Really Simple…Something
Twitter’s API changes mean that RSS is a better option for news.
MacStories had a great article up awhile back comparing two third-party Twitter clients with the official iOS Twitter app, highlighting the often significant differences one can expect when using different clients to access the same platform.
Since I exclusively use Twitter by way of Tweetbot (one of the two third-party clients mentioned in the article), it’s interesting to see how different my experience is from those using the official client. That is because Twitter’s API — the method by which external apps plug into the Twitter infrastructure — severely limits what these third party clients can do. As Federico Viticci of MacStories noted:
Twitter is split in Legacy Twitter and Modern Twitter, and it increasingly seems like users and developers of classic clients will have to stay in the past of the service. Perfectly functional (for now), beautiful in their delightful touches, but ultimately limited.
That makes me sad. I use Twitter for news, and I have no interest in many of the features being promoted by the new app. The near certainty that Twitter will eventually cut off all third-party apps makes me hesitate to continue to rely so heavily on it. So I decided to implement an alternative, one that has been startlingly effective: Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes on the Internet has seen its cute little orange icon decorating their favorite pages. I won’t bore you with a description of what RSS is or does. There are many other places out there with better explanations than I could give. What I can say is that RSS used to be a pain in the ass to use, mitigated only somewhat by Google Reader. When Reader went under a few years back, RSS fell off my radar.
Since then, Twitter has been my primary news stream. But, as mentioned above, its trajectory of late hasn’t been encouraging (quadrants anyone?). So I’ve been on the lookout for alternatives. There’s always sites like Tumblr if Twitter-style microblogging is really what you’re after. For me, I want a constant stream of (mostly technology-related) news. Twitter was convenient because I followed various news outlets and had their updates pushed to me.
RSS achieves the same thing, but with slightly more work. Since Twitter is centralized, it’s easy to find news sources and one tap to follow them. (Of course, centralization also has its downsides, such as the API nonsense referenced above.) RSS requires you to go out on the Internet, hunt down the RSS feed location, and enter it in your reader. There are services that will reduce the friction of finding and adding content, such as the one I mention below. But ultimately you are going to be investing a bit more time upfront.
My solution ended up being to use the beautiful Reeder news reading app in conjunction with the Feedbin RSS syncing service. I get the news I care about, updated nearly instantly, synced between my various devices. And because RSS is a standards-based technology, it’s under no one entity’s control. So unlike Twitter, which constantly forces me to endure increasingly vulgar attempts to monetize my eyeballs, RSS simply delivers the news I want without any nonsense.
The only real problem I’ve encountered is that Reeder for Mac does not include any kind of ad blocking feature. This means that even though I don’t see ads on publications’ websites when I view them in Safari, I often do see them in Reeder. This was never an issue with Twitter, because its links always opened straight into my browser. However, once I enabled Adguard’s protections for Reeder, the ads disappeared. I’m now in tech news heaven, and I’d recommend you take a look at RSS if you want to keep up on the stories that matter to you.
If you’re interested in technology, here are a few RSS links to get your reader started:
And here are a few gaming links too:
Of course, you can’t follow your favorite celebrities on RSS the way you can on Twitter, but maybe that’s a good thing.
