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Marrying RSS and Twitter

Tuesday, December 29, 2009 by Dave Winer.

This may be one of those moments like the time when the guy put peanut butter on chocolate and came up with Reese's peanut butter cups.  

Maybe a kind of breakthrough.  

So here's the peanut butter -- a screen shot of the River2 aggregator. You can see at the top there's a big logo doing nothing, and below it is a list of new articles. This is what I call the River of News, it's what Twitter does so nicely. Or more precisely it's one-half of what Twitter does so nicely. 

And here's the chocolate -- a screen shot of Twitter.  

Where I have my logo it has a small text box for entering a 140-character message.  

And here's the new idea. 

What if you took the text box from Twitter and put it at the top of the River? 

Where would the text go? Ahhh that's easy -- a Realtime RSS feed. And from there it could flow into other RSS rivers and of course into Twitter or Facebook or anything else that likes streams of 140-character messages.  

I'm going to do this in the next couple of days and see how it feels.