It’s my attention and I’m tired of sharing it with everyone
May 16, 2008 by Tris Hussey
Filed under Business
Sarah Perez wrote a great, insightful post about the explosion of cool apps and how, really, we can’t do it all:
What Can We Do? It’s hard to say. Early adopters are not going to stop playing with every new service, but it’s clear that we’re getting to a point where tools that centralize, aggregate, but most importantly filter our content are going to be the ones that win out. There are only so many hours in the day, and, as it stands right now, every single one of them could be filled just consuming and interacting with content, social media, and web services. There’s also this little thing called “going outside” that we would like to take part in, too. Hopefully we’ll see the killer web app to filter the noise someday soon to help us do so, but it’s definitely not here yet.—Too Many Choices, Too Much Content – ReadWriteWeb
I’ve been mulling this very thing over in my head recently. Good thing Sarah is more articulate, and faster off the mark, than I so I could be inspired by her work.
Frankly, as much as I’m a beta junkie, I don’t have time to really try everything. Even now I’m cutting back on a lot of social media tools. Facebook? If I visit once a week I’m doing well. Twitter? I try to keep an eye on things, but I set Twhirl only to ping when I get a DM or reply.
Between real work (like making bloggers better bloggers), writing, and RSS … I really like to leave a little time for real life.
The solution, as Sarah alludes to, is to keep plugging at it. Yep, I’m still going to keep trying things. Especially things to help me aggregate and filter my information. We can hope that eventually we’ll get this right and have a way to pull more information in and get better stuff out.
I agree that there’s waaay too much to keep track of anymore. I haven’t been to Facebook in eons – I find the “add ons” annoying. I can’t even remember the MySpace password, it’s been that long (I was never a fan). My social media has, of late, been limited to twitter. And I check in with LinkedIn every now and again but the ramped up pushiness on LinkedIn is aggravating.
I don’t like having to reply to everyone, make introductions, write recommendations.
That’s why I enjoy Twitter. I tweet on my time.
Tris, good building on Sarah’s post. It is interesting to note the role early adopting bloggers play in our ability to filter all these options. With so many new ‘toys’ to play with I am more likely to check one out if someone else recommends it. And not just anyone, someone who has established that they will lead me down the efficient path to the latest and greatest.
@Kelly, that’s exactly it. Once you get into these buggers there is social pressure to do stuff there. And frankly you have to ask yourself, what does it do for you.
@Michael, yes I try to try out as much as I can (I’m loving Snackr as a fast easy RSS ticker). Sometimes I don’t just get to write about it all. Which means, maybe I should.
I am going to try out Snackr.
But you know what I would really love? An RSS reader that adapted to my reading, and did some exploring for me. Start with my current list of favourites and present them to me. With each post let me actively mark as interesting/or not. Also take some passive feedback, if I click through, pause for an extended period then infer that it was of interest. If my rating of a blog is higher give that blog more ‘air time’, if it stays high add some select members of that blog’s blogroll to my playlist. If I tend to rate blogs with certain tags higher, randomly add other blog entries with that tag. Although reading RSS feeds is pretty simple there is a great deal of passive information I am passing with my actions. Harnessing this could create an amazing experience for the user.
Let me know if you come across this in your adventures. I’ll let you know if I break down and implement it myself.
Michael, the closest thing I’ve found is Attensa’s Outlook-based reader. In fact it was my reader of choice for a long time, unfortunately I couldn’t get the Outlook 2007 version to load correctly.
FeedDemon and other NewsGator products are collecting attention data, so I can tell from FD what feeds I read the most. The next step would just be to sort them by that.
‘Course I’d prefer sort by aideRSS postrank.