Tuesday, September 25, 2012
RSS Feeds vs. Twitter
A year or two ago I set up my Google Reader account with RSS feeds from various library, technology, and education-related blogs and websites. Everyday for a week or two I would diligently log into my iGoogle site (remember those) which my Google Reader "fed" into. I would try to scan the headlines, and read a full post or two, and then that feeling of information overload set in! I felt as though I just couldn't keep up just as Craig Burgess described in his post, "Are blogs still relevant?" (http://geniusdivision.com/2012/06/20/are-blogs-still-relevant/).
Then came "Google+" and "Google Chrome" which started phasing out the iGoogle site (it will no longer be available after November 1, 2013). I sort of walked away from my Google Reader and honestly didn't miss it.
Enter the "mobile everything" phase. I found if information was on my phone I would read it...anytime, anywhere. I found that I could enter my Google Reader into my mobile FlipBoard app, and suddenly reading the RSS feed headlines became fun again. So what made me stop? "Push" or lack there of.
Twitter is quick, brief, and it pushes the information I want right in front of me by way of notifications on my phone. Do I read every Tweet? No way! But I can search for hashtags related to subjects that interest me (at that moment) and have them "pushed" to me without searching out feeds, and updating my aggregator. In addition to the push technology and the ability to search with hashtags, Twitter also has something RSS feeds do not...people! The "social" nature of following people versus a blog has wider appeal to me.
Perhaps I am not using RSS feeds to their full current potential out of a lack of better understanding, but for this busy graduate student and mom, they have long since died on the vine!
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Thanks for your post, Shannon. I also find Twitter to work best for me for the reasons you stated. And yes, "people" do make the difference!
ReplyDeleteHi Shannon,
ReplyDeleteI think you are completely right about Twitter, the ease of quick, short social interactions is appealing to many people; it's like micro-networking. I like blogs because of the privacy and the fact that I can decide exactly who sees my blog, especially since blogs generally contain posts and ideas a lot longer than 140 characters and I must admit, I'm not completely comfortable with my thoughts being available to the world quite yet. I admire your social confidence and love your older blog posts. It's interesting to see how others interpreted each thread and I enjoy reading about it. I hope you keep posting!
First, I have to say that your blog is invigorating! I love the vibrant colors. You make some great points and Twitter has a greater focus on networking and connecting with people all across the globe. It makes it a great place for education to take place for students, librarians, and teachers. The sky is the limit!
ReplyDeleteHaving some technical troubles on my end, but this and above post made by Rachel Lee!
DeleteThanks for the encouragement everyone!
ReplyDeleteI completely agree about information overload! And I'm someone who reads the New York Times website every day and listens to NPR for at least an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. I have never been able to get into consistently using RSS feeds because it was just too much! If I wasn't getting news other places, maybe I would rely on them more, but I have always felt that even though interesting things would pop up, I'd never be able to slog through it all and keep up; meanwhile, I was getting most of my daily news from NPR and NYTimes. I know that the point of RSS feeds are to keep it simple and easy and all in one place, but it is overwhelming even so.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's just me, but I don't mind information overload. Twitter feels like an information, um, underload to me. The way I could see Twitter using this sort of thing is to link blog posts through tweets. Maybe it's a question of preference. I want to read things like "25 creative ways to use an apostrophe" or something, and you really can't do that in Twitter. You'd have to link from somewhere else to get it within the limit. It seems to me that RSS Feeds do the same thing, but also let you sit and read all posts in one place. Google Feed seemed like it allowed you to search by keyword, which may not be as exact as hashtags, but for this librophile who loves reading blog posts, Twitter is a shiny, pretty program that looks better than it ends up being.
ReplyDeleteAlso, many of the blogs that I read are ARGs (alternate reality game) that tell a story through their posts. My favorite, Marble Hornets, uses a vlog, several twitter accounts, and a blog to add to its atmosphere. Some of the other ARGs are solely blog-based, and this would require a whole different story structure to accomplish in Twitter. It can be done, mind you (the New Yorker did an event where an author posted an entire novel in tweets over a month-long period), but it would destroy the creepy, horrifying atmosphere the blog would try to build. Just my two cents.
-Jake