In keeping with Lisa’s theme, I want to talk a bit about the topic of attention management.
A week ago, I declared information bankruptcy.
Information bankruptcy is a more generalized form of email bankruptcy and RSS bankruptcy. I have too much content to keep up with. I have 96 people I follow on twitter (low by most affluent standards). I have 73 friends on facebook (again, low). I follow the life streams of a dozen people. I’m on livejournal, flickr, yelp, upcoming, eventful, tumblr, delicious, wordie, pownce, linked in, myspace, last.fm…the list goes on. By declaring information bankruptcy, I stayed away from all of these things for a week with the intention of rethinking how I consume data when I return.
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Posted on April 17th, 2008 in Blog | 1 Comment »
Twhirl and Alert Thingy are both well built little apps that are getting a lot of attention lately, but neither of them have rethought the way we need to communicate at all. With Twitter in the picture, we can no longer use the same paradigms from email, RSS, or even IM. Twitter is omni-directional, mobile, time-sensitive, and overwhelming in quantity. Voices are rising louder and louder complaining about how they are drowning in twitter messages, and so far applications have only been concerned with enabling users to get even more content, not less. Every day I realize the harsh reality that I cannot keep track of the entire Internet, and I quite literally dream of a service that would lower the signal to noise ratio. Here’s where everyone (including Twitter) is missing the mark: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 27th, 2008 in Blog | 1 Comment »
In yesterday’s State of the Twitter update, Biz Stone mentioned some statistics they’ve been gathering regarding relationship distribution. Half of twitter users follow and are followed by about 10 people, and only 10% have more than 80 followers and follow more than 70. This is a bit of a wakeup call for me to realize just how few tweeps use the service like I do, which is naturally the perspective I use when coming up with cool things to do with it. Read the rest of this entry »
