Twitter vs. RSS - That Battle That Never Should Have Been

Back in November 2008, I created a Twitter account to test Twitter as an alternative to RSS. Would the masses use Twitter as a real-time push to blog entries over my RSS feed?

Here are the total number of subscribers right now:

1519 Twitter followers
272 RSS subscribers

I swear by my RSS feeds, but I've noted the hesitancy of the "average joe" in adopting this form of syndication. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to be more user friendly... less intimidating.

My friend and colleague Daniel makes an excellent point I believe is worth revisiting. He wrote this comment on this blog exactly one year ago this month.

Here's something that works just fine (RSS), it's a standard supported all over the place and it's essentially universal.

Twitter depends on one closed source company that still pretty much has no idea how to monetize their service (read: unstable), and it's restricted only to people using Twitter, obviously.

It just seems redundant to me: "Hey, RSS blows, I'm going to hook my RSS feed up to Twitter so that people can access my content in the trendiest, most roundabout and restrictive way possible". It's totally inefficient.