The verdict is in (day 227)

When Skype came along it seemed like a good idea and it was.  Even older and regular folk use it, they love the video chat.  It keeps families in touch.  Great.  Can't argue with that.   When Twitter came along I never had the thought it was a good idea.  And I routinely hear regular folk say 'why would I want to do that?' in reference to Twitter.  Like it or not, Twitter has a ambiguous value proposition.  Even when you're on it you wonder what it might be.  Like Google Wave, it suffers from being a solution without a well distributed problem.   I think my experiment with Twitter is done, and my conclusion is that there is simply not enough content to keep me interested.  There is too much to wade through and the effort to sort it all out is not worth it in the end.  I'd rather keep up with my RSS feeds and get more in depth content.  The last piece of evidence to let go of Twitter was deliberately being without it for a week.  I felt better without it.  I logged on again briefly to see the difference and I immediately felt triage stress.  I do enough information triage during a regular day.  I don't need more of it.  I need less.  I need the Amazon recommendation engine for the chatter of my friends.  Either that or I need to seriously constrain the friend definition.

I'm a big fan of Google Reader.  There are probably lots of equivalent services out there but the basic idea is that I read my feeds and if I like something I share it with my friends.  They do the same.  It's a nice way to see what everyone else has triaged.  It's distributed triage.  Typically the volume is fairly low so it doesn't add a lot of work to see what they've shared.  I can also keep my own lists of things I thought were interesting.  There are two differences between Google Reader and Twitter that keep me with the Reader.  It's lower volume, and deeper content.  There is something so contrived about the restricted number of characters to a Twitter post.  You can be as clever as you want, it still comes out like half a thought if the underlying context is at all rich.    So for now I'm with RSS and I'm shunning Twitter.  We'll see if peer pressure changes this in the future.  I'm certainly in good company it seems.

Still beyond a tool vs tool diatribe, what is it that I really want out of information tools?

• I don't want to be presented with irrelevant information or idle chatter.
• I want the information to be linked with interests that I've already flagged either implicitly or explicitly.  
• I want to know what my friends are thinking but not necessarily in real-time.
• In fact, I rarely want information as a push mechanism.  I prefer to pull my info.
• I want ambient displays for the creative works that my friends are involved with.
• I want to know about events that are connected to my close friends, or my community.
• I don't want to be invited to events outside of my geographical area.
• I don't want to be invited to be a fan of anything.
• I want easy direct channels for personal requests.
• I want in depth reporting of current events.
• I want time-stamped dynamic geo-tagged information on demand.

 A song for this post.

The almighty untethers us (day 130)

Something unusual happened today.  I learned of a current news event from Twitter before I learned it from anywhere else.  This is in part because I haven't been scanning my usual news sources and I've been at home but it's also because so many people twittered about it, in various forms.  I eventually had to pay attention.  My feeds, they are changing.

The ReadWriteWeb blog recently posted that RSS feeds were dead.  A brave and controversial thing to write.  Turns out I wasn't the only one that thought so.  There were many many comments from people that still rely on RSS feeds.  I was glad because when I first read the post I totally felt behind the times.  "But I still love my RSS feeds!", I wimpered.  It felt a little bit like coming back from sixth great summer break and finding out that my favourite game was now uncool.  The memo hadn't reached me in time for me to avoid making a fool of myself.   Thankfully RSS feeds are not dead and RWW had to capitulate.

The news that had people all atwitter is almost as exciting as my feeds changing - Google has announced the latest Android phone and it's not tied to a carrier.  It's the last part that's amazing.  That's right, you buy the phone and you can use it on any network!!!  This should not be such a gift because it should have been the norm all along, but there it is - a gift from mother Google.  I have no idea if any of this will be valid in Canada but it's only a matter of time.   This means that my previous rant may be moot in a year or two when carriers will be forced to compete for my phone's attention.  Take that Bell/Telus/Rogers.

A song for this post.