Web Worker Daily (we’re all web workers now, aren’t we?) ran a recent post asking Is Twitter Replacing the RSS Reader? This is a good question for a number of reasons, the first being that many members of the Nature Blog Network are presumably still getting their heads around subscriptions, syndication, and feed readers. But why even tackle these topics if rss is being rendered obsolete?
This question resonates more strongly with those who identify as strongly as publishers of content as they do as consumers of content. Bloggers covet subscribers more than mere visitors because anyone who subscribes to a feed signals that they have an interest in the content that is both deep and enduring. When you’ve got, say, 300 subscribers to your blog, you know that regardless of the often fickle ebb and flow of your search engine and social media traffic, you’ve got a steady base of interested readers.
As someone who values the large subscriber base his blog has cultivated and seeks to continue to deliver content where readers are most apt to enjoy it, I have to wonder whether content streams have been simplified, specialized, or splintered beyond reckoning. So I’ll put the question to the community:
Loading ...Once you’ve responded to this poll, please weigh in on this issue in the comments below. Where do you, as a nature blogger and reader of other nature blogs, like to channel feeds from your favorite nature blogs? Has the RSS reader been replaced or not?
17 Comments
I’ve recently created a wildlife photography blog aggregator (http://wildlife-photography-blog.com) which is currently taking 30+ RSS feeds from photography blogs and republishing them as a website, an RSS feed and a twitter feed. Of the three the twitter feed has significantly more subscribers and generates the vast majority of the traffic.
As a method for websites to republish blogs and for committed users to read blogs RSS is not going to go away any tinme soon, but Twitter does seem to be where the major traffic growth is in terms of more casual visitors.
(see http://quantumtiger.blogspot.com/2009/10/wildlife-photography-blog-full-steam.html for more details)
For me, Twitter and FB are primarily discovery tools. I find blogs I didn’t read previously with interesting, amusing, or beautiful content. For blogs I want to read (or at least skim) every post I use Google Reader. YMMV*
*Your Mileage May Vary
I like getting my content through Twitter about as much as I like reading books via SMS messages; which is to say, I don’t use it.
Using RSS is useful because it allows me to consolidate all the blogs I follow and read their new content from one place–like reading all my e-mail from within a client so I don’t have to visit each mailbox individually. I “click through” to a blog post when I want to leave a comment. All Twitter can do is tell me to go visit the blog to see the new post.
That is to say, RSS is a push technology (it delivers content, whole or partial). On the other hand, Twitter is a notification technology (it tells you when there’s new content). The two are hardly the same. I think it has as much a chance of replacing RSS as MySpace has of replacing Blogger.
While I have used several feed readers at various times, and still rely on Live Bookmarks at the top of my browser for the few blogs I read most consistently, I now use the blogroll on my blog to follow most of the blogs I read. I am occasionally active on Twitter, but it is a major time-suck to keep up with it. On my blogroll the most recent item headers show up at a single glance and I can easily decide which ones which ones will get my attention in the time I have available.
I certainly hope not, as I’m not a fan twitter generally (though I do use it), and especially not as a way to keep track of blogs I follow.
There’s simply too much superfluous material there. If I follow a blog, I want to know about every post, regardless of whether I read it or not. It’s just too easy to let a twitter feed get away from you and miss something you might really enjoy.
Thought I’d comment further on Twitter as I am clearly in the minority here! I use Twitter as my main discovery and follow mechanism.
I understand the distinction that Jason is making, however, if you take email as the classic push technology, twitter can work in a similar way (and with simliar conversion rates). It has the added benefit that it makes bulk republishing trivial - so your community is doing much of the push for you.
And Penelopedia, a strength of Twitter is I don’t feel I *have* to keep up. I just dip in when I have time and always find interesting things. I miss 95% of what’s going on, but that doesn’t matter. On the other hand RSS readers are offputing - telling me just how many unread items I have no time to engage with.
It is a difference between a modern completionist (reading a book) culture and the post-modern attention span deficit (entertain me) culture. Both have a value, but the phenomenal rise of Twitter alone indicates to me that it is something that we as bloggers cannot afford to ignore.
Ian - Yes, Twitter is a great discovery mechanism — this is one of its great strengths — and great for “dipping in”. It’s not, in my view, a particularly easy way to consistently follow a blog’s content - it’s an intermediary step that requires more clicks. Following my blogroll doesn’t tell me how many I’ve missed, but gives me most-recent content updates at a glance and an easy way to click through to catch up on more posts if I want to. It’s just what seems to work for me, right now.
One of the interesting pieces of this is that we’re discussing RSS and Twitter in two very different contexts, two fundamental dichotomies if you will: RSS as a push technology of content and Twitter as a networking tool to advance said content.
Ian makes a good point that Twitter enables bulk republishing much as Facebook does, except it does it in shorter bits to satiate the decreasing attention spans of the “now generation.” But I disagree that it can’t be ignored: I ignore it just fine and live a perfectly happy life without all the miniature dramas it creates. I ignored MySpace and Facebook even when told I absolutely had to be there (I have accounts but rarely check them). Can’t say I missed anything by not attending those parties. And like other internet fads before it (MySpace and Geocities anyone?), I suspect Twitter will likewise be replaced by something shinier and newer…sooner or later.
