You know the thing that puzzles me about services like Twitter and Jaiku et al, sometimes referred to as microblogging applications, is that you have to use a central server or service to create and distribute your Tweets or microbloglets or whatever-you-call-thems only to have them converted to RSS and syndicated. Why not just use RSS in the first place? You could create a lightweight RSS client that outputs your status, one-liner pearls of wisdom, or anything else you wish to tell your ‘friends’ about. Bake it into weblog or email or news-feed clients and you’re away. The beauty of using RSS is that everyone’s stream is distributed rather than collected at a central point, or bottle-neck as it sometimes becomes.

The benefit of a single service access point I guess is that it makes it easier to find new sources or feeds, but there are so many ways of finding RSS feeds that a distributed rather than centralised approach would be no problem. So what value do services like Twitter add? I guess that until we get better RSS clients – that is RSS creators rather than RSS aggregators – then the likes of Twitter offer client applications. But if we started to get other kinds of clients based upon RSS then just imagine the possibilities. You could syndicate your status and other Twitter-like info, but also mobile data, email, calendars, and in an educational context learning activities, reading lists, portfolios, lots of stuff. Of course you can syndicate a lot of this now but only via dedicated clients apps like purpose-built calendering service, VLEs, etc. An RSS client agnostic to content based around the triumvirate of title, description and link (plus attachment of it makes sense to add a file) would be a very flexible tool indeed.

I had a similar thought 5 years ago and created a simple tool back then for Radio UserLand. The tool is still available though I doubt it works now, and I don’t have a copy of Radio to try it.

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