How Do You Get the Latest News?
May 18, 2009 By Joshua AllenDo you still use an RSS reader to keep up with the latest interesting information, or have you switched to using Twitter? Steve Gillmor, writing at TechCrunch, lit a fire last week by declaring that RSS is dead.
I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.
Steve goes on to argue that RSS is becoming increasingly less useful as a personal tool for keeping up with interesting news, and that Twitter has already won. It’s a really good post, and I recommend reading the whole thing.
At first glance, Steve’s comments could seem oddly hypocritical, since thousands of people read his TechCrunch posts via RSS, and his posts are even syndicated to Twitter via RSS. But he’s really just asking "How do you find out about interesting new stories? How do you keep up? And how has that changed over time?"
With this in mind, I decided to poll the MIX Online team and see what my co-workers had to say.
- Karsten – Karsten listed twitter as his primary source for interesting new stories, with Digg coming next. He doesn’t use an RSS reader much anymore.
- Hans – Interestingly,Hans listed mailing lists as a primary source of news,followed by Digg and Twitter.
- Tommy – Twitter came first, but RSS reader was nearly identical. Thomas doesn’t see Twitter replacing RSS, seeing them as serving different purposes.
- Tim – Like Thomas, Tim placed Twitter first, and RSS (via Outlook) second. Tim explained that he likes RSS for specific topics or blogs, but that Twitter search via TweetDeck is better for broad awareness of new happenings.
- Nishant – Twitter, Digg, and RSS reader share equal weight.
- Joshua – I’ve found that I get my best news through FriendFeed (which combines RSS and Twitter), mainly because of the quality of the people I follow. My RSS reader is a close second, and even mailing lists!
From this informal poll, it appears that RSS isn’t going away, but Twitter and other "realtime" or "social" tools like FriendFeed are becoming relatively more important. This trend is almost an accident of history, and isn’t guaranteed to continue like this indefinitely, but for now it appears to be real. Phil Windley hit the nail on the head when he asked, "Why Didn’t PubSub Become Twitter?".
We even see this playing out on MIX Online. Some of our friends subscribe directly to our RSS feed, while others follow the twitter account. How about you? How do you keep up with the latest stories? What kind of trends have you observed at the web sites that you maintain?
Follow the Conversation
10 comments so far. You should leave one, too.
Twitter and Digg here. Clients sometimes ask for RSS but they mostly don''t even read their own RSS feeds.
Hot topic these days: check out the Lifehacker article at http://is.gd/AM6d
I prefer RSS feeds (via FeedDemon) for not missing stuff, although often it''s Twitter that alerts me first. But there is too much noise over signal on Twitter even when you use Search or TweetDeck to try and segregate different accounts out. If I''m working on site I can''t afford the time when I get home to plough through 12-24 hours worth of Tweets to find the stories. RSS serves me better on those occasions.
Twitter and RSS
Twitter is great in the moment, but if you spend any time doing any actual work, you''ll find you cannot keep up with everything all the time.
I subscribe to many blogs using Omea Pro and find much that is of use which I simply couldn''t keep up with if I had to monitor Twitter all day every day.
FWIW My gravatar is not showing. This is likely because your site is not providing a lower case version of the email addresses to gravatar.
The funny thing is half, if not more, of the information found on Twitter is coming from another persons RSS reader. More people might be going towards Twitter to get their "at-the-moment" news, but the source of that news is coming from someone elses RSS reader who then posts to Twitter. So in the end the majority still get their news from RSS whether it''s directly or indirectly. RSS in not dead.
Twitter is higher suited for finding news across people you don''t follow. You can only fit so many people on your RSS reading list. So you are limited by the interests of the people you subscribe in RSS. On Twitter you can do search.twitter.com to filter news from everybody. It filters by topic instead of filters by people like RSS. I found more interesting things that way.
But in the end you''re still getting most of your news from someone elses RSS feed who then posts to Twitter where you then search and get detailed results. So overall RSS and Twitter combined = good for all of us. :)
@Nicholas Patten True about RSS on tweets. True it''s good for all of us :) The only difference is do you use RSS reader nowadays or do you read RSS in TweetDeck?
RSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I cant stand twitter and facebook. I acknowledge the great success of twitter and facebook, but some people like myself prefer RSS.