I am a RSS addict.  There’s too much great content out there, and I feel like I need to devour all of it.  It’s a sickness, I know.

Because of my addiction (there are about 200-250 sites with RSS feeds that I have enough of an interest in to want to keep up with, at this point), I’m frequently overwhelmed with the numbers sitting next to each feed in my Thunderbird install (ApartmentTherapy, for example, has 19,000 posts that i have not yet gone through).

Relatively recently, I’ve been able to dig myself out from the pile enough to mentally put the feeds I subscribe to into three distinct categories:

1. Feeds where I find value in a large enough % of the posts to want to keep top-of-mind
2. Feeds I thought I’d like, but never end up reading.
3. Feeds with not infrequent gem posts, but either a really high volume or not consistent relevance to make me check the feed regularly

The first two are dealt with easily enough, and weeding your overall list of subscriptions is a mentally freeing experience, that allows you to concentrate the awesome in your daily content ingestion routine.  That pesky second one is a problem though.  I feel bad unsubscribing because chances are there are some really great thought-provoking posts that get written, but having to filter through content that isn’t as relevant to me leads to huge bulidups and makes it seem like a chore.

If only there was some kind of service or website where I could get notifications of content that gets posted to these sites, without the ‘unread items’ piling up, so I can click through to the ones I’d be interested in…

Oh wait!

That’s right, many blogs and sites have dedicated Twitter accounts (frequently using Twitterfeed) that spit out headlines and links every time a new post appears.  Additionally, lots of bloggers connect their wordpress installs to their twitter accounts using plugins to notify when they’ve written something new (I use Ingoal’s Twitter Updater, which is fine except it uses zz.gd as a shortener rather than bit.ly)

So Twitter has become my RSS Purgatory, and I frequently ‘downgrade’ blogs that have lived in my RSS reader over to following them.  I’m working on setting up a dedicated Tweetdeck group for these types of accounts, which should further optimize the process.

Do I miss posts? Sure.  But I can safely rely on my community to let me know directly or indirectly when there’s worthwhile reading out there.

So, if you’re like me and have way more feed subscriptions than you could ever keep up with, take an hour, weed the garden, and move some over to Twitter.

Whenever I go to tweetups (in-person group meetings of people who know each other online, mostly via Twitter), I notice two distinct types of interaction between people.  One kind of person will who use it as an chance to get to know people as people, talk about all kinds of things and generally chitchat, making a real connection with others.  The other kind is much more limited, focusing on what I like to call “talking about talking.” You will hear phrases out of this persons mouth like “Well, I twitter about such-and-such” or “As I wrote in my blog…” more frequently than most.  They relate to people through how they already know them.

I’m not going to say that one level of interaction is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than another, I just find it curious.  I’ve always tried to chat with people that I know online about things not related to online, because hey, we’re all people first.  Is it possible that the second type are looking for some kind of validation from those around them.

In thinking about it, it seems like perhaps many of the ‘talking about talking’ folks are used to being a ‘big fish’, so to speak.  When you surround yourself (intentionally or by virtue of your job) with people who are less familiar with online communications than you are, I think we all have a tendency to go into ‘guru-speak’, talking about talking, in order to evangelize the importance of the medium.  Some folks have a hard time turning that off when they’re in a room with other online-focused people.

So I guess my message to this second type of person is:  Relax, you’re amongst friends.  You shouldn’t feel the need to prove your net-savvy, or active in the online world, that’s why you’re attending a tweetup!  In-person meetings are the time to get to know people as people.  Find out what music your favorite blogger is into, complain about the weather, start a drinking game.  Talking about talking really just comes off as trying too hard, and makes me want to roll my eyes and go talk to people I know have no interest in talking about follower counts over beer.

Tweetup (via @socialmedium)

Thoughts? Agree? Disagree? Leave ‘em in the comments :)

Twitter.com has become a central part of my online experience, as one can probably see by the focus on it on the sidebar. So, what makes it so special?

First, let’s define what the Twitter platform is.

