Former Google exec and the cofounder/CEO of RSS service Feedburner Dick Costolo is Twitter’s new chief operating officer, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Costolo, who sold Feedburner to Google for $100 million in 2007, left Google in July. We’d heard he was looking to start a new company, but obviously Twitter swooped in and grabbed him.
Steve Gillmor is going to love this, of course, since he proclaimed that RSS was dead and Twitter was the new messaging protocol bus, or something to that effect. “Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.”
Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s existing head of operations (and also from Google), will presumably remain with the company and report to Costolo.
Costolo, who is also an early Twitter investor, is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter sorely needs. The company hasn’t launched any new features in recent memory, and continues to have regular downtime. In fact, Twitter’s inability to build features and keep the service live is a serious competitive disadvantage. Costolo can presumably fix all that.
Twitter is actively hiring more senior people, we’ve heard. In July they hired Alexander Macgillivray, Google’s associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel.
twitter is taking over the world!
hahaha, good joke
Hmmm… no it isn’t… twitter hype is.
Jon @ WoodMarvels.com
Well Said
Is that all there’s to it?
Or, is this news-as-it-comes kind of article?
Either way, he’s doing pretty well in his career.
And, in all due respect, has to be the most boring article on TechCrunch.
Doesn’t Twitter use RSS to Feed other apps and websites or is it all APi’s these days?
Every twitter user is available through RSS. Maybe its just me, but I use Google Reader to follow several twitter accounts… things like woot.com because I want to know what today’s offer is, but I’d ignore/miss it if it was mixed with tweets from my friends.
Woot’s twitter account just posts it’s own RSS feed. Why don’t you just add http://woot.com/Blog/Feed.ashx to your google reader account?
Good point.
Its actually funny because alot of twitter accounts are actually fed through rss feeds of their associated blogs.
I am the same way.
Michael please be more specific as to why or what part of RSS is dead. I subscribe to RSS feeds through Google Reader and would never visit the 70+ sites I get feeds from everyday to see what has been updated.
Yes. Twitter has feeds for individual users, search results, replies, you name it. Mashups and individuals rely on them.
But, since RSS is *DEFINITELY*DEAD*, Costolo’s first job as COO will be to immediately pull the plug on those feeds, because, you know, it’s definitely dead now.
Comparing RSS and Twitter is dumb as both possess different functionalities and are worlds apart.
Twitter cannot replace RSS until it has a character limitation (140 characters). Twitter just can say things in short form, RSS will be worth for sure.
Twitter’s search result RSS feed is DEAD and empty just after a few days.
And RSS != feeds. There’s Atom.
And who exactly gives a flying dutchman’s flaming fart about the difference between RSS and Atom? For all intents and purposes “RSS” is just a shortcut / synonym for “news feed” and encompasses Atom. Stop picking other people’s nits.
I don’t think RSS is going to die soon. Please look at number of websites (news, blogs) that use RSS. If RSS dies, Atom will die to because they are basically similar. There is no other alternative to XML based feeds. I think he just wants to move on. RSS is a very boring technology because it is plain XML file.
TechCrunch still has an RSS feed.
+1
Shh! We are ignoring the fact that Twitter doesn’t really do anything. And proclaiming that since it does nothing it must be able to do everything!
::Cancels google reader account::
Wait, there’s more to the article than the headline?
I kind of know what you mean. We like a little more substance in our RSS feed!
It’s ironic that I, along with thousands of other people got to this article through an RSS feed.
yeah, i was being saronic
Sardonic perhaps?
Actually, the Saronic gulf is a beautiful place to visit. Maybe for your next breakdown?
I, along with perhaps thousands of other people, got to this article through Twitter. Just a fun counterpoint Imran
Appropriately, I got the exact opposite reply when I posted about why I don’t use Twitter.
I think RSS is doing just fine though, thanks.
Hey Imran! Glad to see I’m not the only Ignitian who reads TC and uses RSS feeds.
Great pick up. He is the man.
RSS > Twitter
right, but it seems that some people spend so much time on Twitter, they look at their RSS reader and realise that they’ve fallen so far behind that it’s easier to just ignore it.
apparently, multi-tasking is hard for some, so they proclaim one medium is dead.
Congrats to Twitter and Dick! The humor level at Twitter HQ just doubled.
Forgive me … but how are Twitter and RSS even related?
They are both used for content discovery. Yet, I find it hard to argue that Twitter directly compete with RSS (an open format; not an application). If I used twitter to do what I use RSS for, I’d be terribly inefficient. I skim everything in my RSS reader, twitter would give me a headache if I tried to keep up with the chaos.
My Stats:
27 subscriptions on Google Reader, I skim 100%
737 followers on Twitter, I skim less than 1%
I still think twitter is a fad. I respect the idea of minimalist design as a competitive advantage. However, it’s becoming a breading ground for spammers & a chaotic mess.
It is indeed a big mess of spam and randomness while with RSS you get exactly what you ask for.
atom/rss makes it so i don’t have to unnecessarily go to hundreds of different web sites.
there is nothing worse that headline only RSS feeds, which is essentially what Twitter is to me right now in terms of news. i love twitter, but it has a separate purpose so far.
the person who gives twitter links full text readability within the interface with the click of a button will be due for a big pay-day; they’ll also get me to ditch google reader.
