A few years ago, I was complaining about / dealing with information overload. I remember going from reading a dozen or so feeds to reading (scanning) more than 10 times that in the course of about three weeks.
Web2o tipped it for me. Regardless of how I felt about [Tim’s] label at the time, the activity in the field was wild. Keeping up with it meant getting stupid informed, following hundreds of feeds.
The problem at the time was siphoning. I didn’t care about Vista or WoW, but my [hundreds of] feeds were still delivering news of each a dozen times a day. We launched Feed Rinse to help filter out some of this noise, but the information push still seemed way out of control.
Fast forward two years (to today), and I’d say I have the news / info push properly regulated. But all of a sudden, there’s new flavor to the push.
Sites like FriendFeed, SocialThing and Spokeo just jumped into my mix like some kind of Marvel Comics supervillain crew, looking to f with the water supply. Now I have lifestreams to watch.
And then there’s Twitter. Yep, chatter is important now too. I could argue that I probably get as much from tweets as I do from blog posts some days, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s noisy as hell.
My content monitoring seems out of control again. It snuck up on me because the new content is of an entirely different type. I’m guessing it snuck up on you too.
I think I started writing this to see if I was the only person not grooving on the jump lifestreams seem to be making. But now I’m convinced I need to get better at content filtering again. Maybe even get the band back together for another pass at Feed Rinse.
Whatever it is, don’t take it personally if I don’t subscribe to your socialthing. Your digital life is, still, all very fascinating.
I feel like I know exactly where you’re coming from. Two to three years ago, I even had RSS alerts pop up. That soon ended, and I can safely say that even while reading hundreds of feeds I am, to some extent, in control.
But this lifestream business is daunting. It came with promises full of consolidation and making our lives easier, but I haven’t experienced that yet.
A lot is happening here and we just have to wait for the dust to settle, while we happily try out FF, and Streem and Profilactic and so on. Given the chaos we’re in, I don’t think anyone should take offense at being unfollowed these days.
Yeah, consolidation feeds are the new Trojan Horse. Thanks for the comments Nils.