Poll: To Subscribe or Follow?
Tonight I watched a video with Robert Scoble on 43 Folders as he interviewed Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang (who Scoble calls “two of the best analysts in the tech industry”)
At 11:22 min/seconds into the interview:
JO:”Blogs now feel slow, or slower”
RS:”I’m not using RSS readers anymore”
JO:”I put that away as well. Most of my traffic is coming from Twitter. So that’s the 2nd piece-real time data is here.”
So…here’s a question for you…
I use a mixture – but primarily RSS. I don't need blog posts instantly. Most of the blogs I read are things that can be read at anytime of the day.
Twitter's great for breaking news – and I follow several breaking news sources via Twitter and not RSS – but I can't be bombarded with 500 tweets alerting me to new lengthy blog posts. My RSS Reader lets me read at my leisure.
I read blogs first to connect with people.
You will understand better than anyone that to connect with people through digital media, it takes relatively constant “commenting” (whatever that looks like).
For me to miss 1/3 or half of a blog's posts because I didn't see the tweet would negate their value to me. So for now, I'm a stalwart GooReader.
I love RSS the most, and I use Google Reader for it.
While Twitter is useful (and I do follow some bloggers there), you have to either be on Twitter right when they tweet about a new post, or spend time going through a backlog of hundreds and hundreds of tweets once you log onto Twitter (eg after work).
With RSS, the post is always there for me when I have time to read it, even if I go away for the weekend and don't check my reader for 3 days.
I agree with jdblundell: Twitter is great for breaking news, but the vast majority of blog posts are not that urgent.
Good call
I started making my commenting rounds again. I really missed hitting my old stomping grounds.
thanks for commenting…i really appreciate the feedback
Great question. And I loved the way your poll results were displayed.
I'm probably something of a “late bloomer” to social media. I've been trying a little bit of everything to see what works best for me. So far, I like the RSS feed the best. From a business standpoint, having an email address you can use to send communication has a lot of merit. That said, it probably serves the sender rather than the recipient, so it may not be the best solution in the long run.
Dave
Cool…I love the way that Twtpoll allowed me to embed it here and to push it around Twitter. What started this whole thing was all the talk about how “real time”feed like twitter is affecting RSS…from what i've seen via the poll and feedback…it'll take some time for 'old-schoolers' and 'late-bloomers' to adopt this. what i'm really curious about is whether early adopters of social media are not using RSS or using a mix of realtime and rss.
i got directly to my faves and use the RSS feedreader to allow me to sort thru 1000's of posts weekly. No way i could currently do that via twitter.
Thanks for stopping by…