Dick Costolo, co-founder and CEO of the popular RSS service Feedburner, is soon going to be working for Twitter as the company’s COO. In a way, this feels very appropriate: when Google bought Feedburner, RSS was the rising means by which users frequented content sources. Now that’s all changing.
Many a former RSS user has turned to Twitter to get information as it hits the ‘net. Certain Twitter clients such as TweetDeck make it very easy to aggregate new Twitter updates from your favorite content sources. And given the ease of opening a Twitter client and clicking on links, it’s not all that surprising that RSS is slowly going the way of the dodo.
An example of TweetDeck being used RSS-style.
Most RSS users, about 55% of them, rely on a web-based client like Google Reader. By comparison, Twitter data trackers Twitstat claims that only a fifth of Twitter users are on the web interface. This is important because third-party Twitter clients are what allow users to filter through the feed and find the information they want. So the vast majority of Twitter users are using clients in a way conducive to replacing RSS.
One very important factor in all of this is the rise of Twitter clients on the mobile phone. Let’s consider the iPhone. Many techie has wrote about the phenomenon of forgoing the browser when there’s an app that does the job. Open Safari and go to Wikipedia? Use Wikipanion. Want to fine movie times? Launch Moviefone. Part of the appeal of this practice is that apps are frequently built to be far more functional than the general website. This is certainly the case for Twitter clients. Why use the web interface when you can use Tweetie to read Twitter updates from people close to you?
And it’s not just the techies who are thinking that way. In my experience, all you have to do is suggest a Twitter client to a friend, and they’ll be quick to start using it. This feeds Twitter’s takeover of RSS as this puts more people in a position to use Twitter as one would an RSS reader. So not only are people switching from RSS to Twitter, but people who would have never used RSS are rocking Twitter clients.
