Rebooting RSS in the time of Twitter

I have this theory. There should be a golden balance between RSS subscriptions and Twitter (you should follow me). I haven’t opened my RSS reader in months, and when I did it was obviously quite full. Why haven’t I touched it? Because of Twitter and the fact that everything important ends up there, and gets ReTweeted to oblivion.

Franky said it best: “If it ain’t on Twitter it ain’t important enought”. Or something like that.

Did I miss anything these past few months? Probably, but on the other hand I got a more diverse scope of stories from sources I might not have in my RSS reader. And I’ll tell you one thing: I follow a lot of feeds, or used to at least.

So today I’m starting an experiment. I’m deleting all my subscriptions (without saving the OPML file, screw that!) and now I will only add things that I feel I don’t get enough of through Twitter. And just to prove I can put my money where my mouth is, here’s the whole procedure:

Clicking the Settings link top right brings me here, where I marked all feeds and…

That’s right, I hit the Unsubscribe button! Did it feel weird? A bit, but also good. I dislike clutter, and the RSS feeds felt like unnecessary clutter to me.

This is what I’ve got now:

It’ll be interesting to see how many feeds I end up with this time. My guess is not too many, and I’ll be very hard on the ones I do subscribe to – should they not deliver I’ll unsubscribe right away.