Photo: Twitter

Twitter, the microblogging platform that’s experienced meteoric growth in the last two years, has many uses. The 140 character post limit means people can only share information in short bursts, much like text messaging, the difference being that the message is broadcast to all your friends at once. However, the way Twitter has come to work is both different – and superior – to what its founders could ever have imagined.

Link sharing – the Holy Grail

Twitter, now, has become an information dispersion portal, that has both popularised url shorteners, as well as become a major driver of traffic for web publishers. What this has meant for many publishers is the incorporation of Twitter into their traffic-generating initiatives, and for users, it has meant an information retrieval portal. This is why the company has many predicting that it will spell the death of RSS readers.

The RSS reader – a new dinosaur

These readers work by allowing you to subscribe to news stories from all your favourite websites. This way, as a story is published, RSS readers fetch them for you. This story is then readable from within your application without having to go directly to the site. What Twitter is used for is often virtually identical: publishers post a short tweet that consists of a headline and a link to the article. This way Twitter directs traffic to the site, unlike RSS readers, which pull information from the site without it counting as hits. This is important, since many publishers rely on advertising for income, and the success of online advertising is directly related to the traffic a website generates.

What does the future hold?

Photo: Google

Strangely, though, these apps have continued to survive, partly because they work differently from Twitter and partly because some people love reading content within an application. To this extent, the talk of Twitter killing NetNewsWire or Google Reader and the like is greatly exaggerated, although that market segment is in decline and Twitter has emerged as a key traffic generator.