Twitter as an Alternative Form of RSS
So traditionally I am fairly anti-twitter, at least as it is often used, the bird below summing up my thoughts on the subject quite nicely. It just doesn’t work for me, I have enough of a time keeping up with the data I want and actively seek out, I don’t need to be spending further time sifting through the sea of endless inane drivel some people end up posting to fill up the space between their interesting notes, I really just don’t need to know how awesome the burger at lunch was or how wasted you were last night. I also have no real interest in subjecting others to the same from me. So aside from saving a name on the system in case it became one of those things you simply had to have as part of society I haven’t done anything with twitter up to now.
I was listening to some of my tech netcasts recently, however, which of course always manage to put in some mention of the service and it occurred to me in the kinds of things they brought up from it, how similar twitter was sometimes treated to an rss feed. I started thinking about how twitter could be used as a kind of aggregate, interactive rss feed and was intrigued. Admittedly the analogy breaks down in spots as there is often enough no supporting data beyond the post itself, however some blogs/sites dump their full content to the feed anyway so that users don’t need to visit the home site so maybe its more on target then I give it credit for.
If twitter was just a bit cleaner, rather than being mostly full of people “randomly bragging about their unexceptional lives”, to paraphrase a favorite SuperNews episode. I could see myself using it as such. Even now I’m a bit more open to the idea of at least looking at someone’s stream to see if, just maybe, they are clean enough to follow.
Its in this spirit that I’ve decided to link the blog to twitter and have notifications of new post/changes appear there. For now that and maybe apologies about glitches will be all that appears there however. So if you’re a twitter user and want to add the blog to your “feed” check out twitter.com/KazuyaDarklight