Web Design in Oklahoma City

7 comments (Add your own)

1. Michael wrote:

While both have their place, Twitter is fast becoming the global water cooler and destination of choice for rapid information. Take for example the announcement that Apple is pulling the Macworld show after January. Instantly, the news spread and Twitter is buzzing. While an RSS feed might have informed me of the same information, without Twitter, the news travels slower and is certainly less interesting.

December 16, 2008 @ 4:14 PM

2. Tommy Bailey wrote:

I never really thought of Twitter in that way, but when you look at it like a "content aggregator" it makes good sense. Good observation.

December 16, 2008 @ 4:27 PM

3. Kyle Ridolfo wrote:

Twitter's pretty popular, but not everyone is on it yet. Also, I know a lot of people like to download their RSS feeds and read during their commute - so RSS is about consuming content (not just announcing it).

It can be a bit much to see every new article appear in Twitter. To get around this some companies have two Twitter accounts: one that takes the place of RSS (announcing all new articles, etc), and one that is for bigger announcements or more traditional tweets. In a way this lets you control the volume of info coming at you from a given site/company/blogger.

December 16, 2008 @ 4:30 PM

4. Matt wrote:

I am getting your Twitter feed IN my RSS reader, because I don't really like having to go to another tool or site. If it's not in google reader I won't read it. I am sure others are the same way - and not everyone will know to subscribe to the RSS feed of your Twitter account. So don't stop the RSS!

December 17, 2008 @ 9:30 AM

5. Andrea Decker wrote:

Can I find a 12 Step Program to help me with this?: "if you're too busy to catch it when the tweet comes through, maybe you should just let it go."

Seriously though, Tweetdeck has become my new personalized "catalog" to the web. I find myself using my RSS reader infrequently. I did not intend for this to happen; it just happened.

December 17, 2008 @ 10:38 AM

6. Colin Rowley wrote:

Well, from personal experience, I'm a very faithful RSS follower - up until 3 weeks ago. Unfortunately, it takes me at least an hour per day to go through my RSS feeds (4-500 per day). I don't know about you, but when I'm under time constraints (which is most of the time), it is hard to keep up. If I miss 2-3 days, I'm already over the 1,000 mark.

While I need to pair down my RSS feeds I follow, each of them is important to me in their own way and I hate to let them go.

That said, using Twitter has become a nice ritual for me. I love that it requires short blurbs and that's it. If you have a doctoral thesis on something that interests me, you are required to narrow it down to a pretty nice thesis statement on Twitter to peak my interest for a "click". That kind of thing doesn't come easy in RSS. Rather I feel obligated to at least speed-read the post (some of my OCD coming out).

December 17, 2008 @ 11:31 AM

7. Jason Zimdars wrote:

You can't ever rely on a single source for anything -- especially information. Twitter is great because information hits the network so fast. When something breaks you hear it quickly on Twitter. When something is tweeted by your friends 10 times in an afternoon you know it something popular. There is that context and percolation which happens on Twitter that you can't get with an RSS feed.

But while twitter is fast and social, it can also be very shallow and mundane. It's hard to narrow it to a single topic. People make tweets and they often have wide an varying interests. You end up hearing what the cool kids are talking about regardless of what you might be interested in right now.

RSS is this great road for information to flow all over the web; in and out of social networks, and from site to site. So much of social networking rides on the broad shoulders of RSS. Where would we be without it?

RSS lets me monitor trends and reputation of our company on the web. It lets me see news in very fine slices that match my interests. It lets me quickly scan hundreds of headlines when I want to unlike the constant fire hose that is Twitter. I'll be keeping my RSS feeds, thank you.

It seems like the sentiment that Colin expressed is common. That tells me that we need better ways to display that information so it isn't so overwhelming. So that we can find and digest more effectively those things that matter to us.

December 17, 2008 @ 2:24 PM

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