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Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

I look at this and say to myself "Felicia is using the wrong Twitter client. She should switch to the one that she actually wants. The only difficulty is that it might not exist yet."

Does it exist? What I think we might be looking for is a Twitter client that displays the usual timeline, but also can act like an RSS reader: For a subset of your followers, you can display a list of all their Tweets over the last 7 days that included a link, along with a preview of the content at that link. Surf down that display and mark a Tweet "read" and it disappears from that display (though it remains in the usual timeline).

Actually this might scream "Instapaper addon". I'd love to be able to select a subset of my Twitter followers and have their Tweeted URLs beamed directly into Instapaper to be read at my leisure. Come to think of it, I wonder if I could hack that up myself.

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I look at this and say to myself, "This dude's missing the point."

Twitter is not a superset of RSS. It does a small part of what I do with RSS, but not all of it, and not in as nice of a way.

The Twitter-Instapaper thing is a good idea, but it's just not the same as RSS.

I think what Felicia (a girl BTW) is saying is that it's really easy to "subscribe" to someone's Twitter or Facebook feed, but not so easy to "subscribe" to a RSS feed, therefore websites are removing the RSS feed.

I personally don't want to "subscribe" to a blog via Twitter or Facebook. I agree with Felicia that RSS is the way to go, but how long will it last if it's so difficult to set up for the end user?

Just to clarify, I think the grandparent's "this dude" referred to mechanical_fish.

Alas, it doesn't matter how well RSS works for its current users. What matters is how well it works for publishers.

It's not merely that Twitter is easier to subscribe to, that the feeds are easier to set up and serve (there's almost nothing to do; Twitter's engineers do all the work), that the Twitter link-sharing protocol is intuitively obvious, that Twitter has a legendary brand while nobody knows what RSS is, that Twitter clients show the actual rendered HTML of the linked page (complete with those ads) rather than an often-incomplete text teaser or a bunch of broken formatting.

No, the killer feature of Twitter is the viral loop. Any individual tweet can be trivially forwarded, or trivially broadcast to an entire hashtag. And every tweet or retweet is also a self-contained advertisement for its author and a call to action: It takes only one click to bring up the entire history of its author's Twitter stream, and only one click to subscribe to that author's future Tweets.

It is an almost trivial observation to say that those who don't understand RSS are condemned to reinvent it, poorly - but if you are going to reinvent it, why make it extra-difficult and do it using a proprietary platform and an as-of-yet non-existent client for that platform?

Because nobody planned to reinvent RSS. We can't even be perfectly sure that Twitter planned to invent Twitter! ;)

> Because nobody planned to reinvent RSS.

Indeed, there is not a lot of planning going on when developing brave new platforms. Lack of awareness or understanding of RSS leads people to devise strategies like Twitter lists and custom Twitter clients to keep track of periodically updated hypertext content they are interested in.

About the only thing Twitter-as-RSS does better than plain RSS is consolidation of multiple feeds into one easy-to-poll source which enables easier push-like functionality - essentially a Google Reader.

And RSS is a poor reinvention of Usenet. (But I support it.)

But it's got XML, so it's obviously better. (I kid.)

I found no combination of people with quite my taste on Twitter. There are always bits and pieces that get left out. My RSS reader gives me a more comprehensive overview and allows me to be more effective.

A better Twitter client won’t help with that: It can’t display information that’s not there.

My biggest problem with Twitter and Facebook is too much information. I am constantly pruning my RSS feed in the morning to be things I'm interested in right then. I need it to be a set of the most articles and web comics to me that I can consume in 20-30 minutes while I eat breakfast and drink my coffee. I want relevant information, but that cannot be solved by just throwing everything at me.

The last thing I want to do is sift through a bunch of @replys and find myself done with my breakfast but feeling empty.

I've been looking, and to a point, coding what I actually want from twitter along these lines, but I really don't think that type of client will ever exist for general consumption. Heck, finding a twitter client that actually goes back a day and grabs all the tweets since your last look is pretty hard (even some that claim they will don't. Twitter's crackdown on clients pretty much ended a good chunk of the innovation.

I guess I don't understand the full extent of Twitter's client crackdown. It's certainly a big problem with my line of thinking in this little thread. If Twitter clients can't innovate than Twitter is a dead end.

http://helloform.com/2011/03/dear-twitter/

http://gigaom.com/2011/03/12/why-twitter-should-think-twice-...

Flipboard, Paper.li, Editions, News.me, Zite, right? Or are you talking about something else?

I haven't tried aiming any of these things at Twitter feeds. Perhaps I should! Thanks for the tip.

In the ground principle, this is right, but I find they miss the compact and efficient (but a bit boring - and unsuprising in keynotes) list system. Twitter has understood it all.

We're actually working on this, really early stage but you can register your interest @ http://getchirp.com

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