Registry in RSS

Matthew Graham mjg at cacr.caltech.edu
Thu Jan 14 08:31:23 PST 2010


> Hi,

Twitter is a great piece of social networking technology for keeping  
track of ephemeral issues, e.g. what's the weather like? what am I  
wearing today? how hungover do I feel after last night's party? And  
I've been very interested in seeing how it could facilitate and enable  
science in a way that other more established technologies do not. I  
can see how it is well suited as another delivery channel for VOEvent,  
which after all, is about instant event notification. And it's a great  
way of getting comment/summaries of (missed) sessions at conferences,  
e.g. Kepler has discovered 5 planets. However, beyond this I can't  
find a use that justifies reassignment of resources. Yes, it's a good  
channel for EPO because it is hip and trendy at the moment but do I  
really need instant notification that there is a new resource in the  
registry - a weekly email summary of this would do perfectly well -  
most mailing lists I subscribe to have such digest feature -, and  
could contain far more information. I also find the lack of  
persistence in Twitter a major problem for anything that is not  
ephemeral in nature. If I want to search past the beginning of last  
week, I need to make sure that I am storing the Tweets myself. So what  
does Twitter bring to the party that email, web pages, and even the  
youngest child, RSS, do not already?

	Cheers,

	Matthew (who uses Twitter all the time)



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