Yeah, but aren’t the vast majority of RSS feeds just the title and a two sentence summary and you need to go to the page to read what it is actually all about? Doesn’t seem much different to me.
Depends on the site. Blogs like TC, Venturebeat give the full article. Slashdot gives the entire summary.
New sites of course (nytimes) insist on driving traffic to their sites and only summarize.
For full text readability within the interface and much more try http://www.twittertim.es
Let us know your feedback !
i can get a full article via rss, i listen to full podcast via rss, cant do either of those things with twitter, it only 140 characters and only can deliver links not any rich media. RSS dead sure for people who never really used it in the first place.
RSS won’t die… in fact it’s still in it’s early stages. Just think about how few people know what RSS is
Besides, everybody I converted to using a feed reader, loves it.
Who started this “Twitter will replace RSS” meme? I’d really like to know.
I can’t stand Twitter precisely because many users just duplicate what’s on their RSS. And they can only capture 140 characters’ worth of text, rather than a real snippet or, better still, the full text of the post on RSS. Additionally, many Twitter users add links infrequently (and manually), or incompletely, unlike the complete, automated of RSS feed.
And I don’t like to mix my social life with my blog-reading life. Twitter is fine if you’re doing your little status updates. But incessant one-liners with bit.ly links replacing RSS? Please. This meme has got to stop.
Am I the only one who finds this stupid. Why are people confusing between RSS as a protocol versus the app which delivers the message.
Sure Google Reader or Netvibes maybe dead and Twitter is taking over as the news discovery mechanism. However RSS as a protocol is not…
ps – Twitter also uses RSS…
Is it me or aren’t twitter feeds basically RSS themselves? So isn’t twitter actually increasing the popularity and usage of RSS or am I missing something?
If RSS died, then go ahead, remove the Feedburner count button from your site, and replace it with a Twittercounter button.
That’s what I thought…
What a stupid title. My site serves 500,000 RSS consumers daily. You call that DEAD?
For those who missed the sarcasm in the article, did you also miss the fact that feedburner != RSS?
I really don’t get all this Twitter stuff. I FOUND this article in my Google Reader. Duh… If TechCrunch really believes that RSS is dead why are they still feeding it? Try shutting it off and see how readership plummets.
He’s being sarcastic.
My gut is to say there’s no way that RSS could be dead – because I use it so much. But coming from a guy like Costolo, maybe I should re-think my assumptions.
Well that’ll be interesting. Considering Feedburner has done sweet Dick all (pardon the pun) for the past couple of years, I wonder if Costolo will continue with that trend.
Iheard from a Brighkite exec that Silverlake has sealed or is near sealing the deal to acquire Skype!! Heads up
Brightkite also has awarded a contract with Blackberry and intel
Twitter = AOL. We just can’t see it yet. Twitter – the company – is a fad. Twitter – the behavior – is not.
Whatever comes after Twitter will likely be compatible with RSS. Therefore RSS will live on long after Twitter dies.
RSS has been semi-dead for awhile. Evolution? On my Yahoo! start page, I have a nugget called Top Picks from Your Page, which “trains” itself which types of RSS items I’m likely to pick, then gathers them for me.
Instead of parsing through fifty-eleven RSS tech feeds, I simply wander over to techmeme and fetch the best of all. For a bunch of world news RSS feeds, I wander over to memeorandum and fetch the best of all. Saves a bunch of time.
On Twitter, I fetch immediacy: hints of just-breaking stories without having to wander around to each RSS feed IMMEDIATELY and check for the latest feed news update.
Yeah, RSS is dead, because each feed was just one source, one “take” on a topic. All these others give me the luxury of not having to choose, and watch, a multitude of sources, to get quick news.
the luxury of not having to choose is also called stupidity, being dumbed down – allowing otherss to do your decisions for you.
Having sources, one or many, is a virtue, different takes on one topic is a def. virtue in reality.
Your immediacy = perfect slavery = AOL , Which means twitter might have many users but it sure is not a gem for the tech savy.
I really hope he does not get his way. I think rss is a huge feeding source for what we tweet about! It allows us to consume information fast enough to tweet about it.
I love twitter, but do we want one company controlling everything? The beauty of RSS is that it is open and distributed. And RSS is not dead that’s just…
But wait a minute, how on earth did you get us this far off topic?
Congrats to Dick Costolo on the new gig.
Congrats to @dickc, it makes so much sense for Twitter to bring him on board.
Feedburner has been a handy tool for me and I’d like to see it stick around. There’s still plenty of mile’age left in the tank for RSS.
Every time TC uses the “RSS is dead” headline page views spike as subscribers are incredulous. The only thing dieing is blogs that cover ad-supported Web 2.0 start-ups.
As for Costolo – good for him!
As for the Twitter board – what are you thinking?
You don’t need small company entrepreneur. You need somebody who can bring in revenue, stabilize the service, and manage a company with headcount heading towards 1,000. FeedBurner was a 30 person company with less than $1m in net revenue. His claim to fame is selling a network to Google, which is why they hired him … I guess.
