goobimama:

Turns out some people get real annoyed when when websites push twitter feeds that serve the sole purpose of publishing their RSS feeds. On the surface it seems like they’re right, and that publishing an RSS feed to twitter is stupid and arrogant. But…

I don’t use RSS. I’ve given up on it. Every client has its faults, and I can almost never quite get a feel for content looking through RSS feeds. Plus the whole ‘unread feeds’ thing kind of gets on my nerves. At most RSS is a means of content discovery, which I happily look through ever week or so in Helvetireader. Which brings me to twitter. Instead of having to look through your RSS reader for new content, what if it’s delivered in 140 characters right in your twitter feed? It’s not like I’m going to miss out on something great if I miss the tweet. But the chances of me seeing that (or a retweet of it) is much higher than it seems.

One of those ‘some people’ of course had his own opinion. While he’s cool with a twitter feed regurgitating sites content, it should be personalised. You know, like the awesome @smokingapples feed. While I agree with that, I still believe there’s nothing wrong with having a plain RSS feed to supplement your ‘personalised’ feed.

For one, the beauty of twitter is that you don’t have to follow. If we have an RSS regugitator script installed for SA, and pipe it down into @sa_rss, who is it hurting? For someone who wants to have SA RSS in their twitter feed, that’s a perfect way to go about it. They can still follow our personalised tweets—it’s just one more extra tweet. You can make your own accounts for sites you need to follow. Moreover, with the new ‘lists’ feature in Twitter (and especially so when major clients support it), you can pretty much have an RSS client right inside your twitter client.

There’s so many things for twitter_rss and so many against traditional RSS. To me RSS is dead. At least in the traditional sense. I’m sure Fever makes the whole experience less taxing. But for the way things are at the moment, RSS is out. Twitter RSS, I’m glad you’re around.

As always, to each his own. I don’t mean to say my method should be adopted by everyone, and that Twitter replaces RSS. There’s still a lot of merit to checking news feeds, especially for those who aren’t always staring at a Safari window. This is just me explaining myself, and the merits of RSS-only twitter feeds.