The Calming Joys of RSS

During the last years, Twitter was my main news source. For an information aficionado like me, Twitter is sexy. It never sleeps, it’s always hot, but it has a huge usability problem: Because of its serial news ticker nature, you’re forced to check your Timeline continuously if you want to keep the ball. The more Twitter accounts you follow, the more often you have to check your Timeline, or you will fall back irretrievably.

This week I had enough of this continuous race to catch up and decided to try RSS seriously, for the first time. Yeah, you heard right: Believe it or not, although being a heavy internet user since the early 90’s, I’ve never really tried RSS. So, I created a Feedly account, installed the Reeder app on iPhone and Mac, switched most of my news subscriptions from Twitter to RSS (which works for practically every major blog and web news ticker), and… rejoiced.

First, Reeder is an excellent app, which cleverly wraps a broad functional palette into an optical attractive and easy to use package. Reeder is one of those apps you love to use, even if you don’t have to, because their design makes using them a pure joy.

Second, it’s a relief to have your news automagically downloaded in the background, neatly sorted, stripped off of ads and set in a clear and standardised layout, waiting for you, whenever you have time to read.

The latter is the key point of the story. Your Twitter timeline is an unstructured, continuous stream. It won’t wait for you. It lures you into spending more and more of your time in your Timeline. It won’t help you picking specific sources. In contrast to this, an RSS reader helps you by downloading and structuring new information, like a good, discreet secretary.

What about my Twitter timeline? From now on, I’ll follow only Twitter accounts unrelated to blogs or web news tickers. This reduces the amount of tweets in an order, that checking my Timeline only once or twice a day is more than enough to keep the ball.