RSS, Twitter, and Newsletters OH MY
RSS used to be the predominant method that most people gathered and curated their reading content on the web. Google Reader was the free and dominant choice of the internet. Then, unexpectedly, they shut down back in 2013 . The internet went into a state of frenzy as people were then forced to rethink how they gathered their content from different websites. RSS made it easy to follow blogs and news site because you chose the content, went to one place to see that content, and mark items as read or for reading later.
Many people turned to Twitter and Facebook in order to gather links. But with the fleeting nature of both, especially Twitter, it can be easy to miss what is being shared unless you are constantly engaged on the platform, which, sadly, many are because of FOMO . Additionally, if you are trying to cut back on your social media consumption, which many are, it has become difficult to both be engaged in writing that you want to follow and avoid the blackhole of social media.
Rss
Personally, I still predominantly use RSS through a service called Feed Wrangler. RSS usually has two aspects:
- The service that curates the feeds from websites
- A reading platform to view the feeds
Feed Wrangler is 19 $/yr and I’ve been using it since the Google Reader shut down. They have an app that you can read your subscriptions from but I find it fairly basic and instead use an app on my iPhone and iPad called Fiery Feeds to read everything. Additionally, you can do local syncing without an RSS service but it won’t be available on multiple devices. One of the great aspects of Fiery Feeds is the ability to add feeds with the iOS share sheet on websites. Thus, if I am on a blog I want to start following I don’t need to hunt around for the RSS link but instead I just invoke the iOS share sheet and click on Add to Fiery Feeds and it links to it my Feed Wrangler account for syncing. Another popular and free RSS syncing service is Feedly, which can also work with Fiery Feeds.
Nuzzel
Another app, Nuzzel ( MacStories review ), has a little different purpose for curating reading content. Instead of following Twitter and getting sucked into the endless list of tweets being sent out every second I use Nuzzel to curate the most popular content from people I’m following on Twitter and my lists. Nuzzel uses as algorithm to find articles that have been shared multiple times by either just people you follow or another level down of people they also follow. This allows me to just open the Nuzzel app and view popular content on Twitter that is, in my experience, good content to read without getting lost in my timeline. In addition, you can setup a weekly or daily newsletter that Nuzzel curates to send to you at an interval at your choice.
I use a combination of both RSS and Nuzzel for most of my content. I’ve found that not having to open Twitter for content purposes helpful for both my sanity and productivity. Inevitably, getting on Twitter generally puts me on rabbit trails that I never intended and I lose 30, 40, 60 minutes of my day!
So check out some of the new RSS syncing services out there such as Feedly and Feed Wrangler and also use a social media curating app such as Nuzzel to allow you to still find new and interesting content without being so connected with social media.