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For those of you who don’t know, twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and receive other users’ updates, known as tweets. Tweets can be seen as text messages which move between users’ computers rather than mobile phones.

There are hundreds of thousands of twitter users around the world, all sitting and waiting for the latest tweet to come through. Receiving tweets is substantially less intrusive than instant messages, I know that’s one reason why I use twitter, on top of this, it’s really useful, sometimes, to know what everyone is up to, as it makes life easier in terms of following trends.

Bloggers and article publishers use RSS to stream their content to subscribers, in much the same way, this content could be streamed via tweets. Allowing a user to follow your tweet feed would give them an instant update the minute new content is released, not to forget the ability of retweeting and spreading the content further. Services such as Twitter Starsigns and tweather are fairly decent examples of how content is streamed outwards. With a site such as tweather, tweeple are able to subscribe to a tweather station and receive a weather update daily.

Most publishers have a number of categories on a website and provide the ability for users to subscribe to RSS feeds based on category; would it not make sense to also allow these users to follow category specific twitter streams? Keeping your finger on the pulse is something extremely important in the digital world we all live in; knowing what’s new the second it happens is very important and twitter can allow us to do this, possibly even better than RSS.

Am I completely off or do you think twitter streams could become more popular than RSS feeds?




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7 Responses to “To subscribe or to follow, that is the question”

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(Report abuse)


Twitters biggest strength could end up being its biggest weakness. The MICRO nature of the service gives off enough information to wet your lips, but it definitely does not satisfy the hunger.

RSS feeds, luckily, manages to get a bigger picture across, by allowing full articles and/or images, etc.

Twitter will only facilitate the sorting of content on the web!

(Report abuse)

DChetty on September 11th, 2008 at 11:58 am

Chris,

I like you and your posts here - but this was pure advertisement for your new services. Nothing to learn & nothing new for us techleader readers.

Dear techleader editorial staff - Please don’t allow such advertisement postings in future!
Thanks!

(Report abuse)

Anonym on September 11th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

I have to agree with Anonym on this one…

(Report abuse)

albert on September 11th, 2008 at 3:20 pm

Hi Anonym, the idea was not purely to drive traffic to those website, I apologize if that was how it seemed! I recently coded those websites, which actually do offer something, somewhat, useful and they do allude to my point, but yes, I agree with you that it did come across like that and I apologize.

The article still holds a great deal of relevance, the whole topic of twitter vs rss is something, which will be being explored in further detail amongst us social nuts :)

(Report abuse)

Christopher Mills on September 12th, 2008 at 12:12 am

It’s really great when you see a predication starting to come true. I see a huge movement towards people streaming their feeds and pushing Twitter more than RSS.

Have you noticed?

(Report abuse)

Christopher Mills on October 24th, 2008 at 1:37 am

It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place

(Report abuse)

Knight mayor on April 30th, 2009 at 5:54 am

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Christopher Mills is a highly experienced SEO and Web Development guru. With an impressive track record in blogging, web design, development, and web optimization, not to mention experience in hardware, operating systems, programming and networking makes him a Dalai Llama of computers.
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