Yet as a content syndication and delivery technology, Twitter is useless. It can tell me there’s new content, but it can’t show me the whole of that content in a stored way that I can come back to later. That’s where RSS feeds come in: my RSS reader stays on all the time. Even if I’m away for a week, I can come back and see precisely what I’ve missed. I don’t have to read it all–just like I don’t have to read all my e-mail–but at least the whole of it is there for me to pick and choose from.
And here’s the interesting piece of this: A lot of Twitter-using bloggers say they get the majority of their hits from other Twitter users. I’m curious: Do those hits translate to just a lot of empty web traffic or to like-minded people staying, commenting, and following your work consistently? Or is it all flash-in-the-pan traffic because they’re clicking Twitter links in search of the next quick fix? I’ll take low meaningful traffic over high empty traffic any day.
I agree 100% with wren. Twitter is good for discovery, RSS is good for following.
Jason, as a bloggers getting an increasingly significant proportion of trafic via twitter I’d say the majority of it is targeted, useful traffic. I choose who I follow and I choose who I retweet, as it seems do many people - and that naturally pushes my follower growth to favour people who share a similar set of interests. What I see developing on twitter is loosely-formed communities of shared interest which extend my reach independantly from the tyranny of Google. It has led me to people I would otherwise not have met.
Can we as bloggers afford to ignore it? Okay, so maybe that was an overstatement! Each individual has to the best way to achieve their goals within their time budget and comfort zones. Will it be there in a year’s time? Who can say! But for right now, I’d say I’ve acheived more targetted hits and interesting new contacts in the last four months on Twitter than I did in the prior two years.
RSS is one of several Web 2.0 technologies I have seen declared dead in recent weeks. I think some tech bloggers like to do this to look edgy, with the hope that no one will remember 6 months later if they’re wrong. So I take all of them with a grain of salt. As far as I can tell there must still be strong demand for good feed readers; both Google Reader and FeedDemon are still in active development.
Twitter may become an RSS-substitute for some users that aren’t comfortable with RSS readers. The trouble with Twitter as an RSS replacement is that conversations move so quickly that blog post alerts published at one time of day are likely to be missed by anyone logging in slightly later. It’s not a good replacement for users that want to follow specific blogs.
I remember to check Twitter once or twice a day, Facebook every couple of days. But my Google Reader page is always up, and I start there every time I come back to the computer. For blogs I will read every post (like this one), Twitter and Facebook are fine; all I need is a notification that there’s a new post. For the rest, Google Reader gives me enough material to make a choice whether I want to read the entire post or not, which ends up being a net saving of time.
Google Reader rules. I usually have it open in a tab to check on tech sites and some other feeds, but for the bulk of my blog reading — including nature blogs - I use the GR “Next” Firefox bookmark, which takes me directly from blog to blog in order of most recently published post, and marks them as read in Google Reader as I visit them — kind of like a StumbleUpon experience, except it’s only blogs I subscribe to. This gets around both the boring sameness of the GR interface, and also those bloggers who, for perverse reasons of their own, only offer partial feeds. And it makes it much easier to add comments. Needless to say, I’m not a fan of Twitter for following blogs, and tend not to follow people who primarily use Twitter to pimp their stuff elsewhere.
another ditto here for the prevailing view that RSS is fine for following and Twitter for discovery, but they’re not comparable. I was one of those who didn’t “get” Twitter for a long time, but am now addicted and use it as the source for 80% of the posts on one of my blogs. I’d probably find it even more useful if I used “Tweetdeck” but I’ve been a nervous-nellie about downloading that application — of those of you who use Tweetdeck does anyone have anything bad to say about it, or regret using it, or everyone happy with it (not to change the subject)?
I can’t comment on the usefulness of Twitter in this regard, because I don’t use Twitter (I feel like an old fart or something when I admit that I don’t Tweet and that I don’t belong to Facebook! What is wrong with me?) I started using Bloglines as my RSS reader when I gave up on GoogleReader months ago because I don’t like how it’s laid out, and it’s worked out perfectly for me. Like Jason, I’ll “click through” on the posts that I want to comment on (like here!) I certainly hope that the RSS reader will be around for a while.
Cyberthrush: I find Tweetdeck much friendlier than the Twitter website. I wouldn’t be without it. Downsides? It makes it easier to lose a couple of hours to twitter.
I’m definitely an RSS feed-reader user, for all of the reasons stated above. I use Bloglines, mostly because at the time I was first setting up a reader I was having trouble getting Google Reader to work for me for some reason. It saves me a lot of time, especially once my blogroll started reaching lengths where it was difficult to visit everyone. Even using the reader, I still don’t get to visit and read all the blogs on my list, but at least I can see which ones I haven’t been to in a while, and I’m alerted when my favourite ones add a post.
There’s no way I can keep up with all the twittering going on among my contacts, particularly with prolific users who post a dozen tweets in a day. Mostly I use Twitter for my own tweets and read whatever the latest posts are when I log in to do that.