We’re social!
Twitter has easily replaced RSS as the communication channel of choice.
Only 5 years ago, RSS was seen as the most effective way to allow web viewers to receive federated content.
Two things changed this.
First: Firefox 2 and IE 7, launched within days of each other in October 2006, both chose to only render RSS (along with other XML) as XML. This meant you could no longer present RSS as formatted HTML so content providers were stuck with having to write and verify two types of page even if the content were the same. For automated generation, this was no issue, but for smaller news channels such as school journals this meant changing how you were reporting the news.
Second: people, groups and organisations started to tweet either through twitter, launched June 2006, or via Facebook, 2004.
Twitter is an easier way to reach an audience in that you can make all of the content public whereas only fellow Facebookers can view a Facebook tweet (I appreciate that many, like me use Twitter to update their FB accounts).
This public portal allows your audience to pull of the information they are interested in either by searching in Twitter or in Google.
That short tweet can be made in a variety of ways from separate apps on a smart phone to text messages and Facebook trackers.
Short links allow you to feature longer pieces of information in a properly branded way but the short tweet is the real hook.
After all, who has time to read a 150 word hook via a newsreader?
Posted: July 26th, 2010 under Social Networks, Work.