Just finished reading that Twitter and Facebook drop their public pronouncements of RSS feeds for status updates, sort of. Twitter has hidden the old link that one needed to copy/paste to gather an RSS feed in Google Reader or Netvibes. Facebook has also hidden your status Feed. Is that a big deal, these sites are revenue driven now that they’re past the social networking infant stage – they both need to make money and they see the only way as making money is driving traffic to their site for their paid ads. What both Twitter and Facebook are doing are using API’s, essentially a separate standard for connecting to their web application (or website) rather than providing an open RSS feed. If you’ve grabbed the old Twitter feed, it should still work. For how long is anyone’s guess, but at least it’s something. As the web becomes more fractioned, with extremely large sites like Facebook and Twitter demanding innovation through their channels, and smaller sites using the power of the more open and transparent standards that have existed for many years, it will be interesting to see what happens.