I love the whole concept of using Google Reader to custom tailor my news, but it has just gotten to be too much. I found what I really looked forward to was new blog postings from my friends, and I would scroll through the blogs on the side looking for their updates first. I have no time to read all the entries; it was over 500 this morning. So I have clipped most of the pro blogs, like BoingBoing, Wired, Slashdot, Tor and so on, not because I don’t like them, but just because I can’t keep up.
io9, Massively and ArsTechnica are, I think, the only pro blogs left on my feed. And io9 is tentative, based on the number of NSFW articles they run.
Twitter isn’t so bad, but I have found myself following celebrities for no real reason other than everyone else was. I’ll never have a dialog with these people, and certainly there is nothing about my life that could interest them, so sorry, Felicia Day, Brent Spiner and other people of that ilk – I love your work, but do we really have anything to say to each other?
Lastly, Facebook is gone. I’ve been thinking for awhile now that all these weird little tests you’re supposed to take all the time is just free marketing data for someone. I mostly stopped filling out those tests a long time ago. I’d log in a couple of times and there were dozens more tests I had to take! Just deactivating it just now, there were lots more tests I had to take, most of which required installing applications for, and my mailbox had several more invitations to I dunno what, take more tests probably.
Look, if you want to know how much you and I are alike, just ask me. But damn, Facebook made me feel like a test subject in a psych study.
Social media I use? LinkedIn. Why? Because though it has a bunch of cruft, the cruft/useful stuff ratio is really low. Most everyone I have ever worked with is on there, so I can get an overview for what people are doing with their lives when I would like to know, and if I want to know more, I can get in touch.
And I still use Twitter. As a way to have conversations with people who share similar interests but aren’t necessarily in the same online social groups, it’s invaluable. I am always meeting new people there that I can just – talk to. Chat. In short messages. I wrote my first Twitter application for the Nerd Millennium last week, and it felt good and I had fun doing it. I loved live-tweeting the presidential debates last fall. It’s like IRC without having to choose a room. So that’s a win.
But for reading pro blogs, I feel it’s better to just go to their site and surf it like normal. Having every story pushed to my feed gave them a sense of urgency they haven’t earned. I want to check the feed, read an article or two while collecting my thoughts for whatever it is I’m doing, and then I’m gone. Having dozens of articles a day from the biggies was making me overwhelmed. If you sent only a couple of stories a day to my feed, the good stories, you’d still be there.
The pro blogs that are left also spam my feed, but for them, I read almost everything they publish. Massively is likely to go soon, not because I don’t like their articles, but just because I can’t read the site at work and all the content is hidden behind links I can’t follow, at work. I can surf the site at home. They stay for now because sometimes I can get a decent feel for what they wanted to say in the intro paragraph, or figure out what site the news item came from originally and just read it there.