Blanc on Discovery Via Twitter Versus RSS

15 June 2012

Transcript of technology writer Shawn Blanc on episode 65 of the B&B podcast, talking about ‘the state of RSS’ and its relationship with Twitter as a way to discover things to read: > There’s a lot of people saying, “I don’t check RSS. I just get all of my breaking news on Twitter.”, […] but what I like about RSS is that I can check it whenever I want. > > […] > If it’s important it will be there waiting for me in my RSS feed. If it’s on Twitter, you could miss it, or not. > > […] > Most of the time I only check those ten feeds that are my favorites; that’s what I look at every day because I enjoy reading those sites. And then for most everything else I find it through Twitter, right? That’s usually where you find the cool stuff. Most of the stuff, for my job, I discover through Twitter. Agreed. I discover far more on Twitter than I do via RSS feeds. > With Twitter versus RSS: You can still subscribe to something in RSS, but that doesn’t mean you’re ever going to see it again. […] Where are people actually engaging with links and articles? Is it in their RSS feeds or is it on Twitter? Personally, I discover and engage with more links and articles on Twitter.

Today I have an ‘Unread’ count of 1803 in my RSS reader. I subscribe to 118 RSS feeds. Of those subscriptions that post regularly I probably read five every single day, because I enjoy the writing. Once a week I skim through another fifty percent of the feeds and actually read about ten percent of those. As I was writing this, I found some feeds that I subscribed to years ago and have never read.

I follow 200 people on Twitter. I read Twitter sporadically and probably see less than thirty percent of the tweets on a given day. Of the things I’ve linked to on this site the majority (~80%) came from Twitter.

To keep the signal versus noise ratio high on Twitter, I have two criteria for following people: I have met you in person and/or you tweet things I find interesting or funny. If we haven’t met in person, I have no qualms unfollowing if your SVN drops. Nothing personal, we don’t have a relationship and I have limited time and attention.