Use Twitter In Conjunction With Your RSS Reader
Apr 12 2008 
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Eric Berlin has an interesting post asking whether Twitter is the new RSS reader. The post provides some great insight as to why Twitter could beat RSS readers, but in reality, it never will and he also happens to point that out from the start.
In Berlin’s article he states that:
For me, Twitter has of late become a faster and easier and more accessible way to let the news “come to me.”
While this is a useful benefit of using Twitter, it’s not enough to beat an RSS Reader.
This is a list of stories that I would not have found in my RSS reader, at least not in full.
This is all that Twitter is, to some extent. It’s just a way to find stuff that you may not be subscribing to. However, every website is not pushing there blog feeds on Twitter like I do (@@SheGeeks on Twitter” href=”http://twitter.com/shegeeks” target=”_blank”>SheGeeks on Twitter). That ends the argument for me right there.
However if we dig a little deeper, sometimes the articles sent on Twitter are days, weeks, or even months old! If you’re not following people who retweet articles regularly, you’ll miss a lot of news. On top of that, it could take hours for some articles to spread to others on Twitter, while you’ll get it almost instantaneously through a RSS reader.
Though Twitter definitely has it’s benefits, I wouldn’t call it a replacement for my feed reader. However, I definitely recommend using it in addition to your RSS reader for discovering articles that, as Berlin mentioned, you otherwise may never have come across.
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@shegeeks I agree with you, I use twitter along with my RSS reader (google reader) but it has not replaced it. But I must say that I read tweets more now than I do blog post.
I'm @waynesutton on twitter and I follow @shegeeks and @corvida on twitter
I think we can all attest to reading more tweets than blog posts :)
I use Twitter more and more, and find it useful in various ways – but definitely *in addition to* rather than instead of RSS feeds …
The question of a place to pick up on breaking news is an interesting one, Corvida. I don't think of an RSS reader as a particularly great place to do that, as there's so much volume to dig through. Sure you can set up filters and such but that's not going to set up a very efficient way to pick up a breaking story that could in effect be about almost anything.
I think of news aggregators as a pretty efficient way to pick up on breaking news, as well as places like Twitter, where people you're following are likely to be chatting about hot topics of the day.
RSS does have it's perks and downsized, but you've definitely outline a very
interesting point about RSS volume.
This is cool, but I'm looking to go the other way – I want to sub to an RSS feed and have it delivered to my Twitter account so I can “follow” a person that doesn't Twitter.
This is cool, but I'm looking to go the other way – I want to sub to an RSS feed and have it delivered to my Twitter account so I can “follow” a person that doesn't Twitter.
This is cool, but I'm looking to go the other way – I want to sub to an RSS feed and have it delivered to my Twitter account so I can “follow” a person that doesn't Twitter.