I’m not exactly sure what your point is, of course Twitter is not RSS. However, publishing from RSS to Twitter is a very effective means of publicizing your blog (or other medium that utilizes a feed).
My problem with it is that it doesn’t do anything useful for me. If I want to know when you post something to your blog, I’ll subscribe to the RSS feed. Even though to some degree it does answer the question “What am I doing?”, the answer of “just posted X to my blog” can be better answered in other ways.
It isn’t lost on me that way too few people use RSS, and that you’ll then reach those people who use Twitter but not RSS by using twitterfeed. But Twitter isn’t a feed aggregator either. If someone is going to do this, I’d much rather see them have two Twitter accounts – one that is human generated only, and one acting to aggregate by also showing their automatically generated RSS feed tweets. That’s a lot of work on the source end, though.
Clearly, since this annoys me more than most people, I could also address this on my end and use a Twitter client that filters out twitterfeed tweets, and maybe a GreaseMonkey script to do the same on the Twitter.com interface.
In a more general sense, though, the issue is that using twitterfeed to automatically tweet the post’s title and URL isn’t content, it is meta-data. I’d be fine if people would tweet a Twitter length appropriate summary of the blog post (not a teaser or just the subject), and then link to the full post. That would actually be adding value, and something I wouldn’t get from seeing the post’s title in an RSS reader.
Twitter is not RSS!
Hi Dan,
I’m not exactly sure what your point is, of course Twitter is not RSS. However, publishing from RSS to Twitter is a very effective means of publicizing your blog (or other medium that utilizes a feed).
Doug
My problem with it is that it doesn’t do anything useful for me. If I want to know when you post something to your blog, I’ll subscribe to the RSS feed. Even though to some degree it does answer the question “What am I doing?”, the answer of “just posted X to my blog” can be better answered in other ways.
It isn’t lost on me that way too few people use RSS, and that you’ll then reach those people who use Twitter but not RSS by using twitterfeed. But Twitter isn’t a feed aggregator either. If someone is going to do this, I’d much rather see them have two Twitter accounts – one that is human generated only, and one acting to aggregate by also showing their automatically generated RSS feed tweets. That’s a lot of work on the source end, though.
Clearly, since this annoys me more than most people, I could also address this on my end and use a Twitter client that filters out twitterfeed tweets, and maybe a GreaseMonkey script to do the same on the Twitter.com interface.
In a more general sense, though, the issue is that using twitterfeed to automatically tweet the post’s title and URL isn’t content, it is meta-data. I’d be fine if people would tweet a Twitter length appropriate summary of the blog post (not a teaser or just the subject), and then link to the full post. That would actually be adding value, and something I wouldn’t get from seeing the post’s title in an RSS reader.