By now I assume everyone knows that Google Reader is scheduled for the chopping block in July. This is bad news for people like me who use Reader a lot. And by “a lot,” I mean it’s pretty much the primary tool I use during my working day. It comes in second to the app that allows me to write and publish blog posts, but only barely.
So fine, I’ll have to find a new RSS reader. And I understand that apparently using RSS to keep up with the web never really caught on. It joins dozens of other things that I love but that most of the world doesn’t.
Still, I have one question. Maybe someone in comments can provide an answer that actually makes sense. I hear over and over (and over and over) that Twitter has replaced RSS. And sure, in a way it has: I follow lots of people and they mostly post links to all their blog posts on Twitter.
But….don’t you miss a ton of stuff that way? I don’t follow Twitter every second of every day, which means lots of stuff just scrolls out of view and I never see it. The reason I use RSS is that I want to be able to scroll quickly through every post from a particular set of bloggers, and I want to be able to do it when I want to do it, not only in real-time when it happens to pop up in my Twitter feed.
So here’s my question: Am I missing something? Is Twitter really a replacement for RSS? It sure doesn’t seem like it to me.
