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Twitter as RSS: Reciprocally Stupid Syndication

I keep thinking about the idea that “Twitter is killing RSS,” and it makes me uncomfortable.

I’ll leave it to the technologists to debate the merits of using Twitter vs. RSS from a network standpoint — my own misgivings are cultural. It goes back to my nightmare scenario of a wasteland of marketers blasting tweets at each other — people who’ve dropped all pretense of using Twitter as a conversation tool (save as the means by which they grow their follower count)  and just use it for full bore marketing blasts.

If you’ve got anywhere over a few thousand followers, or are otherwise following few while being followed by many, you’ve pretty much given up on Twitter as a two-way communication tool. Throw in things like scheduled tweets (at least until they can find a way to also pre-schedule @replies to your scheduled Tweets), or RSS-to-Twitter. Automatically porting your RSS feed into your Twitter stream just seems so… indiscriminate.

In some ways, I guess I’m a hypocrite — I regularly use Twitter to harass my friends with silly links, whereas I would previously bother them individually via IM. However, when I send an IM or e-mail to someone to stick an earworm in their head, or give them a silly link, I am fairly selective — I won’t blast it out to my entire address book. However, in return for that selectiveness, I’m expecting they’ll see it, and maybe give a response (perhaps even a particular response).

Of course, if you’re working on the assumption that only a small minority of your followers will even see, and fewer even care, about any given one of your Twitter posts, then it’s in your interest to keep pumping out updates. It’s a shotgun approach. And with the implied reciprocal nature of Twitter following, it’s like you’re basically asking, “If you give me permission to spam you, I will give you permission to spam me.”

There isn’t really a wrong way to use Twitter, I suppose, but it just feels icky. To torture metaphors, it’s like with analog telephone landlines — we used them for person to person communication, until we started tying up the lines for our dialup modems. Sure, you can use a single phoneline for both. Until you can’t.

Ultimately, it’s not about the protocol — we can RSS-to-Twitter and pull the Twitter RSS feed back and round and round again — it’s what kind of interaction we expect when we pick up the line. Conversation, or people just blasting URLs at each other.

There’s still going to be a role — just like RSS readers didn’t kill the traditional Web site main page, Twitter (and Twitter-like things like Friendfeed, Facebook, whatever — social status updaters / social linksharing services) won’t kill RSS.

Am I missing the point? It’s possible. Leave a comment and let me know the real deal.

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