Truthfully, I can't think of a reason to keep using an RSS reader. Additionally, I also don't need to manage 2 sets of people I'm following. I've already worked Twitter into my daily routine for communication, so there isn't another site I need to log into to find articles. When I look at the current feature set of my RSS reader, it does the same things I described above, but checking it has constantly felt like a chore. People can easily (un)follow me if it's (un)interesting. Twitter made it easy for sites to embed a share button, too. If I write something or find something that's interesting, I'm likely to tweet/RT it. If you look at my favorites, they are overwhelmingly tweets containing a link. I don't always have time to read a link right away, so I use the favorite feature as a way to bookmark a tweet until I have time to come back and read it. When I check these, I often discover content that I would have missed otherwise.Ĭombine that with straight up search and managing multiple accounts and I find random stuff all the time. A majority of people I see on there are not people I follow. I have several saved searches and lists that I check periodically. This also gives me a chance to discover new, interesting people that I might want to follow.

This could be due to the ease with which the Twitter interface and mobile app allow RTs. It seems like the volume of RTs has increased over the last 6 months people are sharing more. People I follow retweet (RT) a post, from someone I don't follow, that contains a link to an article. This is the simplest and easiest way to read interesting articles since I'm already following people I find interesting. People I follow tweet a link to an article. That makes it easy to ignore links that don't sound interesting. Many RSS readers added 'following' other users later, but by then it was too late.Īlso, with only 140 characters, people get to the point about where the link goes. If they don't or if they have too much noise, then you can simply unsubscribe. The users you follow will (hopefully) weed out articles that are not interesting, so you don't need to. Subscribing to a site via RSS means that you subscribe to all of the content on that feed.

Strangely, RSS readers have become an obsolete, thing of the past for me and I didn't even realize it until recently. I used to subscribe to blogs via RSS through Bloglines, then Google Reader.

Rss of twitter feed