Twitter is a news-snippet drip-feed
So it can be the BBC telling you about the UN vote on Palestine happening live, or your cousin posting a photo about a skirt she’s trying on, asking you what you think. Twitter is a place where everyone -and i mean everyone- can broadcast a short snippet of something that is happening, something funny, a beautiful photo, or whatever. Most people say they don’t want to know what you had for breakfast, but the blessing is that each snippet is limited to 140 characters, with the link to the page or photo in those 140. How easy is it to skip a couple of lines from someone you don’t care about? ;)
No need to find a needle in a haystack…
I miss tweets all the time. And i don’t care. I can’t possibly always know everything that’s going on in the world. It’s just not possible. Nobody can, and nobody should. But. I have several friends or entities I follow (such as @KindleUK) who tweet at best once a day. In the miasma of the 500+ people I follow, I would be guaranteed to miss them. How to catch them? Stick them in a list. Twitter allows you to build lists, and to read all the tweets filtered by list. I have a private one called “quiet ones”. The secret? You can put people in lists without following them.
Can reading twitter be more fun?
Hell yes! Download flipboard. It basically can tap into your twitter account, syphon off all the links people you consider good references tweet, and feed them to you in magazine format. It’s absolutely brilliant! This is only one method of digesting this information, and it’s an excellently designed one. If you’ve never seen it, try it.
Oh, and you can feed flipboard from your RSS reader as well (like Google reader), which means you can have “channels” set up, grouping various sources by type (design, tech, fashion…) I personally haven’t done it yet, but I never got into RSS at all.
I manage the deluge by pruning the list that I follow so I get fewer tweets than I care to follow each day. So I’ve dropped most news sources .. now prefer to get news ‘on demand’, not ‘push’.
I’ve tried that too, but I do like seeing news in the main feed. And besides, at 500+ people, I can hardly drop it to something manageable! What I have resorted to doing is putting some work-related feeds into lists and actively NOT following them. So I can read them on demand and not have them end up in the main stream.