Here´s the deal. You give me 100 million and just a year or so later – I will post that the thing you bought is “dead” and leave.
Cool – where to sign dude?
Meh, I’m gonna keep using RSS, don’t really care for what the cool kids say, I like messages that are longer than 160 and actually contain something…
But good luck with your twitter pandemic.
great move by Twitter team. dick is awesome, and funny as shit to boot.
(dick is an amateur comic… maybe if they don’t solve the downtime issues right away, they can show some videos of dick doing standup routines instead of the fail whale
I think a lot of people don’t get your sense of humor Mr. Arrington.
I use Google Reader to read TC!!!! Not anymore!!! Leeroy Jenkins!
There is some very wrong logic.
he said:
“Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore”.
So all your feeds are now in twitter format? You stop reading all your feeds because of? and all have been replaced by twitter?
Give me a break…!
Congratulations. Dick Costolo is fantastic!
Twitter will die sooner than RSS …. wan’t it TC to publish numbers about Twitter’s new users per month rate vs the rate of people leaving Twitter after a month ?
Rss is kinda boring. But, it’s very useful. I’ve got nearly all my favorite sites set up in my RSS aggregator. Going there makes finding the stuff I want much faster & easier. Plus, it helps me stay organized.
Mike: you mean “Oh, FEEDBURNER is dead” right?
Remember, FeedBurner != RSS
Sheesh.
Also, don’t forget that FeedBurner and Twitter have investors in common (notably Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures).
Phil
http://www.feed....com/rssfaq.asp
twitter is lucky in that millionaire geeks love a good challenge. they will help twitter, then bail and start a new company or help another phenom reach (and stay) at the top.
regarding feedburner. i never liked that service and felt that it did more harm than good. bloggers should manage and own their feeds themselves.
But seriously, do tech bloggers not know anything about the actual technologies they cover? RSS has always been more useful to me as a backend technology and tool, and I generally see and use it as such. Consumer adoption of RSS has always hovered around ~8% but I hardly see the technology dying.
Agreed Dan, RSS is here to stay… in the back ground. Twitter IS the consumer version of RSS.
We’re all pumping our feeds into it anyway.
Following you’re favorite blogs twitter feed is typically redundant to following their RSS feed.
Interesting. Good move in the long run, but RSS is definitely not going anywhere.
Twitter = RSS
Twitter replaces RSS? Is this a joke? Twitter can’t do what RSS feeds can do. They are still completely essential for tracking blogs. I want to follow your blog posts. I don’t want them mixed in with inane tweets.
Hi,
I still don’t understand why people are switching from the open web eco-system, that early Internet users vehemently protected against the potential encroachment by proprietary services like Aol and MSN, to a world of closed and proprietary services like Facebook and Twitter.
Anyone?
Bueller? Bueller!
Kind regards,
Shakir Razak
This is so stupid…. And what happens if you happen to be ocassionally shitting when an interesting tweet comes up… You miss it. These two are different services my friend… And please don’t come to me saying ” oh you know nothing there is a new tweetdunk version 2.3642774 that let’s you save tweets and read them later” that’s not what Twitter is abouttttt!!!
Its funny how almost every comment is referring to RSS as a ‘user content protocol’ when in fact it is used extremely heavily behind the scenes to deliver content between servers, adserving, and many other things that never touch a user. Learn more about the protocol before saying RSS is dead because you dont use a feed reader anymore
About Steve Gillmor quote:
“It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.”
What a st00pid comment!
Twitter and Rss are used in different way and each of these sources of informations have their own advantages and downsides.
For example:
No, the Rss/Atom is not dead and the new Google Reader or Feedly gives you the opportunity to add new sources of information from other people and share your discoveries with the others in social medias including via your blog ( FYI: blogging is not dead …).
In the Cycle of Information on the Web, the GReader features gives to us the complete cycle of information in term of production/consumption.
All Functions in the Information Cycle are present in the GReader features:
- Creators (content makers)
- Critics (comments, ratings, and reviews),
- Collectors (gathering, tagging and sharing contents),
- Joiners (connecting people to poeple via contents),
- Spectators (or pure consummers)
- Doers (because information is related to “energy” and lead to works on physical stuff…)
- and finaly: Actors (because information is also related to communication and people relations…)
These functions are not exclusives to some peoples and not the others: each of us may, from time to time, be a creator or a pure consumer, or behave as critic or joiner… The only difference between the Internauts à la Web 2 is in the percentage of their time dedicated for each of these functions.
And Twitter don’t replace any of these function: it’s a part of the Web², a useful element but only an element.
BTW: I’m still using USENET and IRC (Yes!)
I understand the position of Mr. Dan Gillmor: why using RSS/Atom reader when you have an innate knowledge as him?
Dan Gillmor is one of the most over rated self proclamed oracle of the Web and it’s about time to reply to this selfish moron.
Yes, yes! RSS is dead! So is print and vinyl! The wave of the future is Internet on your TV.
Whatevah.
Prove RSS is dead by disabling TechCrunch’s RSS feed.
Yeah, that’s what I thought.