Is RSS Dead? Will Twitter Replace It?

I fell in love with RSS when I first learnt how to use it as I thought it was one of the most useful tools I had ever come across as it saved me so much time and made me more productive while using the web. I mean we waste so much time just surfing around and waiting for our favorite news sites and blogs to update so it makes perfect sense to have a system like RSS to deliver all the latest news directly to you. There is one massive problem with RSS…It’s for geeks. Don’t get me wrong, I love it but the vast majority of my friends and family would have no idea what it was or where to start and for those of you from a non tech background here is what RSS actually is, explained in plain English…

I used RSS for about a year and was while happy doing so but I always had a nagging feeling that there was an even better solution out there and in the last couple of months I haven’t actually opened my RSS reader once and instead have started using Twitter to do the majority of my reading online. No matter how hard Google has tried to add social features to Google Reader over the last year it just hasn’t worked as the process of sharing your feeds with people is just to laborious and clunky and never really took off. And this is where Twitter takes a huge lead as I can build up a network of people I trust/admire/are thought leaders and use my stream as a live reader of everything that is current and find links that I normally never would have.

Twitter may not be adopted fully by the masses yet but although slightly geeky it is a lot easier to understand than RSS and the common man in the street will use it as a sort of Live RSS reader within the next year.

Am I the only one who has ditched RSS in favor of twitter? Will RSS go down as a great stop gap solution for a few years while we searched for the live “real time” updates we craved? Will you drop RSS in favor of Twitter?