Why my personality will never allow me to trade RSS for Twitter

I spent January 1, 2010 like I bring in most new years, in the fetal position cursing loud sounds.
However, I did read this interesting David Carr column about the non-ephemeral nature of Twitter, in his estimation. The passage that is relevant is this one:

Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to.

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while.

In essence, what Carr is saying is that he is forgoing RSS readers for his use of twitter. Perhaps that works for him. But this passage, "I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry." suggests that Carr has a much different personality than me, one that allows him to give up control.

If you are the obsessive compulsive control freak type (let's just say you are, for arguments sake) this functionality of twitter will not replace doing the primary reading and evaluations of topics themselves via RSS. In short, you are putting trust in tweeters. That's a difficult step for me.

I think Twitter makes a great companion piece and serves as an excellent, real-time barometer of public mood and impact, but I don't think it will replace RSS reading functionality, at least for those of us with difficult personalities. Hence, instead, I link in defense of the RSS, offered by Read/Write Web.

As an addendum, yes, i know i've been extraordinarily absent on this blog. Just thought this one merited publish.