Patrick Howell O’Neill, writing for Gizmodo, sings the praises of Real Simple Syndication. He calls it an “ancient and unsexy alternative to Twitter,” which is weird because personally, I don’t see Twitter and RSS really living in the same address.

Twitter is micro-blogging, and you follow a bunch of different micro-blogs to see what they say. Feedly (one of the better RSS readers) is a way for users to follow a wide variety of posts. Personally, I don’t really use my Instagram account, but I follow several Instagrammers via RSS. I could even do the same thing with Twitter accounts, but I don’t because I can’t then mute RTs, and that is one of the secrets to taming one’s Twitter feed.

O’Neill argues Twitter’s value proposition is up-to-the-second news, and I guess that’s right if you simply follow news feeds on Twitter. I prefer to read the actual news on the news websites via RSS in Feedly than just see a link to read the same story on Twitter. RSS isn’t really slow. It just feels slower because Twitter is a continuous stream of hot takes.

I prefer a little of both. I follow plenty of people on Twitter, but I curate who and why and always mute RTs because I only want a specific person or entity’s thoughts, not their curated RTs. Plus, with RSS and Feedly, I get the news with time to actually process.

He also mentions email newsletters as the wave of the future. Curiouser and curiouser.