Today Feedbin announced a new feature to their RSS reader which allows you to subscribe to Twitter users, searches, lists and hashtags.

I've been looking at this for the last couple of hours to find a way that will allow me to continue to use Twitter, but without mhaving to check on my timeline as often. Here's just a few ways that I see me using Feedbin's new Twitter subscription options.

Vanity Searches

A few months ago I removed analytics tracking from my blog. It was a decision based on the fact that I'm not interested in the numbers anymore. I don't want to see how many people viewed my blog in the last 24 hours, and I don't want to see how many visitors I've had in the previous week. These numbers don't drive why I blog. It's the content that drives why I blog. It's about getting links back to my blog from other bloggers.

To do this, I have a saved search in Feedbin that only includes blog posts that contain my name. Sure it doesn't have the accuracy of analytics tracking, but through the blogs that I follow and the times that my name appears in this search, it's a great indicator of what other bloggers like on my blog.

Feedbin's new Twitter integration will allow me to broaden my reach so that I can use searches on Twitter to include tweets that either includes my Twitter handle or my domain name.

Better Reading of Lists

Twitter's lists have always been difficult to use. I'm not a big fan of reading Twitter on my mobile and changing between lists on other apps is not great either. Feedbin's new Twitter integration will make digesting lists a lot easier.

I have some accounts on Twitter I follow, but I would like to bundle into lists. I've tried in the past to do this, but I frequently forget to check these lists. Separating these accounts into lists makes my timeline much easier to follow.

With these new lists to follow through Feedbin, it is a lot easier to follow and scan through.

RSS to the Rescue

Right, so Twitter dropped RSS a long time ago, and since then it's been difficult to follow people through anything other than Twitter on the web or through one of the many Twitter clients that are available. So it's not RSS to the rescue but Feedbin to the rescue by providing a genuinely different way of consuming Twitter.

The next few weeks will see the accounts I follow tail off to perhaps around fifty or so accounts, but I'll continue to use Twitter for sharing content from this blog and my micro-blog as well as responding to replies on Twitter.