Twitter is the new RSS

May 13, 2023

Personally, I am not as active in the Twitter sphere. As an organisation @langoor has a bit of a presence, but at @ruchir_p, I am fairly quiet.So why am I there in the first place? Initially, like a lot of other people, I joined Twitter to see what the rush was about. But I ended up staying for a completely different reason to what I think it was made for.The thing about Twitter is it can be as personal or impersonal as you want and while you can choose to keep your feed private, most people choose not to. This allows people to connect with celebrities and organisations alike without needing to know them on a personal level.In reality what this means is it becomes a media outlet on its own. Facebook has always been a lot more personal from a network perspective. The whole privacy layer adds a sense of belonging but does not expand your network as quickly. Also, from a business perspective, you do have the 'Pages' feature but they are a very passive source of information. You only see them if you visit the page a lot or if you hear from them under 'Updates'.This is where Twitter is different. But, how does this relate to the title? I am getting there.Twitter, especially at a personal level for me, allows me to connect with everyone from @barackobama to @reuters. It also lets me connect to smaller organisations like @vibewire or people I know. This just means, I get news not only from Reuters (who, by the way, are very good at publishing their story links to Twitter on the go) but from Vibewire or Barack Obama who have their own news items and stories.The one benefit RSS may have is that you can organise feeds wherever you want (limited by the relevant RSS tools of course) by the category and/or website. But Twitter, given the extent of applications that exist out there, is starting to do the same thing. In fact, in chronological order you are able to receive news from the people/organisations you wish to listen to at regular intervals.But there is room for RSS right? Of course there is and there always will be until there are people who are used to using RSS plugins. But Twitter, to me, on a daily basis is eradicating the need for those feeds as more and more people are coming on board and sharing their news. We have personally set up feeds for different organisations and in some instances they are reaching out to a thousand followers every time they tweet.I would say move over RSS, and Twitter can stay - until something better hits us again.