Twitter = Length-constrained globally accessible Pseudo-IM that’s tribes-enabled and logged, featuring content-based networking tools. That’s a mouthful so let’s break it down

• Length-Constrained: Each posting on twitter can only be up to 140 characters long (including spaces, punctuation, etc)
• Pseudo-IM: Short bursts of conversational content. Thoughts, feelings, musings, inspiration, funny links, etc.
• Globally accessible: By default, anyone in the world can see any of your postings to the site.  More importantly, anyone can respond to them and engage you directly.
• Tribes-enabled: My definition, based on Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us by Seth Godin, is based around Twitter’s “follow” functionality, which allows any user to “follow” any other user, so that their updates appear in their incoming stream of content.  Unlike Facebook or Myspace, you do not need to confirm someone in order for them to start receiving your content.   As you build your tribe, you have several ways of interacting.

1. You can post a message out into your ’stream’ which anyone following you or searching can read
2. You can direct a message at someone but still have it reside in your public feed by preceeding the message with an @username (e.g. “@jeremymeyers Your new blog post is awesome!”
3. If you are following someone and they are also following you, you can send them a private message that only they can see.

• Logged: Public conversations are on twitter.com indefinitely, so they can be referenced in the future.  In fact, the definition above came from something I posted on December 12th.
• Content-based networking tools: This is where it gets interesting.  Twitter features a pretty robust search engine, allowing you to search not only for people, but for anything anyone has ever posted to the site.  This makes finding interesting people saying remarkable things about topics you are interested in very simple.  And since there’s no barrier to engagement, you can follow them and say hi immediately.

This may seem to some like a fancy way of pushing out Facebook updates, but as more and more interesting people join and start using the service a remarkable thing starts happening.  The old barriers to being able to contact people fall away.  Imagine this scenario:  You’re a writer with a book almost completed and no contacts in the publishing industry.  You go on twitter and notice that the VP of Editorial at Bantam has a twitter account. You can go and see what they’re thinking about, who they’re talking to, what’s interesting to them.  Then you can engage them in authentic communication, build up a relationship, and before you know it you have a friend who can help you out.

Now imagine being able to do this with Rachel Maddow (@maddow).  Or Adam Savage from Mythbusters (@donttrythis).  Or potential Surgeon General Sanjay Gupta (@cnnhealth), or ?uestlove from The Roots, or the guys behind Threadless.com.

I think what I really love about twitter is its a great democratic equalizer.  We’re all just people, and we’re there to make connections that allow us to give and receive value.  Twitter makes it easy to find people who are into what you’re into, and want to have great conversations and debates and grow and learn.  If you use it right, your life can be affected in any number of ways.

Pro Tip: If you find yourself using the site with any regularlity, I suggest using the free program TweetDeck as your interface into it. Its dashboard system makes keeping track of the various threads of conversation much easier than twitter.com’s own website.

(yes I know, quite an ambitious title)

What if Facebook only allowed you 75 friends?

The continued rise of Twitter.com has been attributed to many things by many people. Beyond the ambient intimacy, portability, business uses, networking, simplicity, etc, is one thing that may not have been blogged about quite as much: In a bandwidth-is-cheap storage-is-cheap development-is-cheap world, setting limits can create freedom.

Twitter.com limits all conversation atoms (a unit of measure for posts, replies, direct messages) to 140 characters. That’s it. No exceptions. This forces atoms to be succinct, without artifice or flowery stuff or suckuptitude or any of that capital-m-Marketing that more freedom allows.

Turns out that setting limits is a pretty effective way to get people to say what they want to say and then sit back. I’d be very interested to see what effect putting the 10 minute time limit on YouTube videos did for overall creativity, usage, and density of videos created over time. (paging Mediaeater, can Trendrr demonstrate that).

Being social network fatigued as I am (seriously, if one more site asks me to enter my email address, then upload a photo, then shout at my gmail contacts, I’m quitting the internets.), I hope this trend will expand. Another site that is doing something interesting with this paradigm is 12seconds.tv, which is exactly what it sounds like: Create and share videos, each limited to 12 seconds. From their FAQ:

Why only 12 seconds
Because anything longer is boring. The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.

Note to people with pre-existing sites:Imposing limits where users are USING a particular featureset is a BAD IDEA. Don’t do it, and if you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So there you have it, sports fans. If you’re thinking of launching a new site with community function or content creation abilities, maybe you should think about using a limit as a feature.