With the rise of Twitter and social networking news streams, many techies have been debating the value and livelihood of RSS. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a common format used to share a constant stream of articles. Popularized by blogs, RSS can be imported by RSS readers (like Google Reader; here’s my little guide to them).

Back in May, TechCrunch already pronounced RSS dead which makes it more shocking that today, again, Sam Diaz reveals he’s not using RSS anymore. And so the conversation begins. Marshall Kirkpatrick defends RSS as another of his many research tools while Robert Scoble has moved on to Twitter and FriendFeed for news.

Let’s not confuse death with evolution. RSS has always been a tool, a tool still used by, shockingly Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed.  While some find basic RSS readers less valuable, this is because innovators have found ways to make finding information on the web more useful and more valuable.  New tools like Feedly and LazyFeed are making RSS more valuable, and in some cases, unrecognizable from its original state. The internet is, obviously, moving so quickly (just watch Twitter update), that it’s impossible to believe the same tools we use today will be the same tools used next year. Nothing disappears, it evolves into something better.

Of course, I still love my RSS Reader.

The mainstream media has been buzzing about this new and exciting web tool called Twitter.  Because Oprah now uses it.  Twitter, over the past few weeks/months, has been crossing the infamous chasm that separates early adopters with everyone else.  After Oprah promoted the three-year old company on her show, and sending out her first tweet, traffic spiked 43 percent.  Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, and CNN competed for the first million followers on Twitter.  Celebrities and brands have replaced the Twitter innovators like Robert Scoble and iJustine who helped evangelize the application and build the massive following it has now.

Social media bloggers are pondering what happens next for Twitter (beyond that nagging how are they going to make money question).  Will Oprah follow other people and engage in true two-conversations? Or will Twitter become just another broadcast marking tool.  I offer links to these questions and tackle one of my own: where do geeks go next?

I ask this because I consider Twitter a niche tool.  It has limited functionality and because of that is very hard to use effectively/creatively.  Twitter has obviously grown from being just another way to tell people what sandwich you’re eating – it’s a unique, rapid-fire communication platform thriving on texts and one-liners.  And this is, at least posed, to become popular with soccer moms and every brand with an email account (neither of which is bad, this is not a moral judgment).

To me, this says more about how tech savvy the mainstream is, than how useful Twitter is or how protective geeks are of their turf (we are).  Twitter is far more niche than Facebook or LinkedIn are, and if software like this can cross the chasm, how much more niche does niche get?

This is a credit to the rapid transition people are making into the digital world.  My mother is now asking me if she should join Facebook (no) and my 50+ year old friends want me to help set them up on Twitter. Definitions of what is part of the geek niche need to be redefined.  Geeks need to be a lot geekier to be geeks, it seems.

For web companies, this should be exciting news (though watching how Twitter traffic grows over the next weeks will affect my confidence in the following statements).  Twitter’s ability to appeal to a broad audience of users shows a society more willing to experiment with new tools, even if their uses are not so obvious.  I’m not saying this can be easily replicated – maybe Twitter is a fluke.  Instead, the next time you’re developing a product you fear might be too geeky, think about Oprah and your mother using Twitter.  Suddenly, your definition of geek, and the demographics for your product, are suddenly much, much wider.

While newspapers, it seems fun to find alternative news outlets.  Twitter gets lots of hype for being the newsroom of tomorrow. The most recent example is Twitter users being the first post about the LA earthquake.

But Twitter is not a newsroom. It’s not meant to be a newsroom. It helps news spread, but so do water coolers and and town criers.  But 140 characters of information doesn’t make a newsroom, but it helps the newsroom find news.

Newspapers are in trouble so looking for the next thing is a popular topic, but trying to anoint something as the “Future of…” is shortsighted. Twitter is still an experiment, one that doesn’t make money and gets crushed by its popularity. Twitter could be replaced by the next-big thing in a few months.

Twitter should, for now, be another tool in a journalists arsenal. A tweet alluding to an LA earthquake should send the journalist to their phone for confirmation.

