Rest in Peace, RSS
Steve Gillmo,
TechCrunchIT,
May 06, 2009
There has been a lot of blog reaction to this article suggesting that RSS is dead and has been replaced by Twitter. Most people reading it probably found it by RSS, since while Twitter is really good at real-time, it is not nearly so good for content syndication. Why not? Real-time networks are much less dense than content networks, because people have a limited capacity to keep up with connections in real time. Because the networks are much less dense, it takes many more hops for content to work its way through the net, meaning that most content can reach only a limited set of recipients (the obvious exceptions being the 'big spike' celebrities who have come to typify the Twitter experience). So Twitter can't duplicate the function of RSS, which is to widely distribute (most people's) content, which is why most people read this article via their RSS feed, and not Twitter.
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