Ever imagined what replacing RSS with Twitter can do to reading news?

It starts years back, this story — with a mild heart attack. Google had just killed Google Reader and I was thoroughly devastated. My carefully curated list of sources was useless now. While there were many fine RSS readers, cross-device unread count, that was so great about Google Reader, was gone. There were services like Feedly that reacted quickly to fill the gap, but you know geeks. Workflow disruption is the last thing we can take. Replacing one portion of our carefully constructed workflow with another (even with a near-perfect replacement) causes great brouhaha. It truly does.

During this time it so happened that I was itching to learn two technologies that I was convinced were going to have a great future: iOS and Node. I was also equally fascinated by Twitter and quickly ran through it’s RESTful API. I realized that news sources, apart from publishing RSS feeds of their articles were also publishing links to all the same articles very faithfully on Twitter. A bright LED (gotta respect energy efficiency)went off in my head. How about I write an simple Node app that talks to the Twitter API to read news off these sources on Twitter? Most of the news sources I cared about were already on Twitter. For example, while Marco Arment the persson was active on the handle @marcoarment, his blog marco.org’s “feed” was being published on @marco_org. Similar was the case with John Gruber. While the person was active on @gruber, Daring Fireball’s “feed” was available on @daringfireball. Just like it was on RSS. This was perfect for my needs. The app could purely be based on Twitter alone to read news and safely ignore RSS completely.

But why Twitter? Why not good old, rock-solid RSS? Why not just use Feedly? It was possible to use Feedly to read off of Twitter links as well. And could one not, just read stuff off of Twitter directly? Sure, you could do that. But if you’re still reading this article, may be you are the type that takes news reading seriously and still uses or used an RSS reader app to be able to read in a distraction-free environment and also be able to track read/unread count. As I built a simple prototype, it dawned on me that several nice features were possible when RSS was replaced with Twitter as the only source of news in a news reading app.

I then started coding Tociety, an iOS app and a simple, associated backend writen in Node, that tracked things like unread counts and Twitter conversations around shared articles.

Unread count in the hundreds and thousands!

But first off, I wanted to have unread count tracked across devices just like Google Reader had, and not be like a locally installed RSS reader that couldn’t sync unread count across devices. But, I had to do better than that. As with any other over-ambitious geek wanting to read gigabytes of text everyday, RSS readers I used showed me hundreds, if not thousands of unread articles. Admit it, you have the same problem. In reality though, only two things matter:

1. Are there any new articles available from my favorite source?
2. If there are more than 100 unread articles, I’m never gonna care about 101 and beyond — like ever.

So, here is what Tociety does: It let’s you know if there are new articles to read in the sources you’ve added. The point is you are not going to remember if you had 12 unread articles and 2 new articles made that number 14 now. The count doesn’t matter. What matters is that there are new articles. So, Tociety changes the count field of the source to “new” if new articles available. Not some number you can’t make out. And unread articles are capped at 100.

This way, you immediately know if your favorite source has published something new and you feel less guilty due to the fatal combiation of oversubscription and under-reading.

Source of the sources

RSS readers typically let you create groups and add individual RSS feeds under them. But Tociety is based on Twitter, so it leverages Twitter lists to group and read from sources on Twitter. This choice seemed a natural one for an app like Tociety. The beauty of Twitter lists is that while you can create a list and add Twitter handles/sources to them, you need not follow Twitter handles in that list. This has the nice effect of the tweets from those sources not cluttering your timeline while you are still able to read the source’s tweets at your convenience. The Toceity app allows you to quickly get started with a bunch of curated Twitter lists. In Tociety they are called “packs”. When you subscribe to a pack, under the hood, you are really subscribing to a Twitter list (which is curated by us) via your Twitter account.

What’s best, you can add your own Twitter lists anew, or if you already have them — they automatically appear in the app complete with unread count tracking for every source you’ve added to your lists. This way, Tociety cleanly leverages Twitter itself and let’s you subscribe and unsubscribe to sources without cluttering up your Twitter feed. Best of all, if for some reason you don’t have the Toceity app, you can still read news via twitter.com itself, since your lists are all there once you login. Of course the advantage of reading via Tociety would be that unread articles count and other features will be available to you as you read, enhancing your reading experience.

Joining the conversation

So far, if it seems to you like Tociety is bending over backwards to somehow shoehorn Twitter into being like RSS, the following features should convince you otherwise. While RSS readers bring you news from the source, the most interesting conversations about articles published today happen arguably on Twitter. And Tociety has access to those conversations natively. And you can join in too.

Via Twitter’s streaming API, the Tociety backend tracks conversations related to articles tweeted by sources you’ve subscribed to. You can now read and participate in those conversations right from within the app. And did I mention about the cool animation that brings in the convesation dialog box?

Sharing stuff

While we read via an RSS reader, we turn to Twitter to share stuff we care about. However, since Tociety is in essence, an extension of Twitter designed for serious readers, the article you are reading is technically from a tweet and all you need to do, to share it, is just retweet and that functionality is built right into the Tociety app itself.

While you are reading an article, you can easily like it or retweet it. Since your Twitter account is what you use to login into the Tociety app, those likes and retweets happen via your Twitter account.

Let me know what you think

Tociety is an experiment in replacing RSS with Twitter. You can also think of it as an extension to Twitter for serious news readers. I really hope you like it like we do. Download the Tociety iOS app now and give it a spin! Let me know what you think about it via Twitter on @shuveb.