rss // Joshua Wagner Online

Is Twitter the New RSS?

July 8, 2009 | Technology

I have been thinking about this lately. Is Twitter replacing RSS? I mean, I seem to find my articles via Twitter, not my Google Reader.

Ok, here’s my line of thinking. Twitter is the real-time communication tool of the moment. The idea of RSS is that you don’t have to run to each site every 20 minutes to see if there’s something new. Well, Twitter and FriendFeed and the rest all make that insanely easy. You follow your favorite news sources, magazines, and blogs, and their new articles get sent to you in real time.

But there’s one problem. If you follow more than 75 people on Twitter, then you don’t get every tweet you follow. If you follow over 500, you pretty much only get like 5 minutes of history. So what happens when you’re at work and you can’t check Twitter? Well, you miss that great post.

Ok, so Twitter won’t be replacing RSS feeds and Google Reader quite yet. But it could happen.

Do you find yourself neglecting GooReader for Twitter? Do you think Twitter can replace feeds?

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How Do You Consume Online Media?

June 10, 2009 | Marketing | Technology

With all the means to get news, blog posts, and almost anything else on the web, which tools do you use? How efficient are they? Could they work better?

I was inspired by this post to think about my subscription practices, and I’ve found they could use some work. For my RSS feeds, I use Google Reader. I love it. But the number of articles per day has grown beyond what I can read everyday. What the above article suggested was to use email subscriptions for your must-read feeds. This would act as a filter and let you spend less time checking your feed reader. Cool.

So, my mind is taking that idea one step further. I find that for the few sites I frequent daily, I end up just checking their actual website. Why? Well, I comment on the posts. To do that, I have to be on their site. So why go through the RSS middleman? I did subscribe by email to these sites to see if it helped me at all. I think it has, at least a little.

I’ve found that I will probably end up with three categories of “feeds.”

A-list feeds that I just go to their site, but will also have some subscription to alert me (probably email and/or Twitter),
A-list feeds that I really like, but I don’t generally comment on or frequent the site, so I’ll get an email subscription,
Other feeds that I like enough to subscribe too, but that I just consume.

Of course, the feeds are always in flux. If I really start liking a feed in the third category, I’ll jump it somewhere above.

So what’s your way? Any cool tools you use to make it easier?

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New Layout, New Comments, New Feed

March 26, 2009 | Blog News

If you’ve been following my tweets for the past few days, you may have noticed a few about changing up my blog’s layout. Well, I think I’m done tweaking for now. I’ve done some layout changes, and I think it looks good. I’ve also set up a FeedBurner account to broadcast RSS feeds and to add an email subscription for my blog. (I don’t think you’ll need to resubscribe if you already are, but it might help in the long run if you do.) And finally, I’ve installed IntenseDebate for comments on the blog. The look is still quite simple, and I like it like that. Still, I may be adding some graphics here and there to add some color.

For those following on my Posterous and my WordPress accounts, my main blog is here.

Let me know what you think.

Posted via web from On Life, Stories, and Music

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