People follow RSS feeds because theyre intrigued by a certain author or site’s perspective, connections, and content. RSS readers provide an intuitive GUI for reading these feeds without the distraction of conventional ad inventory on websites.

Twitter, at least at this point in time, is a primitive tool that calls for clicking on headlines, fed by the owner of the twitter account, to shortened urls (non-descript and useless in value because they don’t carry the site or article name in the url). Feed readers like Google Reader often give you a full RSS feed including headline, full body content, and any accompanying rich media. The value proposition offered by this type of service is huge, and if you have read any metrics lately, RSS readers are penetrating a wider demographic reach every day.

Twitter has a very limited adoption, primitive listing and aggregation technology, and at this point has very primitive link-sharing offerings for interested media consumers. (At least in comparison to sharing via Google reader, other rss aggregators)

Every once in a while you bring up the $1 per feed topic. I always respond that $1 is way too much. I subscribe to 107 feeds right now. I’m not paying $107 per month, nor is anyone else. Publishers really need to consider something like $.10 or $.20 MAX. Maybe $1.50 to $2.00 per year. Otherwise, you will see your feed subscriptions disappear.

I would expect that many people might also consider abandoning the blog outright in outrage. I’m quite certain I would. I don’t mind paying for content but it has to be reasonable and inline with the subscribers perceived worth of the content. I could easily walk away from 90% of the blogs I read.

Sites that don’t offer full feeds are sites that I don’t read.

And no, I won’t pay a buck for them either. I’ll switch to another site that offers what I want. The notion that somebody can charge for content is fundamentally flawed, because content is fungible. Your content is not special. If you don’t offer it in the form people want, then people will simply leave and find their content elsewhere.