With all the buzz surrounding Twitter these days and more people (tweeple) joining at a faster rate than ever, I’ve found myself discovering more great design-related content on Twitter and checking my RSS feeds less frequently throughout the day. I was curious to see if others were doing the same, so I thought I’d ask the masses – and what better way than to post a question on Twitter:
Do you subscribe to blogs or do you get your news via Twitter? Which do you prefer? To my surprise I was quite shocked with the results. Of the 25 or so responses I received approximately 20 of them responded with “I prefer Twitter”.
Here’s what a few had to say:
- @eleonor: I subscribe to blogs & twitter. I find I’m using twitter more though these days. I find it more immediate when a blog post goes up.
- @marnieb: Used to subscribe to feeds, but found I didn’t have time to read them all… so now it’s all via Twitter.
- @sarahtelldown: get most info from twitter. don’t subscribe to too many blogs. if I did too many it’d overwhelm & I wouldn’t read any.
- @beet09: Truth is I follow blogs via Twitter now – I will subscribe if they have no Twitter ac but haven’t checked RSS reader this week
- @designmogul: Both, mostly Twitter recently though.
How Do We Prepare for the Twitter/RSS Takeover?
In addition to my most active personal Twitter account (@behoff), I created a separate account (@TDCBrand) which is dedicated to only my blogs content — new posts, giveaways, announcements, etc.
This gives TDC followers an additional way to “subscribe” and stay updated with my content without reading all my other tweets and “twit-chat”. Also, adding hashtags (#) before keywords makes your blog articles and content more searchable on Twitter. ie: #thedesigncubicle #TDC #brianhoff. This will help those trying to search and find content related to your site more easily on Twitter. From Twitter Search they can even subscribe via RSS.
Add Twitter to everything
Try adding your Twitter ID to your business cards, email signature, stationery, etc. I even saw a bumper sticker on the back of a car sporting someone’s Twitter ID!
You’d be surprised on how many people heard of Twitter opposed to RSS – give them more ways to connect and follow you and your blog.
RSS or Twitter?
- BLOG FOUNDERS: Do you find yourself getting more Twitter followers than subscribers? What have you done to prepare?
- BLOG READERS: Do you find yourself subscribing to RSS feeds or checking Twitter more? Which do you prefer?
I stopped checking my rss some time ago. I find it is distracting and takes me away from actually doing stuff that will actually make me better. I find good articles tend to bounce around twitter, that and I follow some people that do all the hard work of going through all the articles and RTing the good ones so I just read those now.
I subscribe to several RSS feeds, some design, some news, some tech, etc. They’re all fed into my Google Home Page. I don’t think I could possibly follow all of these feeds via their tweets. It would be far more difficult to scan for all of these on Twitter than it is to check a couple of spots on iGoogle. I say RSS over Twitter.
With that said, I do find myself reading something cool from an RSS feed and then tweeting about it to others ;)
I haven’t used my RSS reader in over 2 weeks. I find it easy to get overwhelmed with it. Seeing 2,000 unread posts is daunting to say the least and when someone I trust recommends something via twitter, mostly I take that to heart (unless they’re pimping out their own blog)
I feel like when I use only Twitter, I am left out on some things, so I still use RSS frequently.
Twitter doesn’t do it for me.. too noisy I guess. I stic to RSS, and I don’t think Twitter will last.
I check my RSS reader every single day :P Although there are some posts that come up with in Twitter, I’d rather separate syndication from it… well at least the regular/consistent one. I do publicize though :P
Besides, it annoys me like hell when people simply dump an entire feed, I simply skip those tweets.
I use Twitter mostly to find people with common interests and share knowledge, not to spam.
Another thing to consider: What about twitter taking over sites like Digg? I find that twitter serves as a great aggregator of good content. You can perform searches and start to see top stories trending to the top. Twitter search has some incredibly powerful potential, right now, it’s a simple manual search tool, but with some modifications, or third party applications, it could become very powerful, and replace RSS and aggregation.
I definitely use RSS over twitter, but I don’t let myself get overwhelmed with all of the unread posts. I just scan the blog list to make sure I’m not missing a site, then scan the headlines before hitting all-read. It’s too easy to lose a good post in Twitter.
