I read some interesting thought on the Mashable blog about the relationship between RSS and microblogging. If you think about the two technologies, there are for sure some evident similarities, i.e. they both deliver a stream of short items with high semantical concentration(*).
In RSS you usually get also a bigger amount of text, but to stay simple, we don’t lose generality if we see RSS as just a list of links about some topic.
Microblogging is in fact more general: it allows personal communication and link sharing. The content of a message must necessarily be compressed in 140 characters. That’s why I think that every message can be seen as a set of keywords – of course leaving out common words, articles, prepositions, and the like.
What you can do with these keywords, of course for twits containing urls, is to use them as tags for the url. Hence, you can basically build – over Twitter (**) – a RSS feed for whatever topic you like; moreover you can build a folksonomy of tags for it. Not bad, what do you think?
The question here is what’s the future of RSS with the increasing diffusion of Twitter, Twitter-like sites, and services built over Twitter (yet again, give a look to @footytweets, or @bakertweet, and you will see the potential here).
Many newspapers already use Twitter as a means for broadcasting updates and news alerts (the two important examples here: @bbcnews and @cnn). Thousands of users are already using these twits as a replacement for their RSS aggregators. The success of Twitter as a news alert broadcaster relies on its higher versatility with respect to its RSS counterpart: you can use keywords, hash tags, comments, together with urls. You may object that all of these features are more or less already present in RSS. Nonetheless, their usage is not immediate as in Twitter, and there is no single point of aggregation as Twitter offers.
Naturally, there’s always a dark side 🙂 Finding relevant content in Twitter is not an easy task. There’s plenty of services claiming to be able to recommend users to whom you could be interested (see Mr. Tweet for the most popular example and an interesting application of a recommender system). However, a killer application here is still to appear and no single recommender is able to get you the real number of interesting twits you would like to get (also partially due to serious limitation in the search APIs that Twitter makes available).
This is what I would call filtering good content; we also need to mention that how to filter out bad content from twits is an issue that hasn’t been solved. It’s very easy to manage bad users: spammers get usually identified and blocked quickly, due to the intrinsically tightly coupled interest that twitterers have on the content of what they read (in other words, as soon as they realize it’s a spammer, they report it to Twitter). But what about filtering out content that is simply not interesting? One user you follow may write something irrelevant to the reasons for which you usually read his or her twits, and you may like to read only those in which you are interested. This is still an open issue.
Addressing the bad points is not an easy task. Nonetheless, I must say that I already see microblogging as a good replacement for RSS. Many users are starting to use Twitter this way. And I’m realizing, as I write this post, that I’m slowly doing the same, removing RSS feeds I don’t read anymore because I follow their update on Twitter.
(*) this is a definition I coined for a research proposal I still like a lot 🙂
(**) ok, I’m using the terms Twitter and microblog interchangeably, but if you think about the expression Google it you’ll realize that the winner takes it all – including the right of naming the appropriate service.