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Twitter is a Crappy RSS Reader Replacement

This was not necessarily the point of what Gardener Campbell pulled out of an article about the perhaps sliding value of twitter as a business (Twitter is dead!)

and it brings to mine all of the crowing when Google put a stake through the hear of its greatest IMHO achievement.

Make no mistake- I get a huge amount of my important resources and beautiful bits of serendipity via twitter. It is insanely valuable. It is a giant showerhead of flow, and very often many of those drops are golden. And it is most definitely human filtered. That is the joy. The weirdness among the gold drops.

But away from the shower, it goes down the drain (oh yes, rely on retweets). Twitter is no replacement for the ability to quickly scan a reliable set of sources that collect the drops while away.

This is how efficiently twitter works for managing content flow. Several times last weeks I got people tweeting questions relating to something I sent out earlier, things that are published in this blog. Their recall is working, but as a system of information management, twitter leaves them standing wondering “where is that?”

So they tweet me and ask for it. And I have to fish in my own blog and resend links.

Twitter is a lazy way to get information you missed while away from the hose.

The whole notion of technology as “tool replacement” that you must forgo one for another, is a flawed approach. Think augmentation, into replacement. A scan of reliable resources checked vis RSS augmented by the nudges of twitter is how I roll.

And for those who might cry about the lack of time to review RSS feeds, I can tell you it is even less time consuming since so many of you are no longer blogging much.

So if you utter something about twitter as an rss reader replacement, just accept in advance this scowl of disagreement


creative commons licensed ( BY-ND ) flickr photo shared by warriorwoman531

Besides, your rss replacement is dead. So there.

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Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog
An early 90s builder of web stuff and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person. And he is 100% into the Fediverse (or tells himself so) Tooting as @cogdog@cosocial.ca

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