I actually do a little of both.
I still rely heavily on my feed reader (google reader) because that’s more laid back, I can read it when I want to. If I rely exclusively on twitter and one day I’m not on top of it (if i’m out for a day) then I’ll miss some news I might have otherwise seen if I was using a feed reader.
I don’t even check my feeds any more… ok maybe once a week. I use Tweetdeck now instead.
I use both – different tools for different purposes!
Google Reader – I follow about 300 feeds that fit into 2 broad categories, “Mentor” blogs and “Breaking News” blogs.
I tend to check the breaking news (eg. Geeks are Sexy) on my Blackberry and have 2 to 4 hours a week dedicated to reading my “Mentor” blogs (eg slide:ology).
When I find good content in my reader I mark it as a shared item which automatically gets posted to twitter (via the shared items rss feed).
I also find, RT and share heaps of great content via Twitter (@mfubib) – often finding new blogs to subscribe to in the process – however twitter will never replace my reader :)
Thanks for the great post, especially your tip about having a twitterfeed dedicated purely to new blog posts.
It presents some interesting dilemmas. If you know that people are relying on Twitter to keep up with your blog instead of RSS, does that mean you should tweet every post? Some people who aren’t following you for that purpose might think that is a little spammy, especially if you post frequently.
Having two Twitter accounts is a possible solution, but then you run the risk of having people who might be good “personal” followers follow your “announcement” stream instead.
Hashtagging your announcements of new posts might be a subtle way of letting people know that you are just getting it out there, and you’re not saying that this is one of your must-read posts.
Mark,
I like the hash tags idea. How about #tss for “twitter simple syndication.” Just add that every time you twitter a new blog post, then people can also perform searches inside that hash tag for specific topics. Now we just have to get the word out for bloggers to start using #tss for standard posts. What does everyone think about such an idea?
I can skim my Twitter people a lot faster than a few dozen RSS feeds. Plus, I’m a lot more inclined to click on a link from certain people on Twitter than every feed that comes through RSS.
I like the #tss idea :)
When I first signed up on Twitter I already had a healthy RSS reader. I used to tweet a lot of that stuff. As I followed more and more people, though, I realized I was tweeting things that had already been tweeted – and sometimes hours or days later! Eventually the content I was seeing on Twitter was much the same as the content in my RSS reader, and I could see them come in right away as opposed to checking Reader every couple hours.
Now I mostly just wade through Twitter rather than check RSS. See how long that lasts, I guess.
I think the next logical blend will be some kind of parallel rss feed that ties into a third party app like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop. I prefer to read blogs in stream if I can…I can definitely get to them much faster this way.
@signalstrength,
I agree. Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself less frequently visiting my RSS feeds due to the fact that most of the posts that interest me are RTed several times on Twitter.
Zhuoshi,
I agree that Twitter cannot completely override RSS but it has put a huge dent in my subscriptions to other blogs.
Erik,
Great point! Twitter does have some very incredible search capabilities which started me wondering how much Twitter has played a role in this sudden change on my part. Developers are putting out some fantastic apps that add to the entire Twitter experience and I have a strange feeling it will only get better :)
Mark & Erik,
Hashtagging is a great idea guys, much like I mentioned above. Tweetdeck is great for creating groups or keywords to follow and this way you can follow exactly what you want to read. Even with the 300+ RSS subscriptions I follow, I only find myself “marking all as read” more and more due to the lack of content that interests me at that time.
As a blogger, I’ve even written about how Twitter has exploded my traffic. Here’s a good comparison: I have a handful of RSS subscribers, but over 1000 Twitter followers in my first 2 months. I’ve written about some of the techniques I use to get Twitter followers and convert them to blog visitors:
5 Advanced Twitter Tips
As you can see, I also leave my Twitter link in comments instead of my blog – I do that about half of the time. Happy Twittering everyone!
-Peter (@absurd_human)
This is a great and very thought-provoking topic for discussion.
