As I gleam more information through blogs and microblogs there comes a time when the fun wears off and overload sets in.
In 2009, I’ve decided to tame overload and reinstate fun with some simple rules:
For Twitter (and other microblogging services):
- Follow only folks that have a reasonable number of posts per day. Chronic Twitters (some individuals, but often sources like large blog sites or newspapers) force me to weed through a lot of cruft to come to the juicy information I can use. No one has infinitely interesting things happening all day long.
- Twitter is not email – I find back-and-forth conversation via public twitter replies to be tedious unless one puts a bit of context in their reply. If the reply is interesting in itself, I’ll spend the effort to flip to the initial Tweet and try to see what was initially said.
- For chronic Twitters that still do have some interesting morsels, I often stop following them on Twitter, but subscribe to their blog RSS and follow lower traffic there — RSS is much easier to skim through than Twitter. Garden hose instead of fire hose.
- Don’t blindly follow! (good advice in many situations). When someone follows me, I check out their profile, recent Tweets, and number of Tweets per day before jumping in. If a reasonable number of posts are interesting, and they’re not Tweeting every moment of their lives, I will follow them too.
- Keep it interesting! Sure, not every tweet someone makes is interesting, but many should be. Try out folks, but don’t be afraid to jump off without guilt. I’m personally attracted to Tweets pointing me to resources, interesting sites, or interesting happenings — in other words, I rely on my social graph to provide interesting content, not noise. I keep this in mind when posting Tweets for others.
For RSS
- Cut out large noisy RSS feeds even if occasionally interesting. Feeds that produce too much traffic (albeit this traffic can safely be higher than microblogging since it’s easier to skim) even if a few morsels are interesting should be tossed because they prevent you from reading the really interesting ones.
We each have a limited amount of attention we can give – these simple rules will keep these services interesting and useful.
What other techniques do people use to handle the growing amount of information coming at them through microblogging (e.g. Twitter, Facebook), location-aware microblogging (e.g. BrightKite) and good old fashion blogging (via RSS)?
As a person with one or two experiences with information overload after running one of the large open source projects over the last 8 years, I have dealt with Twitter in the following way — it might not be appropriate for everyone, but works exceedingly well for me, since I’m mostly interested in a couple of specific topics:
- Don’t follow anyone. No, really.
- Instead, create a search at twitter, and subscribe to its RSS feed. For me, that’s Plone.
- Have one account for conversations, and another account for updates. (For me this is “limi4plone” and “limi”, respectively)
- Check the conversation account once per day, at most.
- When something interesting comes up in the Twitter search feed, use the conversation account if you need to respond.
- Only write to the “updates” account when you have something substantive to say. Nobody’s interested in what you had for lunch.
This way, Twitter is not quite as obnoxious a time waster anymore. YMMV, but works for me.
Thanks Alex for some great tips to consider.
I forgot to mention that I’ve been using searches more as well (such as Summizer app on iPhone) but have still been following folks…
…though now you give me pause and am wondering if searches should be my primary interface as you suggest.
(The only con I can think of is that I may miss some random finds if my search terms don’t catch it, then again your method eliminates a lot of noise)
Yeah, it will give you less random input (aka. “entertainment”), but I have that through other channels.
To me, Twitter is a giant IRC channel with a lot of noise, and the only way to make sense of it is to define some notifications and let the stream remain an undercurrent — pick out the bits that are relevant instead.
You may also want to check out yonkly. It’s the first “create your own” microblog to integrate with Twitter: http://yonkly.com
Good tips. Personally, I have a different method for cutting through the noise:
For RSS, I have folders setup in Google Reader…
“High priority” has low-post-frequency feeds from friends and colleagues.
“Middle priority” has low-post-frequency feeds from other consistently good quality sources (mostly short posts).
“Must read – sometime” has posts from high quality sources that post longer articles on topics that aren’t particularly time sensitive.
Then I have a few folders that start with “Scan-” (”scan-politics”, “scan-tech” etc.) with feeds on particular topics, mostly of a timely nature.
I only check in with Google Reader on free time and “breaks”. I try to decide ahead of time how much time I will spend browsing. I check the High priority folder first (Reader allows you to view all of the feeds in a folder aggregated together). Then Middle priority or the Scan- folder I’m interested in at the time. With the Scan- folders, I flip through very quickly, looking for interesting headlines or recurring themes (hot news). Each time I check a Scan- folder, when I’m finished, I click “Mark all as read” (most of the Scan- feeds are time-sensitive; no point in reading stale news).
For Twitter, I take a similar tack. I follow somewhat promiscuously, but I use TweetDeck to organize columns between those I follow closely and those I follow casually. The columns in TweetDeck are organized in priority order from left to right:
Replies (@ replies to me)
Direct Messages (DMs to me. Wish I could combine with previous.)
Search (A global search with a few terms connected by “OR” on topics that interest me.)
Friends and Colleagues (People I actually know or share something in common with who don’t tweet a ton.)
Consistently Good (Celebrities, funny people, and interesting people who usually tweet responsibly.)
Scan (Interesting to check in on once in a while, but I won’t feel bad about missing most of the time)
Twitscoop: Buzzing Right Now (TweetDeck’s “tag cloud”-style display of trending topics)
…And there are some people that I “follow” that aren’t included in any of the columns, so I rarely see any of their tweets.
When I’m working with two monitors, I keep tweet deck on my second monitor and allow other programs to be in front of it most of the time. When I’m mobile, TweetDeck is usually minimized or covered by other apps and I try to check it infrequently.
It’s a little tougher to keep things prioritized for mobile Twittering. Twittelator has a new “Sub Groups” feature, but the implementation isn’t great yet. But reading tweets on my phone is mostly for leisure, so I don’t mind having everything in one stream.
One last thought (since I think my reply is longer than your original article
)… When Twitter notifies me that I have a new follower, I do *not* check them out right away. One of the tactics for growing your follower base or spamming is to follow a ton of people in the hopes that they’ll follow you back or check out your website. Spammers usually unfollow you right away so that they can follow others. Self-promoters usually unfollow you within a week if you don’t follow back. After a week, if they’re still following me, I’ll check them out. But if I find someone I might be interested in following on my own, I pretty much follow your method.