Using FriendFeed to deal with Real-time Information Overload
The real-time web has become a real problem for me lately. All this instant news and social-networking has been overwhelming. Many services start off nice and manageable, but inevitably don't scale and quickly spiral out of control.
My experience has been that when I "follow" over 100 sources of information in any service, it starts to become hard to keep up with the flood of info.
I have seen that social-networks tend to go through these 4 phases as shown in my crude mspaint drawing:
- Join a new service to keep up with a specific source of information.
- Subscribe to other sources of interest as you stumble upon them, and to your friends as they join.
- When what you care about gets lost in the stream of info, start unsubscribing to reduce the noise.
- Abandon trying to keep up, or re-define how you use it.
Twitter is currently at phase 3. Real-time updates to my phone is unnecessary for most tweets, so I do not hesitate to click the unfollow button. As more of my real-life friends join, it is rapidly approaching phase 4.
Facebook is at phase 4. I check the website once a day or so, but it is just too slow and cumbersome to use more than that. And it doesn't help that many people feed Twitter into Facebook. The only thing worse than information overload is information overload twice.
Google Reader was also at phase 4. I let it sit for months at the dreaded All Items (1000+). I had to re-define what makes a RSS feeds worthy to subscribe to. My requirements for feeds added to Google Reader are now:
- Update no more than twice a day.
- Must include the full article.
- Have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Every article should be interesting.
So, do we just keep declaring real-time-web bankruptcy over and over? Or is there a better way?
FriendFeed has been the only service that has provided me with adequate tools to deal with a ton of real-time information. It has these three key features:
- Organize sources into lists.
- Have important info delivered to you via email, IM, or desktop notifier.
- Hide what you don't want to see.
Now whenever I stumble upon a new source of information on the web, instead of following it's twitter account or adding it to Google Reader, I try to add it to FriendFeed. If the RSS feed is small or updates really often (or the twitter account only has a few @replies) I create a FriendFeed group. I did this with Georgia Tech, Woot, Jake and Amir, Netflix, Card Observer, ThinkGeek, TMNT, Surviving the World, Giveaway of the Day, wikiHow, and Vimeo Staff Picks. Most other sources were already in FriendFeed like the Big Picture, The Onion, Hacker News, and XKCD.
FriendFeed isn't perfect (ability to hide Twitter replies would be nice), but it is makes a great dashboard to keep up with friends and news across the web in real-time. You can perform advanced searches across everyone, or just your friends, or just lists of friends. Another big aspect of FF is the viral conversations that can form around a single post. If you have only been using FF to aggregate your web activity, I suggest you give it another look. A good way to start is to subscribe to groups that cover topics you are interested in, like The Apple Room or Apps.
The real-time web is only going to get bigger and noisier. If new services are smart, they will follow copy the FriendFeed model (like Facebook has been trying to do). The information won't slow down, but we can manage it better so we don't go crazy... and who knows, maybe we can actually get some work done?
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