Geotagged Tweets over London, England

A few days ago I read a comment from Jesse Stay in which he was suggesting that Twitter encourages disloyalty.

He feels that Twitter encourages potential blog subscribers to not subscribe, but rely on Twitter links instead to reach the content that they want to read.

I’m not so sure that this is vastly different from subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed, and then only reading the articles that have headers that look potentially interesting. We’re using the RSS feed as a filter in that case, and surely this is what we’re doing with Twitter.

Combined with search strings and hashtags, this does make using Tweets to find the content you want very appealing. It’s certainly much quicker than wading through a whole blog, and perhaps even quicker than scanning down a list from that RSS feed too.

If you’re already a frequent Twitter user, you’re probably already set up with a Twitter client such as Seesmic or Tweetdeck, where it’s easy to set up these searches. I have a few set up in Tweetdeck, in a separate column.

Of course there are many other ways to find content, search engines being the obvious one. There’s also real-time search such as Collecta, and services such as Backtype. I use these two.

Having said all this, if I find a really interesting blog, with a high proportion of posts of interest to me, then I will subscribe, and it goes on my small reading list. (I have to keep it small or I’d never read most of it, and that would defeat the point of having a reading list in the first place).