One problem is that there is too much emphasis on short, witty quips in widely shared tweets. It has everyone going for the witty zinger and that makes conversation shallow and obnoxious. Occasionally there are decent tweetstorms, though.
Complete with all the problems of spam, overwhelm, etc. You gotta find your people, foster a community, and stay there. I owe a lot of my career to twitter I’d say. It’s an amazing place.
Ok, not directly. First it started as a proto semantic web protocol, at Netscape to syndicate links and titles for their portal.
Then Dave Winer used RSS to syndicate his weblog, scripting.com and started the marriage of blogs and feeds. But blogs at that time were more small paragraphs, less big articles. And every paragraph was syndicated. That's still visible in archives of long running blogs:
• http://scripting.com/2001/09/11.html
… which seems a lot twitter like. The focus on longer articles in blogging is something which started later, in 2001 or so, in my recollection.
Btw: Following those blurb-like RSS feeds in a traditional RSS reader with read markers is overwhelming, in my experience. I banned all those feeds into a "High Volume" folder where I more often than not mark all as read just to get ahead.
It's like a web page, itemized into a very regular syntax.
If you want to "tweet" using RSS, you need a URL somewhere where you can upload updates to XML content; then give people that URL.
Either you have to join some website where content (like blogs) you create are exported as RSS feeds, or else run your own domain.
I’m saying that it’s easily possible to imagine a world where the uses of RSS vary from what they’re used for today — different from the parent commentor.
Given that is true, isn't it "funny" that RSS is now non-existent compared to Twitter? ... I despair at the direction of the web.
In short, RSS is a feed of (mostly) professionally written articles while Twitter is full of amateurs expressing half baked thoughts in 140 characters. It is unfair to compare the two.