[rabble]

When we built twitter we had also hacked up various forms of RSS readers. At the time nobody on the team really thought they were going after rss, news reading, or discovery. But it turns out that trying to solve that problem in parallel to the status update system. Twitter was for a long time very much built upon the RSS stack of technologies. It was a semi-open platform which worked better, unfortunately, than the fully open world of RSS & ATOM.

In the end, now 8 years later, it's clear that twitter DID kill rss as a dominate category of apps & services. We went from being overwhelmed by unread counts on the 'readers' to having flow. I'm not sure it's better, but it did solve the problem of feeling like you needed to keep up.

I think there's still more interesting work to be done in this space. Open social networks (that's what blogs are folks) plus users being able to control visibility of posts and frequency and open api's could do something which could unseat twitter/facebooks.

[brlewis]

Unread counts are a UI feature orthogonal to the underlying syndication format. FriendFeed uses RSS and doesn't have unread counts.

[masklinn]

Meanwhile a number of twitter clients do have unread counts (Tweetbot certainly does)