The Great RSS versus Twitter debate

Steve Gillmor kicks off a lively debate with his Rest in Peace, RSS

I don’t Twitter - much to the chagrin of many of my friends (I suspect many don’t consider me a friend anymore because I do not Twitter) – but I do use Twitter Search when I am researching a topic.

And I find I am awful at guessing what interesting tidbits hide behind the TinyURLs which most Tweets embed. Steve must have honed that skill.

Give me RSS feeds and readers any day. Particularly partial feeds so I can skim the first few lines and decide if I need to drill down.

But before I go too far on the RSS side of the debate let me say it is just another tool.  For me to write about disruptions for the Deal Architect blog I have to see patterns emerge over months and years. RSS I find , in a forest and trees context, makes me focus on leaves – conversations which last a few hours, then move on.

For me to write about the 40 innovation categories on the New Florence blog I also need a lot more variety than either RSS or Twitter provides. For recent posts I found ideas in Business Solutions, Electronic House, Hospitality Technology, Inc., Southwest Airline’s Spirit and Wired magazines. In their printed editions.  Those are, of course at the margin – I get plenty more each year from MIT Technology Review, Popular Science, NY Times, BusinessWeek and others. Even there I seem to have better luck scanning their web sites rather than relying on a RSS feed from a particular category they cover. Then there are vendor press releases which mostly arrive through email.

But my most important source of research is good old-fashioned verbal conversations. With my clients, vendors, people at conferences, people about their hobbies, people on airlines. That requires time away from both RSS and Twitter.

So, I keep looking for a tool which will allow me to synthesize all that. And if that would require me to hone the art of guessing what lies behind a TinyURL, I will gladly pay for some tutoring from Steve.