Twitter ups ante on RSS by recruiting Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo

September 2, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Comments | |

dickcostolo050The race between Twitter and RSS readers to be the best personalized source of news just got a little more interesting. Former Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo is joining Twitter as its new chief operations officer starting next week, the company tell us.

Costolo left Google in July, a little more than two years after the search giant bought Feedburner in 2007 for a reported $100 million. After it was acquired, we reported that the RSS management tool was plagued with problems like posts not being picked up (it seemed to fare only a tad better than other ill-fated Google acquisitions like Dodgeball and Jaiku).

Costolo joins other Google alums like Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, who worked on Blogger. He was also an early investor in Twitter.

“He’s a long time friend of Ev and Biz so he’s a trusted addition to the team,” said Jenna Sampson, a spokesperson for the company.

RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) and Twitter are slightly different ways of customizing a stream of information from many sources. RSS is beneficial if you favor digging deeper into all your news sources while Twitter lets you scan a breadth of sources much more rapidly. There’s been an ongoing debate whether Twitter represents a legitimate threat to reading RSS feeds, so when one of its pioneers jumps ship to the other side, the spectre of RSS death becomes a little more real.

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • batboyjr
    This has so little to do with RSS killing that it's laughable. It's always amusing watching people report on the news in the Valley when they come from places like WSJ and DJ. Please, do just a wee bit of homework before you ring the death knell of something like RSS. Unless you're selling ad space to eyeballs, in which case, you're doing a fine job. Pardon me as I ring this other bell over here -- that would be the death knell of quality journalism.
  • OK, drama aside. What's your take?
  • The biggest difference between Twitter and RSS: RSS is available to anyone to be used by anyone. Twitter is controlled by Twitter.
  • I use both RSS and Twitter, and wouldn't give up either of them.