I like twitter. The downsides are that what gets tweeted is completely random, and that I’m in a vastly different time zone to most of the people I follow so I miss much of what gets tweeted when folks in the US are most active on twitter – for example, I missed your tweet with the question that got this post rolling in the first place :) I’m ok with that, though.
I like RSS. The downside is that having 300+ feeds means my Reader gets into four digits very quickly, which used to frustrate me but I’ve learned to live with it like that. I’m getting better at speed reading now!
twitter is much more immediate: if I catch a link that’s been tweeted, I might see the blog post within minutes or hours of being published. With RSS it might be days. twitter also points me to articles from months ago which I had missed at the time.
I like seeing how many RSS subscribers I have (despite ongoing hiccups with the new Feedburner) but I have to admit I get very excited when one of my blog posts is tweeted by lots of people. That’s a great measure of how your posts are being received.
@absurd_huma (Peter),
Twitter can indeed explode traffic. During the early stages of TDC’s start in particular a large portion of my quick success came via my interactions on Twitter.
[...] Is Twitter Taking Over RSS?… Prepare Your Blog Today [...]
I know what you mean. I stopped logging on to my Google reader. Now I ‘Follow’ friends and sports news on Twitter. Don’t need to click on categories or scroll as much or see the pop-up ads constantly.
I’m going to have to give another vote to twitter. It’s so centralised and defeats the redundancy of following multiple feeds.
Twitter has the potential as you said. But because of differences in international timeline, I, somtimes will not be able to read some readers’ tweets. This is not the case with RSS. So if there is spare time, RSS can be a better tool-atleast for me!.
Twitter is great, but it is way too NOISY. It has great power, great depth, and insane reach, but it cannot be FOLLOWED adequately unless you pour enormous amounts of time into it. With an RSS feed you can tailor your feeds to read exactly what you’re interested in. You follow what you want only, without having to wade through all other kinds of stuff. Love Twitter, but I think RSS is here to stay.
[...] Is Twitter Taking Over RSS?… Prepare Your Blog Today [...]
Tried Twitter last week, fled from it as far as I could. Short urls don’t do it for me, weeding out the crap doesn’t do it for me either. Twitter gives you too little content to function well as an advertisement tool. Not to mention the fact that 50% on there is personal garbage.
My Twitter account is still up, and even though I’ve only written 4 posts and the last one was written a couple of days ago, people still keep subscribing … feels a bit like zombie town to me.
So I’m all for RSS. There you do the weeding yourself (I only follow 15-20 feeds and keep my list clean) rather than trust others with their spammy nonsense.
I often come across new posts via Twitter before I get RSS notifications, but I still like using Opera for RSS because I can have my email and RSS ‘inboxes’ in the one place and I can always take my time to check through feed notifications, whereas I might miss a link on Twitter because I’m not checking it constantly.
No. No. No. RSS is a coding language. Twitter is a social network. They are mutually exclusive. That’s like saying Del.icio.us will replace CSS.
[...] Is Twitter Taking Over RSS?… Prepare Your Blog Today! (5 votes) [...]
A good mixture of both seems to work well. I may find new websites via twitter and then add them to my RSS reader if they have a bunch of good content.
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Same as you, James Kurtz.
I’ve discovered lot of site, including TDC !, thru twitter. Then, i prefer to follow all using RSS. I’ve personally adopted netvibes.com as my main RSS aggregator.
2 times a day, i browse the headlines. If It sounds usefull for me, i digg it.
i gust want to say some thing “great job”
Update your Twitter randomly according to your intrest Or, from Rss Feed Or, from your own tweet message list Or, Any combination of t
[...] Is Twitter Taking Over RSS?… Prepare Your Blog Today [...]
I prefer Twitter too! Although I am new to Twitter, I find it really cool and useful :)
I don’t know If I said it already but …Great site…keep up the good work. :) I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say I’m glad I found your blog. Thanks, :)
A definite great read….
[...] while back I wrote an article posing the question if Twitter was taking over RSS? To summarize the post: since the popularity of Twitter increased and more information was being [...]
i gust want to say some thing “great job”
Update your Twitter randomly according to your intrest Or, from Rss Feed Or, from your own tweet message list Or, Any combination of t