Is it over for RSS readers?

You can't drink scotch and twitter at the same time. I can't imagine life without my reader. Shields up.

I signed up on twitter, and finally got around to adding you... geez, you LIVE on there.

See, when I see it completely flooded with messages like that (translation: a long string of messages I'm not connected to), its utility to me crashes through the floor.

That, plus I don't have it set to bomb my phone for most of the day and I don't visit it too often means it's only at the novelty level for me at the moment.

RSS, on the other hand, is still key.

Krupo

100% agreed

I twittered and died on it

RSS workds

Richard

Add another vote for Krupo's line.

@Dennis - do you ever wonder whether there's a few of you who are becoming digital separatists? The twitter thing feels like a pretty exclusive clique - I can't see myself bothering unless a couple of dozen of my friends are also on there four or five times a day, which I doubt they ever will be. The news twitters ("tweets"?) are too frequent and too brief to be useful. And an RSS reader on an iPhone makes it convenient to keep up wherever I am in any case. Twitter just seems a bit... hyperactive.

(Having positioned myself as "mainstream" and Twitterers as dangerous extremists, I'm forced to remind myself that 90 per cent of my friends have no idea what RSS is.)

Personally I wasn't a fan of rss because once you start get a collection of feeds to gether takes ages to read it all but now I have my iPhone and using netnews wire with it sync service it is alot easier. The biggest reason rss is great for the iPhone is because its small because let's face it 3g isn't everywhere and rss is great over edge and then after going through my rss feeds on my iPhone I save the ones I wantro look at closer as unread and have a look on the computer or on wireless on my iphone.

@Richard - I don't see it that way at all but I understand why some people will think it's hyperactive. There's a ton of utility in Twitter for ME. I discover a heck of a lot things that way. But then I am in a narrow group of people who are tech junkies.

That's why I'm involved in a project to develop enterprise Twitter. Only tied to process and to auto-discovery.

What I DIDN'T say is that RSS readers have lost their utility. I still use GReader but not as much as I used to.

@marzy/@Richard: How many people use iPhones? When's it going to penetrate business?

At the end of the day, we tend to go where the conversations are happening that are important to us. In that sense, I am definitely an edgling.

@Dennis - everyone will have an iPhone one day. OK, that's an exaggeration, but everyone I know with a BlackBerry provided by work who plays with my iPhone wants it immediately. Certainly, devices with a screen big enough to be genuinely useable as browsers will oust all the BlackBerry type devices within a couple of years.

Ironically, I saw the benefits of Twitter much more when I got a client for the iPhone - if I had lots of friends or colleagues using it, I can see now how it might enable me to stay in touch much better. But it really is a microtrend: if you're part of the 1% of the population that does it, it's brilliant; for everyone else, it's utterly mystifying.

I would be fascinated by enterprise twitter. How would it go beyond a system of notifications ("I've finished the paint job, vanishing can start at 15:45") or a short-format chat room ("Lisa in HR is pregnant again")? I'm the first to admit I have limited vision for these sorts of things, but like a lot of people my age, the volume and abruptness of the messages on twitter-type systems just puts me right off - so I'd love to know how it gets over that hump (or whether I'm just developing generational mind-plaque).

My 1st reaction to Twitter was: "This is the biggest fskin' waste of time ever invented." Then I had an ah-ha moment. There are some good iPhone clients for Twitter including the iPhone Twitterific app plus Hahlo. As to 1% - I think that's over stating it by a mile. More like 0.0001%.

We're developing something that can (in the 1st use case) be seen as an auto discovery mechanism in extended network environments. The initial questions is: "Does anyone know why this sales portal is performing badly, users are reverting to manual input?" That's in an SAP environment (We thought we'd start somewhere easy ;)) but can go out to the whole network.

ESME (as we call it) though we know say Project Harpoon (as in the Fail Whale) seeks to address that in a massively scalable way by using a combination of auto created groups based on tag clouds generated in different ways.

To Vinnie's point - yep - I'm not saying otherwise, but I really want a single point of access to all the breadcrumbs people in whom I'm interested are leaving. Twitter allows me that cos people can autopost their stuff there and I can pick up accordingly.

An alternative is FriendFeed but I'm not sure I really like that as much, even though I can get threaded conversations there which I can't at Twitter and which also has a neat iPhone app with FFToGo.

I am with Richard.

Dennis, you know what delights me - hits on 1-2-3 year old posts of mine. I am prouder of my "evergreen" stuff than "breaking news" kind of stuff.

So RSS is not dead, and neither is Google search or links from other bloggers who I respect and link to and they link to mine...to me a balanced set of readers across these "channels" is important...

I do use a reader. When I can't find anything interesting on FF or Twitter for a while. And I do make it part of the daily routine. But I still catch myself not using a reader for days at a time.

I don't think RSS is dead. I admit that I get 80% of my links from Twitter and FF, but then I will subscribe to the feed for the writers I want to follow. I like to spend some time every day cruising the feeds to see what people are saying. I would miss a lot of good information if I only got info from Twitter and FF.

I've been pruning my Google Reader subscriptions recently. I have a "For Morning Coffee" folder that I hit fairly frequently but the subscriptions in that folder are mostly to aggregators like "Items shared by Robert Scoble" and TechCrunch. I let them do the work of finding the relevant and interesting stuff - I just don't have the time. I use the Twitter stream, supplied by twhirl and a-listers and their friends, to keep a pulse on things and occasionally stumble into the weird and interesting.