Twitter Lists Expands in Time to Be Your New RSS Reader

The other day I came across a post detailing 46 Google Reader alternatives.
Forty-six!
Instead of combing through the contenders, I wondered, can Twitter be the Google Reader replacement we’ve been looking for?
With the imminent demise of Google’s beloved RSS Reader, Twitter has fortuitously upgraded its lists functionality which we can now use to create and manage blog and news feeds.
Here’s the news from Twitter:

Update to Twitter lists: You can now make up to 1,000 lists (up from 20), and each list can include up to 5,000 accounts (up from 500).
— Twitter for News (@TwitterForNews) May 30, 2013

Twitter is a major traffic driver for blogs, news and other content producing sites, and most have Twitter handles to help broadcast their work. With expanded lists, you can transfer your RSS reader categories and feeds to individual Twitter lists. You can even use the RSS designation to separate them from other lists you’re curating. Example: RSS Productivity, RSS Marketing, RSS Legal, RSS Tech, and so on. You can create up to 1000 lists with 5000 sources in each list. Don’t do that! Keep it lean and useful, like you did with your RSS subscriptions, or else it becomes overwhelming and useless.
For blogs that don’t have a unique Twitter handle, like the superb 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, follow the authors. You’ll have to choose carefully here as individual accounts can get noisy.
Remember that if you don’t want select lists public, you can easily designate them as private lists. The advantage of public lists is, of course, you’re now on their radar.
I’ll be testing this option over the next couple of weeks with the intention of chucking RSS readers. If you’ve had success with using Twitter lists as a RSS reader replacement, please share in the comments.
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