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Comment by Evbn | Hacker News Reader

Why do people keep mentioning Twitter? It's not even vaguely related to what RSS does, any more than, say, a digital radio station you could tune iTunes to.

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When you boil it down Twitter, Facebook, and G+ do the exact same thing as RSS,but they are all just easier,less flexible, closed and more centralized. You publish something and your subscribers receive it....seems at least vaguely related to me, imo.

Except RSS doesn't have an access control layer; everything is public.

You can do authenticated feeds (RSS feeds are over http), but most readers don't support it for some reason....again its just not as convenient.

HTML doesn't have a access control layer either. So?

How exactly is Twitter the exact same thing as RSS? I don't really see how someone tweeting about a new blog post being the same as what RSS does in any way other than being notified that a blog post has been written and possibly a title. I agree it is pubsub but that's pretty shaky. If the implication is that because we have Twitter then we do not need RSS .. I just think that's sort of ridiculous; is 140 characters the end of the road now? If not then Twitter is not a great solution to replace RSS. You can argue that RSS feeds have become like unread email but I think that is a different issue.

I agree with you. I wasn't saying twitter is the exact same thing. Just vaguely related (as you said.. pubsub). Even without the character limit Twitter's functionality is a subset of what you can do with RSS.

For non-techies Twitter achieves what they would use RSS for (notification of content) with convenient annotations. Yes they are very different, but that's how it works in principle. I doubt RSS will ever be completely gone, but the number of human readers was never high and is unlikely to go up in future.

Even apps that make use of it will be moving away from the user being directly aware of it.

Insofar as a lot of sites publish their entire feed to Twitter, composing a huge list of publications could replicate Reader to an extent.

I've considered doing it as a stopgap, but it's just too laborious for sets of feeds numbering over 100, and will be inconsistent because some feeds will undoubtedly lack Twitter accounts.

Because if you can't subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds to follow the news and click on what interests you, the two options you're left with are either remembering to open a bunch of different sites a bunch of times a day to check the news or looking at your twitter stream. Most people I know have opted for the latter. In an RSS free world, I would too. Perhaps with the exception of opening HN (which I already do) and maybe reddit a few times a day.

Well, I haven't used RSS in years. I just follow bloggers & websites' on twitter. My twitter feed spits out all the news articles into a passive stream of noise without interrupting me (like an email would do), so it's pretty similar to RSS for me.

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