Twitter and RSS

One of the most intriguing parts of the stolen Twitter documents published by Techcrunch last week was the notes on RSS. The people at Twitter don’t want Twitter to become “just a vehicle for RSS feeds.”

The notes suggest RSS might become prohibitively expensive to support and that seems reasonable given the amount of online content available in RSS format (although the notes also reveal the company’s ambition to become the first service with 1 billion users!) But I don’t think Twitter is in any danger of becoming just a feed reader or alert system, it’s already too vibrant a place, but RSS is one of the many natural and growing uses of Twitter.

The notes on RSS end with “Monetize?” It reads as though RSS feeds are not desirable and so perhaps it’s something Twitter should charge for which sounds strange to me. It’s important to reiterate that the Twitter documents were stolen and represent fragments of internal discussions with no context whatsoever. I bring it up here in order to make a more general point that applies to any company, not just Twitter.

Charging for RSS feeds in Twitter sounds odd to me because it would be more like the way governments generate revenue than businesses. It instantly made me think of the London congestion charge. It makes sense when you think of Twitter as infrastructure or “plumbing” for all of the online communications it has fostered and I don’t disagree with the analogy. The main difference is that Twitter is a private company.

Charging for behaviors you are trying to curb can be a powerful tool to change behavior but it doesn’t sound like a winning business model for a private company. It runs the risk that the customers that become the most valuable to you are the ones using your product in the exact way you don’t want it to be used and then you’re in a corner because you’ve suddenly created something completely different.

In this specific example, I’m not sure RSS-fed content could be so easily distinguished from “original”  tweets anyway. For example, I use Twitterfeed to import bookmarked links from Delicious. The message that appears in Twitter is the comment I write in Delicious, not an auto-generated title or description of the feed item so it’s no different than any other Tweet that includes a link.

Posted on July 20, 2009