Money24Seven: Twitter And Social Syndication

Twitter And Social Syndication…

The widespread adoption of RSS - Really Simple Syndication - was a turning point for accessing information on the web. Instead of constantly visiting key sites throughout the day to keep up with information, people could simply subscribe to everything being published on those sites, and then use whatever software they wanted to to aggregate and read it.

It was, effectively, the first content “mash-up” technology available on the web…

RSS has been a real game-changer for anyone that regularly consumes web based information. It’s shifted the process of collecting content from a manual to an automated one, and has made it easy for people to follow hundreds of sites that could be publishing content of interest to them. Equally important, adoption of RSS by publishers has taken off, with most major news organization, blogs, and local publications now supporting it. Widespread adoption by all parties has brought it to critical mass, making the benefits offered by RSS really compelling.

But there are also some downsides that come along with that…

As an essentially frictionless process, RSS has made it easy for people to find themselves receiving far more information than they can possibly consume. It isn’t uncommon for people to receive many thousands of updates a day, with only a few dozen being relevant or interesting. The work that they previously had to invest in visiting sites to access content has now shifted to the task of sorting through the content that they keep receiving automatically. And that can be a much harder task.

The other challenge most people face with RSS is keeping on top of what sites they should be subscribing to. There are millions of RSS enabled sites available covering just about every topic imaginable. It isn’t easy for folks to know what new sites they should be adding and - perhaps more importantly - which existing ones they should drop. My experience is that people tend to add most of the of sites they end up following when they first start using an RSS reader, and then stop paying much attention to it as time goes by. Because of that, they end up missing out on a lot of great new content.

That said, I believe there is a way to overcome these limitations and really maximize the potential of RSS. The key is to leverage the interests, insights, breadth, experience of my social network, and effectively ‘crowd source’ editorial control to them to create unique and relevant topical feeds.

I call this process Social Syndication.

A great platform for social syndication is Twitter. As a community, Twitter users can publish short (140 character) updates on any topic they want, and they can subscribe to the updates of any other members they want to follow. What makes this so powerful for social syndication is that these updates (called ‘Tweets’) can contain links to other content, and can also be tagged with searchable keywords (called “HashTags”). Combined, these capabilities can effectively create ‘virtual feeds’ on any specific topic.