MediaViews.de

Steve Gillmor of Techcrunch wished RSS „to rest in peace“. Her argued that Twitter  (and Facebook, Friendfeed, …) have taken over RSS’ function to „push“ content to the consumer  and is therefore no longer needed from a consumer perspective.

I think he is wrong. RSS is a far superior technology compared to twitter to push content to consumers.  The limitations  of twitter are obvious and are similar to short messages vs. email: while you have only 140 characters in twitter, you can have rich media delivered with RSS. See these two examples as an example. Choose for yourself: which of these previews gives you a better impression of the actual article?

While Twitter is great to get a short headline and a link to a source from a friend – i would rather get the stories previewd in a RSS style (top in picture) than in 100 characters and a shortened link (twitter style in bottom of picture). Think about it: you dont discover new fantastic news sources everyday. If you are like me you read about 5-10 sites regularly and a few additional articles which you find throughout the web or which you get recommend via twitter, facebook & Co. Therefore you propably read >80% of your daily articles from regular sources, which works better with RSS.  So switching completely to twitter would have a lot of disadvantages for me: „crippled“/limited news previews for all my stories and i also may miss a few sources because still a lot of publishing houses dont use twiter yet (or not properly) and local news stories are seldom retweetet.

If RSS is so great, why is everybody buzzing about Twitter when it comes to media sharing? Because – of course – it has its own advantages:
-    Easy Customization: - just follow/unfollow
-    Personal: direct feedback and communication is possible
-    Share & Recommandations: Utilizes the social graph (Retweet & co)
-    Quick: 140 characters dont take much time
-    Simplicity: no copy & paste from ugly RSS feeds
-    All in one: Only one stream to look at – not 10 different websites

So Twitter and the whole „statusphere“ are great but they wont replace RSS – just like short messages on the mobile phone did not replace a real call and/or email.  From my perspective both have their own tasks:

-    RSS: rich preview of actual media
-    twitter: link tipps, personal communication, breaking news, …

expertnews.me
So if these two technologies enrich each other – lets combine them. Thats what i try to do with expertnews.me. The following screenshot gives a simple example of what i mean. While the RSS feed from Mashable gives a actual preview of a Masable story, (bottom) Pete Cashmore (boss of Mashable) gives a  link via twitter for further reading (top).

On expertnews.me users can follow news from the experts they trust on the topics they care about via a twitter-style feed.

Ist main features are:
-    Follow experts (and not accounts on specific services) to get their news – you dont mind if the publish the content via twitter or RSS or any other service
-    Discover the best an most important sources/experts for your topics in the expert directory
-    Compile expert teams around specific topics (e.g. Hamburg or iphone development)
-    Share and comment your stories easily via facebook and/or twitter

In short expertnews.me is a combination of twitter, google reader and an expert directory with ratings (think Qype/Yelp for experts). With this approach you get the advantages of both services (RSS and twitter) in one:

From RSS
-    rich media preview of news articles
-    you can choose from all relevant sources (because everybody uses RSS)

From twitter
-    Easy Customization: same as twitter – just follow/unfollow experts
-    Personal: use twitter or facebook to communicate with the experts
-    Share & Recommandations: share via twitter /facebook
-    Quick: 140 characters dont take much time – twitter is integrated
-    Simplicity: copy & paste not necessary, since you only click on follow in the expert directory
-    All in one: You have your RSS and twitter feed in one feed combined

Sounds interesting? Check out the early alpha/prototype on expertnews.me

Please give feedback on http://twitter.com/kwkrass or comment below – thanks for reading and testing!

Karsten Wysk Allgemein