Why Twitter will save RSS

I’m a huge fan of RSS. It is the glue that holds much of the internet together. It allows anyone to stay on top of the hoards of information on the web quickly and easily, without having to visit a website to get updates.

Publishers have embraced it. RSS feeds are included in all blog platforms as standard and now, more and more, you see that little orange logo appearing in browser address bars.

News organisations can clearly see the advantage too. With the democratisation of the web, readers are no longer loyal (they are too busy meta-reading). They no longer go and buy the same brand of news day after day. They can pick and choose, using social recommendation or aggregators like Google News to pull together the best pieces of the web. This poses problems for these websites however. Problems that RSS solves.

But there is a big problem with RSS. And this is that most people don’t know how to consume RSS feeds. RSS readers (despite the fact I use mine every day) don’t work for the majority. They are fiddly and cumbersome and can quickly become unwieldy.

This is why I believe Twitter might be the solution to the RSS problem. And as far as I can tell, many news organisations feel the same way.

Despite the fact that Twitter is still only used by a proportion of the population of the UK, media outlets have embraced it. Just take a look at this list of newspaper Twitter feeds. Why is this? The answer is that it is a great way for readers to subscribe to what are essentially RSS feeds. And this is making RSS sexy. You can now get your updates from the BBC Today Programme alongside your updates from Andy Murray and Danny DeVito.

And what is even better is that if readers want to read the article, they have to click through (and view some adverts) rather than simply consuming information within the ‘closed’ feed reader.

I’ve increasingly found myself subscribing to feeds through Twitter rather than my RSS reader. It’s usually for websites where don’t necessarily want to see and read absolutely everything published, but I want to stay in touch. I want to stay connected.

With so much more information out there, I still believe that RSS is a great way to sort, consume and reference content on the web. It just needs a more consumer-friendly vehicle to make it work. Most wont even know it’s RSS, but then, often the best technology is kind that works seamlessly in the background, making everything that bit easier.

Danny Whatmough