Twitter feeds and RSS feeds are two kinds of feeds that are commonly confused about their nature and design with both being arranged similarly and having information of the same nature. However, there are certain differences between the two feeds and this is what makes it important to know the difference so as not to mistake Twitter feeds for RSS feeds.
Twitter is a social networking site that lets anyone make tweets that are a bunch of characters that should not be more than 140 characters and can include a URL in the content. As content syndication, the website makes it possible for the participants to share short messages. The participants can take part in any conversation with hashtags being used to mark the conversations and makes it easier for anyone interested to follow the conversation and find out what is being discussed using the hashtag.
The hashtags are used to tag the tweets and anyone looking for a given topic will be able to follow the hashtags and find related tweets in the process. Twitter also lets someone add friends and expand their social circles and this means that their friends’ tweets will be added to their Twitter feed and regularly updated whenever their friends tweet on the social networking site.
Twitter feeds are live feeds and the changes are noticed immediately someone has sent a tweet. This means that no one is left behind in the conversation and they all get to maintain their attention on the topic of the conversation. Also, the social network site makes it possible for the feeds to be filtered down to a topic of interest and twitter is free to create categories that will be used as a way of differentiating which topics the user has a greater interest in and which ones should go to the live feed.
The use of the live feed makes it possible to capture events in real life and track their progress. This is very important for the events that take place in a short time but gain a lot of interest and attract lots of attention from the internet. This is the reason news usually spread very fast on the site when they are of interest to a huge crowd and the users will always get to react to what has taken place in real-time as well as spreading the news through shares to their growing social circles.
In contrast, an RSS feed acts in the same manner as a news aggregator and draws content from news events and other activities such as football matches, and with the content aggregation, the reader can get a summary of all those events complete with links to the actual information. The RSS feed summarizes all that massive amount of content and presents an excerpt to the reader which then means that the reader can make sense of the information more easily and doesn’t have to read through tons of information to get the same conclusion.
