<story><title>Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS</title><url>http://www.staynalive.com/2011/05/twitter-and-facebook-both-quietly-kill.html?q=1</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bradleyland</author><text>The title is a bit of a double entendre. At first reading, I thought the claim was that (once again), Organization X had killed RSS (figuratively). As it turns out, Facebook and Twitter have, quite literally, killed RSS within the scope of their own systems by removing it from key locations.&lt;p&gt;In my view, RSS was never the right tool for this application anyway. Social networks are naturally conversational in nature, but you&apos;re only a part of the conversation while you&apos;re there.&lt;p&gt;In the economy of my attention, both Facebook and Twitter occupy a different position than the RSS feeds I follow. Facebook and Twitter are there for when I want them, but my RSS feed is the kind of thing where I try to at least review every headline. I don&apos;t want to miss anything in my RSS reader, but I&apos;m perfectly content to miss out on large portions of what occurs on Facebook and Twitter.&lt;p&gt;Twitter is probably closer in function to RSS -- for me, anyway -- than Facebook, in that I rely on it for &quot;pushed&quot; information that I rarely respond to (think service outages and status updates). This could, theoretically, have been fulfilled by RSS, but for some reason, I never made use of RSS that way.&lt;p&gt;I think one of the reasons for this (Twitter as a popular info-push medium) is that you &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; respond easily through Twitter, even if I only do it on rare occasions. Status blogs provided an avenue for response, but you often had to have an account on every blog... Ugh. Twitter is also great because you don&apos;t have to dig through the service website; you simply search Twitter for their company name and follow.&lt;p&gt;Facebook, on the other hand, is purely entertainment for me. I use it to keep up with friends and converse in a time-shifted manner. I cannot imagine collecting RSS feeds from Facebook streams.&lt;p&gt;Based my usage patterns, I don&apos;t see this as &quot;killing&quot; RSS for me in a general sense. Maybe I&apos;m a dying breed though.</text></comment>
<story><title>Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS</title><url>http://www.staynalive.com/2011/05/twitter-and-facebook-both-quietly-kill.html?q=1</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pstack</author><text>I have no interest in ever directly using Twitter and there&apos;s not enough content on there for me to bother with any workarounds. I currently use RSS for the one Twitter feed I bother to follow and if they ever really do get rid of RSS for their site, I&apos;ll just stop using even that. Not that much of a loss.&lt;p&gt;My habits are such that if you don&apos;t offer RSS feeds of information I want, I probably won&apos;t ever get your information &lt;i&gt;or&lt;/i&gt; go to your site. You&apos;re not going to sucker me into &quot;visiting regularly&quot;, just because you don&apos;t offer an RSS feed. I&apos;ll just move on and get what I want somewhere else.</text></comment>