Why Twitter beats RSS: Context + Content = Added Value

I was chatting to Caitlin Fitzsimmons and Tom de Grunwald today about whether people liked just receiving streams with only blog posts on Twitter, or preferred a stream with combined Blog post + chat. Our conclusion was that more people like the combination of post and chat.

Our own experience is that the people following the chatstream (@freecloud) outnumbers those following the blogstream (@broadstuff) by about 4:1. Both have been going for about 2 years. Sure, not all of those on the chatstream are avid Broadstuff blog readers (shame on them ) but some are and many are occasional readers, and it is indicative of the trend in my view.

I must admit I haven't looked at an RSS reader for at least a year now. In fact, on reflection, I think nearly all of the people who I used to have an RSS feed from I now followon Twitter. I far prefer seeing their posts come up, seeing the context, and maybe having a chat with them about it.

Which leads us to hypothesise that the simple RSS feed is a dying phenomenon, as Comms with Content and Context is clearly more attractive than Comms with just Content. But looking at Friendfeed's struggles to gain ground, there is an optimal amount of it - too much in the stream and its becomes unmanageable or requires filtering (hence the growth of search and filtering functions, of which more later).

Its interesting thinking about Twitter's evolution too, and where this may go:

My own experience of Twitter was that from when I joined in early 2007 to about Dec 2007 it was full of the sort of people who were telling us what they had for lunch and was roundly and justly lampooned for it. For 2007 I just used twitter to stream the @broadstuff blog feed to those who wanted to use Twitter as their RSS replacement, as "the conversation" was usually so banal I couldn't be *rsed to follow it ( I have a theory that Twitter at the time was full of the same early adopters that find throwing sheep entertaining for more than a day or so? )

But around Dec 2007 something changed - as I noted at the time, people started to realise that if you added useful stuff to the conversation, you got more out of it too and the whole tenor of the system changed. I think it was sparked by some of the more thoughtful people deserting Facebook after Beacon.

Twitter in 2008 was in its heyday in my view, heavily colonised by interesting people saying interesting things, and increasingly passing links to useful articles. At this point I started to bother using it as a comms/chat system, and started passing Broadstuff blog post links in the chatstream as well. A few people didn't like this (and some still don't), but far more did so we continued.

By early 2009 Twitter was shifting usage again, as more Slebs and their mainstream followers came on board. One could argue that this is in fact a new Context + Content mode, as fans get not just news about their favoured slebs, but deeper context about them too, fro comments and the overall stream. Sadly, they have also brought the whole Advertising/PR circus with them (monetize being the mantra). Sadly, a few early users have also gone to "pimp my XXX" mode too, as the earlier social regulation of this sort of behaviour breaks down under the weight of commercial interests.

So where now, as Twitter goes from 2m to 39m users in the space of 2009 to date? One risk is that spam so ruins the content experience that people drop back to "pure" feeds of content again, like RSS. But one of the joys of Twitter is its an asymmetric pub/sub system, so you can cull noisy and vacuous people from your stream with little overall damage. The spammers are then forced to try and @you based in comments you make which is a far more expensive transaction than email spamming. In fact the cheapest spam seems to be to spam the trending #topics, but it is a fairly trivial update to cull that.

Hypothesis therefore is that the Context + Content mode will still be a (the?) resonant mode for Twitter for some time, though how it works will change depending on message and recipient.

With respect to Search - I am aware that "Real Time Search" is a Hot Topic on Twitter just now - here it comes again but in my view this is just a component of the overall Content + Context hypothesis, its just helping the find/filter process as volumes go up.

(An interesting aside: most very early adopters used nom-de-plumes, whereas 2008/9 adopters - coming off Facebook perhaps - tend to use own-names, and in fact a few were quite vocal about everyone having to change to "be genuine" - which is b*ll*cks in a conversational chat medium as its quickly discovered if you are or not, so this had now largely died down. In fact, I wonder if we will see a rise in nom de plumes from newbies as a way of making themselves look like old hands? )