never really been a huge fan of RSS (except on my mobile phone, where it’s my main news source). On the web, I have bookmarks, and I can simply visit my trusted news sources to check the headlines as easily as checking them in my feed reader.
And if we’re honest, it’s never really gone ‘mainstream’. As with any technology, do the ‘ask your mum’ test with RSS and you’ll see it’s definitely still in the domain of the geek. With a name like RSS, that’s hardly surprising (no honestly, it’s really simple), and it’s not a ‘simple’ concept to explain.
Unless you call it ‘status updates’. Thanks to Facebook, Myspace et al, everyone gets ‘status updates’. Twitter is the champion of status updates, and for the first time, users are mixing business with pleasure, happy to read tweets from their friends, then skip to tweets from brands, publishers, and god knows who else.
So could Twitter kill RSS? Or could it save it? One tool I’ve been playing with is Ping.fm, a clever RSS distribution tool which re-posts your blog posts onto social networks including Twitter (although annoyingly, it’s double posting on twitter… my apologies, I will work it out). As soon as I post on my blog, a shortened version of my blog post appears on Twitter (and Facebook, and LinkedIn). Which in turn, drives more traffic to my blog. Another tool is Twitterfeed which provides a similar function.
All of a sudden, the potential for thousands of people who would never get RSS (and more importantly, get my RSS feed) are getting my headlines, immediately, in their inbox.
And so, finally, I get it. I will be taking Twitter more seriously from now on.
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