RSS – Not a recipe for boredom

Robert Scoble wrote an article earlier today about how he is bored with the discussions around RSS. Basically, RSS is not real time, and Twitter offers the best access to news and information.  I am being very loose with the summary, but it’s really just best to read his short article if you want to get his meaning.

He ends by asking “What about you? Is RSS interesting or boring to you? Why?”.  This struck me immediately as I have been spending more and more time on Google Reader recently reading RSS,. and I figured I should write up a response.  I should say that I fit somewhere in-between a news hound like Robert or Louis and what I would call a casual RSS user (someone who adds a feed to their My Yahoo page for example).

I wanted to make just two points to answer his question.  I find RSS to still be quite exciting.  This is in part due to the social aspects of Google Reader that have been brought online recently, and in part due to new and better filters which are available.

The first point I want to make is that while Twitter is a great way to get the most recent information, but it is just a big black hole.  If you have the time to watch everything getting sucked into the void you can derive a lot of value, but once the tweets have passed into the void beyond they are gone.  One of the first things I do in the morning is check in with the Twitter trending topics.  This morning I saw that Senator Kennedy had died.  Trending topics can be a great Twitter filter.  This news was not in my paper, nor was it in Google Reader yet, making Twitter’s speed a benefit in this regard.  I filter Twitter by following a number of topics via searches, and I read the filtered content through RSS and Google Reader.  I am basically putting a video camera right in front of the black hole which is recording everything on a particular subject that goes in.  I don’t need to read all of those items, but I have them captured should I need them.  I agree with Robert that Twitter is important, and I agree that filters are important (even better filters than we have now), but it is the ability to grab that filtered Twitter content as RSS that makes Twitter really useful to me.

Secondly, I have to ask where is all of the great content in Twitter is coming from if not RSS?  Isn’t it PubSubHubBub and RSS feeding these new post from the blogs into Twitter and FriendFeed super fast?  Even the articles that feed into Twitter a little slower are often coming from people who are monitoring various news and blog sources (through an RSS reader).  In my mind, RSS is not boring because it is the root of getting this information distributed.  I love hearing about new advances in getting information into RSS faster.

Robert is right though, filtering is super important.  This is why I am finding the new social features in Google Reader nice.  I am able to look very quickly at articles for shares and likes to see how popular articles are.  I can sort articles by comments which can be helpful as well.  The filters are not perfect yet, but better than they were.  Filtering and search functionality will continue to improve and I will continue to take advantage of those in my feed reader.