News can be an bit of information, but a newsroom provides more. A newsroom needs to provide relevant information, context, what has happened, is happening, and will happen next. A tweet can’t provide that.  Even rapid fire wire services like AP and Reuters churn out several hundred words on events that happened minutes or hours before. Tweets might help cut that response time down.

The key difference is journalists should read Twitter. Everyone else will still read the journalists.

Any web 2.0 business model must, by law, include five or more buzz words from user-generated content to API to social networking to get venture funding.  Companies are desperately trying to use social media like Facebook, Second Life, and even the iPhone to manufacture marketing and attention. The result is start-ups and established companies focusing resources because that’s where the hype is rather than where the smart business is.

Hype is the keyword here.  An already popular company like Facebook or Apple launch something new and obviously there’s hype.  But this hype is not contagious.  A former boss of mine said the reason we were developing an iPhone app before we had a mobile site was to “Get some attention when the app store launches.”

For start-ups limited in resources, jumping on the internet bandwagon is more often a waste and at best a distraction.  It’s best to focus on building your own features and worth to make sure once people find you, they want to stay.  Building applications for other platforms fragments your audience and time - what you build on Facebook needs to be rebuilt for the iPhone and rebuilt for Netvibes.

Second Life has become a prime example of hype overblowing marketing potential.  Last year, just as another company I worked for wanted to build a Second Life presence, Wired wrote about the marketing waste the virtual world had become. Coca-Cola, Reebok, IBM, Sears, and dozens more build huge islands with style and zazz, paying high-profile Second Life consultants and expecting the viral marketing to take off.  But no one visited.  The hype came from companies trying out Second Life, but no one ever posting resulting.  Since Second Life accounts are free, the 4 million users it boasts is misleading.  Only 1 million had logged on in the past 30 days and only a third of that in the past week.  Only 100,000 of those live in the U.S.  Those who do sign on spend most of their time in sex shops or gambling, not looking at marketing campaigns.

Facebook is likely to follow. Facebook itself is having trouble monetizing its massive user base, how do third parties expect to do better?  iPhone applications can be sold for money, which makes them less viral.  And working with any closed platform like Facebook or Apple puts the platform in control of your future.  Facebook suddenly blocked some of its most popular applications, Top Friends, Super Wall, and Social Me, with little notice and challenges to get back in the platforms good graces.

The opposite strategy of releasing your own API is more worth the time (if it makes sense for your product and not just a buzz word for investors) but has its own risks.  Twitter’s success and constant downtime are both due to their API.  Without the API, much of the sites usefulness wouldn’t have happened leading so many to join.  But because of the API’s popularity, the site can barely keep basic features operational.

So this is a lot of don’t.  The dos, unfortunately, are the hardest because it needs to be case-by-case.  Because there are so many platforms and APIs and doodads to try and sync up with, it’s impossible to say everyone should do this.  The key is when deciding how you want your product to integrate with the greater web world, think about your own strength and goals rather than bullet list features.  Everyone is pushing the same bullet lists.  You’ll stand out more by not.

I updated my Twitter status which, through TwitterSync, updated my Facebook status. Facebook, in turn, updated my FriendFeed with that status, but Twitter already updated FriendFeed. Suddenly I realized data portability is closer than we think.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Info Wars brewing between the social networks on their desire to control our information. MySpace, Facebook, and Google launched their own social networking networking service, allowing users and 3rd-parties to access information inside each walled garden. Facebook quickly blocked Google’s service claiming privacy issues, an attempt to protect its users.

Facebook forgot its API already allows an immense amount of access to user information. Many leading social sites offer APIs, or application programming interfaces, that allow other sites to integrate each other’s systems. Facebook, for all the criticism of its walled garden mentality, is able to import data from many sites and external sites, like FriendFeed, can have data exported. I can’t move all my friends from one site to another…yet. But smaller social networks like Twitter are almost completely functional without ever going to Twitter.com.

The dream is control our content. Now we can just manipulate it. It’s a start. And competition, from new and old and in between social networks will force more open standards that make every site more valuable to users.