I just opened NetNewsWire (my feed reader) for the first time in about three weeks. I think that’s the longest I’ve gone without looking at it in many years. Even when I did open it, it was more out of habit than out of necessity. Why isn’t it calling me any more?
These days individual feeds are far less relevant to me. The ambient awareness (in my case, emanating from Twitter and Filtrbox) seems to have relegated all of my “subscriptions” to second class citizens in my world of information. It seems that most of what I’m reading in my feed reader is either a) something I’ve already seen through a newsfeed or other amplification or b) not that interesting. Twitter has already sussed out the really interesting stuff, and my persistent searches through Filtrbox make sure I’m not missing something that’s directly on point.
I think that’s becuase I’m subscribed to way too many feeds via RSS. I think I can now cut back to a few dozen, instead of 120. Sure, I’ve got friends whose blogs I want to be sure I’m keeping up with in full. And I’ve got certain feeds that are just pure streams of brilliance. I won’t unsubscribe from those. But I think the trend is clear – most of us have already read the really good stuff before we even look at our RSS feeds.
Take TechCrunch for example. Does anyone but the truly die hard geek really read every post any more? Why? There’s just no need. If it’s really that interesting, I’m hearing about it elsewhere. I’ll keep my TechCrunch subscription but I’ll continue to fly past almost every article, never reading more than the title. Occasionally, I’ll learn something. It’s become more like a magazine, and less like news.
I suppose the new way of thinking is to understand that there are really three types of information that we’re now consuming:
Alerts – By this I mean “important current events”. Essentially 100% of my alerts come from Twitter. Whatever the story, if I care about it, I almost always see it there first.
News – I think of data as all of the stuff that’s highly specific and relevant to my world, but that isn’t really time critical. Twitter supplies me with an awful lot of this too, and Filtrbox fills in the void where my social connections don’t create the approprate ampliciation automatically. The news is needed, but it’s not needed immediately.
Feeds – Now I think of RSS feeds or “subscriptions” more like I used to think of magazines. It’s the stuff to pass some time with. It lets me catch up with old friends, and provides me with some random and interesting stuff to ponder.
I’m left to wonder though – shouldn’t there be a new breed of RSS reader that understands that I’ve already seen the alerts and the news? I’m now spending a meaningful chunk of time in my feed reader just skipping over stuff I’ve already read. It would be neat if NetNewsWire could automatically hide any articles that I’ve already visited based on my browser history.
There is one more type of information that I get through Twitter. It’s the one I don’t want:
Noise – This is the price you pay for using Twitter. You can be sure that Twitter will deliver the news, but you have to be willing to parse the noise. Fortunately, this is very easy to do as long as you have a reasonable amount of discipline in how you consume Twitter.
No wonder that when you attend media conferences, you now hear old school journalists in the know saying that Twitter is the most important technology that affects their industry. Twitter effectively delivers both types of important information (alerts and news) if you use it correctly, at a very small price.
This has me thinking. I think we’re going to see a real decline in the subscriber counts of long tail publishers. After all, if you write something really great, I’ll find out about it anyway, right? Unless I’m really close to you and/or I really want to read every word you say, there’s just no need to subscribe anymore. The good stuff you write will find it’s way to me, and my social filters will block the garbage. Subscriptions will remain only where strong community allegiance and/or participation exists.
How has your information consumption pattern changed in the last year?
I completely agree with you on this. I got tired from feeling that I had to stay on top of all the latest "news" in the tech world so I could be a good entrepreneur. Last fall (after the election) I gave up on starting companies and I completely disconnected from all the news coming at me from numerous sources. Canceled magazine subscriptions (I used to be a B&N junkie, buying Wired and Web Developer magazine religiously), stopped reading the paper and watching the news on tv and did not open my feed reader until today. I have over 20k posts "to read" that have queued up (actually more than that as some feeds will not pull down all the posts sense I last read them).
Looking back on my previous self I now realize that all these feeds of "news" was the root cause of my dissatisfaction on building new technology. I found it hard to stay focused and have faith in "my beliefs" on what constitutes good technology and companies when I was constantly being influenced by reading about what other entrepreneurs where creating and doing. I was continuously changing and tweaking my pitch for funding based on what vc "a" said or what vc "b" had just invested in. Now I am "tabula rasa" and re-approaching being an entrepreneur again with a firm belief and conviction to what I KNOW to be great new technology with out all the "feed clutter" as I call it, being a negative influence.
Now that I have spent 5 months with only my social network (Facebook, Twitter, Friends and Family) as my news source I am happier, less stressed, and more focused.
David is correct on that how people find and consume "news" is going to change and is changing rapidly. I might not know everything as quickly as I did, but the things I need to know are finding me and it is those things that find me that are important. My social network is the greatest filter of all.
Fred Wilson just did a smart thing, making a twitter feed for his blog posts, and keeping those out of his regular twitter feed.
TechCrunch is a perfect example of one that needs to do that.
That's a micro issue that gets to your topic. The macro issue is one that I'm struggling with a lot.
I've been continuing to use NetNewsWire, setting up my Twitter, FB, LinkedIn updates with RSS feeds so that I can funnel everything through that one stream, but it's not ideal; no way to reply to tweets, etc. Also sometimes NetNewsWire isn't up to date with Twitter.
If Newsgator, or someone, could figure out what is a duplicate — e.g.: eliminating the twitter version of an RSS story, eliminating retweets that you've already read — and then mark that as read, that would be a huge win and eliminate tons of noise.
I agree that Twitter is mostly noise, and at the same time vital. I _think_ RSS is in the middle of the solution because it's pretty well cooked, but it's clear that the solution is not yet there. At least I haven't seen it.
Great topic! Post again if you find a great solution.
Perfect. I don't need to get that bc i get the RSS feed.
While that is the wise way to do it here in early 2009, it shows the need for a more comprehensive reader, something that would know — even if I was signed up for your RSS feed and your Twitter feed — that I have read the story so the reader marks both as read.
Great post. I'm seeing this trend in my personal scouring of news too. I hadn't really thought about the 3 groups of Alerts, News, and Feeds but that feels about right.
I was emailing with Brad a couple days ago on the very topic of duplicate content…..
I still rely on NetNewsWire. I find my RSS feeds much more valuable than Twitter. Not only is there a lot of noise on Twitter, but there is a limit to what you can communicate in 140 characters. This seems banal but is true.
I fear people's attention spans have deteriorated to the point where they can't concentrate on anything longer than a few sentences….
I've had to keep some discipline to keep my feed reader relentlessly focused on things that actually contribute to stuff I am working on. Generally this means software, apis and tools I use, or am considering using, for a project. That's how I'm coping with juggling a day job and a startup.
I have been bouncing an idea around with a coworker of mine (David Duey – I believe you know him David) to possibly solve some of these problems. The idea stems from the fact that everyone has an RSS feed and the consumer must subscribe to the feed to receive that information in their feed reader. This is unfair to the consumer of the information.
You mention how twitter contains noise, but RSS feeds contain just as much noise (especially if you consider that most of us are subscribed to several dozen rss feeds, many of which produce several articles a day). I love reading Brad Feld's blog, but I am I not really interested in how long it took him to run a certain marathon.
"It would be neat if NetNewsWire could automatically hide any articles that I’ve already visited based on my browser history." <– that's brilliant. i hope someone uses that idea.
i found that twitter was getting overwhelming when i was using tweetdeck. i've since switched to nambu and all of twitter's usefulness has come back to me, plus some.
Another possible solution coming from gist.com, and Brad just invested so it must be at least interesting…