Other than a few techies, no one understands or uses RSS. In fact, even among most of my techie friends, I'm one of the few who actively reads RSS. It just doesn't work right now in terms of "normal" people being able to use it.
And anyway, saying "we already have the web, why do we need Twitter" is wrong. That's like saying "we already have cellphones, why do we need SMS". Different kinds of information tend to have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "why do we need Twitter?". While I consider it a useless service there are obviously a huge amount of people in disagreement with me, which would imply that it serves some purpose. What I am saying is "Why would we need a decentralized, open Twitter?"
As far as RSS being to complicated goes, that (in my eyes) is a failure of browser authors then. Excuse my disconnect from the mainstream browsers, since I've been using Opera exclusively for about 10 years now. But for me subscribing to an RSS feed is a matter of pressing the orange RSS icon in my URL bar, which shows me a clear overview of the history of the feed with a very large subscribe button at the top. The end result is that the feed shows up in a list under (and looking exactly like) my mail filters (sort of like the folders in most common mail clients) including an unread count and notification for new ones, which seems about as simple as it gets.
The difference is in synchronization. If I subscribe to a Twitter feed, I get the contents of that feed no matter how I access my Twitter stream. With RSS, I have to make sure that my feeds are identical in all the browsers I use. Bookmark synchronization helps, but only for desktop browsers - I can't synchronize bookmarks (yet) between my desktop and my smartphone in a totally transparent way. Even with bookmark sync. taking care of synchronizing your subscriptions, there's still no way of synchronizing read items between instances. So items I read on my lunch break at work won't be marked as such when I get home.
I don't think that is the problem. It's more a problem of explaining the concept and having good readers. Even I, when I started reading feeds, spent a long time trying to find a reader and setting it up (Google Reader, by the way).
Contrast with Twitter - easy to explain the concept, 5 seconds to sign up and get started.
There is just a tremendous difference in usability between RSS and Twitter.
RSS: find the icon (displayed differently on every website), follow a multi-step process to sign up (minimum of three clicks/choices), open another application which you've never heard of before to read this information. Or, click the orange icon on your browser, which is not prominent and is totally undescribed and undocumented. Same deal: minimum of three clicks/choices.
This should be a huge lesson for all developers. You made some shit, call it RSS or Atom, that does exactly what Twitter does, only it's hard to use. People sort of use it, once they can figure it out. Twitter came along and made it one-click to follow Brad Pitt. There are great-grandmothers and 2-year-olds using Twitter, but none using RSS.
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I think the big difference is usability.
Other than a few techies, no one understands or uses RSS. In fact, even among most of my techie friends, I'm one of the few who actively reads RSS. It just doesn't work right now in terms of "normal" people being able to use it.
And anyway, saying "we already have the web, why do we need Twitter" is wrong. That's like saying "we already have cellphones, why do we need SMS". Different kinds of information tend to have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "why do we need Twitter?". While I consider it a useless service there are obviously a huge amount of people in disagreement with me, which would imply that it serves some purpose. What I am saying is "Why would we need a decentralized, open Twitter?"
As far as RSS being to complicated goes, that (in my eyes) is a failure of browser authors then. Excuse my disconnect from the mainstream browsers, since I've been using Opera exclusively for about 10 years now. But for me subscribing to an RSS feed is a matter of pressing the orange RSS icon in my URL bar, which shows me a clear overview of the history of the feed with a very large subscribe button at the top. The end result is that the feed shows up in a list under (and looking exactly like) my mail filters (sort of like the folders in most common mail clients) including an unread count and notification for new ones, which seems about as simple as it gets.
The difference is in synchronization. If I subscribe to a Twitter feed, I get the contents of that feed no matter how I access my Twitter stream. With RSS, I have to make sure that my feeds are identical in all the browsers I use. Bookmark synchronization helps, but only for desktop browsers - I can't synchronize bookmarks (yet) between my desktop and my smartphone in a totally transparent way. Even with bookmark sync. taking care of synchronizing your subscriptions, there's still no way of synchronizing read items between instances. So items I read on my lunch break at work won't be marked as such when I get home.
Firefox has a similar feature.
I don't think that is the problem. It's more a problem of explaining the concept and having good readers. Even I, when I started reading feeds, spent a long time trying to find a reader and setting it up (Google Reader, by the way).
Contrast with Twitter - easy to explain the concept, 5 seconds to sign up and get started.
There is just a tremendous difference in usability between RSS and Twitter.
RSS: find the icon (displayed differently on every website), follow a multi-step process to sign up (minimum of three clicks/choices), open another application which you've never heard of before to read this information. Or, click the orange icon on your browser, which is not prominent and is totally undescribed and undocumented. Same deal: minimum of three clicks/choices.
Twitter: click follow. Content magically appears in whatever app you're already using.
This should be a huge lesson for all developers. You made some shit, call it RSS or Atom, that does exactly what Twitter does, only it's hard to use. People sort of use it, once they can figure it out. Twitter came along and made it one-click to follow Brad Pitt. There are great-grandmothers and 2-year-olds using Twitter, but none using RSS.