Now that I have a blog with an RSS feed, I want to check out Micro.blog. It’s yet-another-Twitter-replacement, but unlike others I’ve tried, this one isn’t based on new protocols or technology, instead it relies on a rather old one - RSS.

All I had to do to get started was register at Micro.blog and plug in my RSS feed’s URL. This allows me to follow people on the network and see their posts and replies in a timeline.

My first problem was finding friends. I didn’t see an easy way to search for my Twitter friends on micro.blog. In fact, I couldn’t search for my friends at all. If you know someone’s username you can type it in and follow them. Otherwise the recommended way to find people is by looking at the Discover timeline, which contains posts from a “random selection of featured users”.

My second problem was finding out that my replies on micro.blog will stay on micro.blog. This makes perfect sense given that it is really just syndicating RSS feeds, but imo it really falls short of the dream. For a service that “encourages publishing at your own domain name, where you can control your own content” it seems weird that a large chunk of the content is hosted and controlled by yet another centralized service.

So my first impression is that this is not the service that will save the web or be the social network replacement I am looking for, but it may be a nice water cooler to hang out at in the meantime.