One large component of the “RSS Is Dead” idea is that services like Twitter offer a faster and more curated way to share content. But the problem is that to do this on Twitter, it involves sharing a link to the content and not the content itself. Tweetree solves this — using RSS.
When you log in to Tweetree with your Twitter credentials, you’ll see your normal Twitter stream, but whenever anyone shares a link, Tweetree goes out and grabs the content on that page via its RSS feed and places it right in your stream. Long articles are placed in a frame that can be scrolled through. This is a seamless way to read a ton of content without having to leave your Twitter stream.
Of course, there’s still a couple problems with this. The biggest one is that a number of popular content sites use partial feeds. That basically means that Tweetree will pull in the opening snippet of the story, but you’ll still have to click through to the actual story to see it. Another potential issue is that many sites use Google’s Feedburner product for their RSS feeds. That service has a history of poor performance when it comes to RSS feeds, so it’s possible that when you share a link through Twitter, it won’t yet be on the RSS feed for that site, so Tweetree won’t be able to pull it in.
Tweetree also updates in real-time, using the Twitter Search method of letting you know when new tweets are available and asks you to click a button to refresh your stream. Another nice feature is that Tweetree actually pulls the background that you set up for Twitter, so it looks similar to how your stream looks on twitter.com. And you can send tweets from it, see your replies,direct messages and even search tweets.
We previously covered Tweetree back in December when it launched a way to thread Twitter conversations, to make them easier to follow. That worked to some effect, but this is a much more compelling idea. Now if we could just remove the RSS middle man from the equation, it’d be a great idea.
Learn more about it in the video below.
Tweetree: web twitter client from Ryan Twomey on Vimeo.
when do we get to the point of app overload?
It’s like shopping at the supermarket for cereal. Too many choices!
Who gives a F about Twitter??? Seriously. Enough already.
How can you compare RSS and Twitter?
Good point on the fact that links won’t be identified as blog posts if they aren’t in the RSS stream yet. We’ve taken that into account though and avoided caching links if they have an rss stream on the page, but don’t appear in the stream themselves. That way as soon as they do show up in the stream they will be pulled in correctly.
Thanks for the write up MG.
This is an interesting feature for sure.
However, when it comes to web based twitter interfaces, I tend to prefer http://www.twitscoop.com (or tweetie on my iPhone).
More about mobile marketing
Great concept. I don’t normally twitter from within my web browser. I use TweetDeck as my desktop client. I prefer to have the option of clicking on links instead of auto-downloading content.
MG, give this a read:
lsvp.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/median-of-tweets-1/
Most people don’t give a crap about Twitter.
http://www.name...our-tweets.html Take a look at that, hilarious stuff about tweetree.
TwitterPower for FireFox does this too and injects all of this on Twitter.com. Really kick ass!
Quite nice. Someone (or probably lots of someones) is going to really nail the whole feed/stream user experience problem and it is going to become progressively easier and easier to manage our Internet interactions with feeds and streams – indeed with feeds and streams becoming the default mode of interaction for a lot of folks, online. I don’t know if this is it – but it’s going in the right direction.
The interesting question, I think, is what happens to the social networks: as the social graph becomes duplicated in multiple places and their hold on it becomes less of a unique asset, and as people move to more feed/stream interaction does the need to use Facebook or MySpace as a point of entry significantly diminish? Do they then go the way of homepage builders?
I created a new startup on tweetfoods.com also I am working on a startup call retweet.com and also perfectshavetweet, all with twitter functionality and its never covered on twitter! what the hell man!? F U MG! FU!
i MEAN TECHCRUNCH! I also am creating a techtweetcrunch.com start to discuss stuff about twitter and such, but mainly twitter.
ROFLMAO. Best response evar.
I must be missing something… RSS??? Go download jQuery and embed an iframe for each link on page load
twitter is getting old….
There are great posts on Tech Crunch and Mashable (60% of the time) but a ridiculous amount of energy is being spent on one service! Get over the spam-apps.
Regards to this post, you can already do this, it’s called FriendFeed.
No, actually you can’t do that on FriendFeed.
Semantics MG. the data output comparison between the two is apples to apples – Red delicious to Granny Smith yes, not in an iframe, and the display output is slightly different, but to say you can’t do that on FF is simply not true.
Please remove your RSS feed. Thanks in advance.
Seems interesting, however, the power of something like Feedly to manage your feeds in a more pleasant manner and its awesome integration with Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. (at least in Firefox) makes this completely redundant to me. I’m a massive twitter user, but there is enough noise in my stream already. Adding all my feeds in there as well would be a massive distraction as well as ensuring I missed some great articles – if I relied on it exclusively
Lame.
How can you not see that companies that named themselves Twee*** are doomed to failure. They:
1. Have no originality.
2. Put their destiny in the hands of another company which is the dumbest business move possible.
FU Nick! you know nothing about twitter. I have created a very successful twitter startup called TwitterLife.com and Twithealthy.com and also twitclothes.com all which have over 50 million users signed up and ready to go.
You are a loser! how sad, you should join my other startup called Twithate.com
Please keep your negative commets out of techcrunch.
Couger,
I ordered my Twit mask and gloves from twitclothes 3 weeks and haven’t got it yet. Can you hurry them up.
Ta
Jobby
I sent you an update on @twitclothes I will paste it here:
Doing right now: packaging twit mask and gloves for @jonjobby
I appologize for the delay. Please follow me on my new startup twitcheesecake.com – we sell nice cheese cakes with twitter functionality…hoping techcrunch will cover this startup. Instead of frosting I creatively put cool twit messages…its really cool.
Thanks again for the order from all of us @twitclothes
Say ‘NO’ to any Twitter app that asks for Twitter passwords, they have Twitter Oauth ready and is a MUST for any serious Twitter app.
Wasn’t it only you who said twitter would kill rss a few weeks ago?
OAuth is still in beta and is not yet stable. That being said we are working on implementing OAuth alongside our current login system as a separate option and should be rolling it out soon.
twitter is landfill site. just awful!
See our interview with TweeTree co-founder Costa Walcott: http://2above.c...-costa-walcott/