I’m with Kortina on this. As a bonus, every once in a while I manage to write something that remains both true and relevant for me, and it’s pretty cool for me when I stumble across one of those moments. In a post entitled Attention, Aggregation, Customization that I wrote nearly four years ago, I hit this one:
So what’s the point here? Well, that over time my approach to consuming feeds has shifted to treating them as raw material, rather than finished products. I don’t feel obligated to give each feed the attention it deserves, nor do I worry about what gems I might be overlooking. While I do still read my daily feed group in a high-friction way, much as I go through my email inbox, the rest of it (the overwhelming majority) gets a low friction approach.
I am glad to see you mention Google Reader in this conversation—it’s an easily overlooked member of the stream category ( I actually read your post on Google Reader mobile in blackberry browser because I don’t have a good twitter client and browsing any stream is the way I spend downtime on my phone—these streams are definitely of the same category, behaviorally for me.)
I was thinking about this after reading your post, and I believe that Twitter has actually taught me how to use Google Reader. I used to think of Google Reader like my email inbox, because there are read/unread statuses with each article. The overwhelming number of messages on twitter and lack of read / unread status, however, made me realize that you cannot consume entire streams like you would do with email. You just jump in, browse around the recent stuff, and jump back out. Streams are reminding us just how much data is flowing through our lives everyday and that attention is a choice given only to some bits of data.
I imagine we’ll become acclimated, again, to deferring more attention choices to editors / curators of content as we become dissatisfied with just turning on the stream and seeing what’s at the top—we’re going to need some way to filter/reduce the flow of these streams to something that fits the finite bits of time we devote to these floods of data passing by us.
Originally posted as a comment by kortina on JohnB blog using Disqus.
