To subscribe or to follow, that is the question

For those of you who don’t know, twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and receive other users’ updates, known as tweets. Tweets can be seen as text messages which move between users’ computers rather than mobile phones.

There are hundreds of thousands of twitter users around the world, all sitting and waiting for the latest tweet to come through. Receiving tweets is substantially less intrusive than instant messages, I know that’s one reason why I use twitter, on top of this, it’s really useful, sometimes, to know what everyone is up to, as it makes life easier in terms of following trends.

Bloggers and article publishers use RSS to stream their content to subscribers, in much the same way, this content could be streamed via tweets. Allowing a user to follow your tweet feed would give them an instant update the minute new content is released, not to forget the ability of retweeting and spreading the content further. Services such as Twitter Starsigns and tweather are fairly decent examples of how content is streamed outwards. With a site such as tweather, tweeple are able to subscribe to a tweather station and receive a weather update daily.

Most publishers have a number of categories on a website and provide the ability for users to subscribe to RSS feeds based on category; would it not make sense to also allow these users to follow category specific twitter streams? Keeping your finger on the pulse is something extremely important in the digital world we all live in; knowing what’s new the second it happens is very important and twitter can allow us to do this, possibly even better than RSS.

Am I completely off or do you think twitter streams could become more popular than RSS feeds?