My Experience with RSS Feeds

(Welch, 2004)

Hello,

This weeks learning activity had us explore RSS feeds and work with a website company called Feedly. I found this third party website to be very interesting and very useful. Feedly allows users to organize and quickly read news stories of all different types. It works similar to social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter where you have a news feed that is constantly giving you live updates of current things happening. For example, I followed the RSS feed BBC News on Feedly. This allows me to take a quick glance at the top news stories from all around the globe. From here I was able to click on a story that interested me about China ending the 140 word twitter count. This story sparked my interest because of its relevance to this course. Although the Chinese version is called Sina Weibo, it is merely identical to twitter. For quite some time now, Twitter has been debating on dropping the word count limit so that individuals can create longer posts. Looking ahead to week five in this course, I see that we will be making a twitter account. Having previous experience with Twitter, I can personally express my hatred for the word cap.

(Werner, 2002)

It is hard to get your full message across when you are only limited to a small amount of freedom. With over 200 million users, Sina Weibo will be a great resource for Twitter to use as a pilot project. If expanding the word count fails for Sina Weibo, Twitter will know not to do that. Overall, I feel that Feedly and RSS feeds are very helpful because they give you upfront information at the click of a button!