One Twitter account. One RSS feed. Firehoses, but not in name.

Once upon a time, two days ago, Techmeme maintained not one, but two Twitter accounts. Our intention for this was noble: flexibility for the user. One Twitter account, "Techmeme Firehose" (@TechmemeFH), would tweet all stories posted to the site, while the main account, "Techmeme" (@Techmeme) would tweet only the top 20-30 stories of the day. That way readers could select whichever story volume suited them.

It didn't work out that way in the end. Most readers only ever discovered @Techmeme, and then wondered why it was missing stories. And why some stories hit Twitter long after they hit Techmeme. We similarly published two different RSS feeds (again, "Techmeme Firehose", and "Techmeme"), and found the same discoverability problem.

So today we're scrapping @TechmemeFH, and publishing just @Techmeme, while making it include all posted stories, just as @TechmemeFH did. To help people following @TechmemeFH switch to @Techmeme, we've been auto-tweeting annoying reminders every hour like so. We've also consolidated our RSS feeds, but accomplished that through 301 redirections, so you shouldn't have to change anything no matter which RSS feed you've subscribed to.

We hope these moves will expose fresher and more interesting stories that our followers/subscribers may otherwise have missed. Of course, readers using neither Twitter nor RSS are unaffected, except for having needed to read this post (all the way to the end, wow).