Retweeting Feeds
There’s a feature I miss from the old twitter, or rather, there’s a use case that twitter filled better than anything else.
The use case is this: RSS feeds are a great way to publish content, but that’s where it stops—there’s no intrinsic way to (re)share an item from a feed you’re subscribed to with anyone else, to retweet it, if you will. I’d love to have an easy way to reshare content from feeds I’m subscribed to.
I think one of the reasons that twitter sucked the air out of the RSS ecosystem was that not only was it trivial to set up a twitter account that worked just like an RSS feed, with links to your blog or podcast or whatever, but everyone who followed your feed could re-share it with their followers with a single action, optionally adding a comment. I cannot tell you how much great stuff I found out about because someone I followed on twitter quote-tweeted it.
Here in the post-twitter afterscape, I keep wishing NetNewsWire had a retweet button. I’ve spent enough time in product design and development to know why that doesn’t exist; something that could re-share an item from an RSS feed out into a new feed with a connection back to the original feed requires about 80% of twitter, if you’re going to build all that, add the ability to post your own content as well and go all the way to a social network/microblogging system/twitter clone. And I guess the solution is either bluesky or mastodon.
But I keep thinking there has to be something between turn of the century–style RSS feeds and a full-blown social network. And I am putting this out in the universe because I absolutely do not want to build or work on this myself, I want to use it. (All my actual startup ideas are going to be buried with me.)
Somebody go figure this out!
Edited to add: I am reminded by an Alert Reader that Google Reader (RIP) had a similar feature, you could “share” things from your feed. But google’s gonna google and the share list was basically your gmail contacts list? Which would lead to some really bizarre results like suddenly seeing a thing in your feed that got there because a friend of a friend shared it, because you were both on the same party invite a couple of years ago. Cool idea, but again, something twitter improved on by making those connections obvious.