What are these things? I realize they are not related to each other, but I was jst curious. I see RSS everywhere now and I just read a story about shittle crew or something sending tweets or something.
What am I missing?
If you’re shittling tweets you should probably see a doctor.
Twitter is a service for people for whom blogs don’t satisfy their relentless narcissism: it’s “micro-blogging.” It allows you to update your friends and groupies with very pithy messages saying what you’re doing at that very moment, either via the web or cell phone.
RSS is a standard XML format for syndicating news, blog posts, twitter junk, etc. It’s basically a file format that contains nothing but the raw data and metadata for each headline and article summary, and is updated whenever new content is added. You can use an RSS reader to “subscribe” to RSS feeds – which means you download the ones you like at regular intervals – to see new content that is added to the blog (or news site or whatever.)
That cartoon gets linked to in every discussion I have seen on the web involving twitter.
I’m sorry, but that killed me with laughing. 
:dubious: 
Secondary question to the OP. How does one go about collecting up all these RSS feeds? Where do I get an RSS reader or whatever you said? Is there one that’s better than others?
(I get RSS feeds to my livejournal friends page, but I think that’s different, no?)
Firefox is probably the best general-purpose RSS tool.
Socially, maybe. Technically it’s the same technology.
No no no. Google reader is the best RSS reader. I love that I can use it at any computer and it marks entries as read when I scroll past them. Pure magic.
It’s too hard to add new feeds to Google reader, whereas with Firefox it’s just two clicks every time I visit an RSS-containing website. That, and I can visit RSS links in the same browser session as everything else I’m doing.