Today I am kick starting a new experiment, replacing my RSS subscriptions with Twitter follows. Over the past few months I’ve begun following various interesting people, my Twitter feed getting more and more rich with content that I am interested in. Really using it as a source of what’s going on in the technology industry rather than a way to communicate, but anyway….

When running through my RSS feed subscriptions I found that around 80% of them are on Twitter in one shape or another, as well as publishing said RSS content in their own Twitter feeds. With that, I’m now effectively duplicating my subscriptions in Google Reader, and also on Twitter.

The difference though is Twitter is two way. Whilst some Twitter accounts are purely setup as one way publishing, most engage back with their user base which is something you just don’t get with RSS. Also, the viral power of Twitter feeds is huge compared to RSS – the sharing (retweeting) ability has an instant impact. I’m getting to the point now that I think using Twitter has a much richer experience for the user, and without a doubt far more engaging.

Therefore, I’m currently replacing all my rss feeds with Twitter follows. There are still gaps, some people still don’t use Twitter, or don’t publish their content via Twitter. You also lose the ability to read entire articles via twitter without clicking a link, but most of my subscriptions are only a preview anyway. It’ll be interesting, but hopefully a great time saver.

Very interested if anyone else is doing this?

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 and is filed under Technology, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.