This is a Guest Post by Rodlie Ortiz.
Ok, so I know that this title sounds a little grandiose. The thought of bringing another social network into one’s life would seem to complicate things. But I’ve found the reverse to be true. Let me tell you why.
In this post I shared about a “problem” I was having. It’s an addiction to information. I subscribed via email to quite a few different blogs and news sites. I also subscribed via rss in Google Reader for even more blogs. If something was happening, I wanted to make sure I knew about.
But this started to become a problem for me. I just had too many things to check (Facebook, Twitter, email, rss Google Reader) and it was becoming quite burdensome. I just didn’t have the time and it was increasing my sense of anxiety. My anxiety became worse when I would jump in to check my rss subscriptions and see a bunch piled up that I haven’t read. Somewhere in that stack of hay there could be something really important!!
So here’s what I decided to do: dump most of it and trust in the power of crowd sourcing through Twitter.
Allow me to explain…
Crowd sourcing is nothing new. It’s something that those in the publishing world have been doing for some time. The big book publishers will wait until the best self-published books rise in popularity and make money, then they pounce and sign up those authors.
It’s simply leveraging the power and intelligence of a large group to accomplish a certain task. Think Wikipedia.
I’ve done something similar with Twitter. I dumped my rss subscriptions. And let go of even more email subscriptions that I had (I still subscribe to a few important blogs via email, though). Now I’m relying on Twitter to let me know of important stuff. And i’m following enough leaders on Twitter, that if something important is happening, more than one of them will tweet about it. Sure, I will miss different personal things. But I probably won’t miss anything life changing or really important.
This is a lot quicker for me because I can quickly scan Twitter to see what people have posted, and most bloggers post a link to their latest blog on Twitter, anyways. If it looks and sounds important, I’ll check it out. If not, I just pass it by.
And if I really wanted to, I could import the rss feeds of those other blogs directly into Twitter. I haven’t done so, but it’s an option that’s there.
Since taking this leap I feel a lot more free. I’m not stressed out thinking that I’m missing all this information. If it’s important, it’s going to rise to the top and people will tweet about it. If not, it’s going to be ok. Life will go on. I will survive.
That’s what I keep telling myself, anyways.
What about you? Have you taken a similar leap? How has Twitter helped you simplify your life?
[Image from Dano]
Paul Steinbrueck says
Rodlie, thanks for writing this post. Managing one's information feeds effectively is becoming one of the biggest challenges for people these days, myself included. For that reason I'm always interested to hear people's strategies on this.
Personally, I follow too many people on Twitter and miss more tweets than I see. So, I prefer to continue subscribing to blog feeds in an RSS feed reader. I still get some articles/newsletters via email, but whenever they offer an RSS feed, I unsubscribe via email and subscribe to the RSS feed.
I hope others will share their feed management strategy here.
Rodlie says
Thanks, Paul. Yeah, I think it's just good for people to be intentional about whatever strategy they're using. Sounds like rss is working well for you.
Daniel_Berman says
I took Rodlie's advice and completely cleaned out my G Reader. There was actually several cases where I was following the person AND subscribed to their rss feed. I wonder whether it will actually work in terms of missing things, especially thinking about Steve Rubels comments about having a searchable archive, but the reality is that my G reader inbox was overflowing and largely unread anyway.
Yes I can't save tweets, but if its especially critical I normally dump the link to Delicious which FF picks up and cc's Twitter and the cycle continues.
Graham Brenna says
I've kinda moved in the same direction. Seesmic desktop is open all the time. GooReader is not.
Tim Holman says
This a great post and has me considering why I'm on twitter in the first place. I have been considering de-following a few people so I can focus on less.
Rodlie says
Tim, I would highly recommend following less people on twitter. It depends on your purpose, though. If your purpose is to be a marketing machine and to get lots of people to follow you, than it works well for that. My purpose is to learn, dialogue, and to do it effectively. By following smaller groups of people, but people who are connected leaders, i'm able to leverage the power of crowd sourcing. It's working really well for me, anyway.