How I use RSS.
RSS is too slow. RSS is dead. No it’s not. Rest in peace. RSS is alive and well. We’re seeing the rise of the real-time web. I’m reminded that back in the day I had a small spat with Fred Wilson when he said Email is dead. And I said no it’s not. I felt vindicated this week when Wilson implored, Don’t forget about email.
Indeed, everything old is new again and many of us are saying, as danah boyd so eloquently rants today:
For my own sanity, I need one pile of ToDo. So at the end of the day, the only channel that actually works for me is email. And if you need me to respond to something, don’t message me elsewhere; send me an email.
Boyd’s larger point is that she is — and we are — drowning in information overload:
I cannot read everything that I want to, engage in conversations with everyone I’d like to, let alone deal with high-bandwidith content like video. Over the last decade, I’ve developed a set of coping mechanisms for dealing with online conversations. Ways of keeping myself sane amidst the onslaught. The problem is that each new genre of communication and consumption brings new challenges and forces me to adjust… And I hate that.
My own coping mechanism is a river of content strategy. Twitter. Facebook. 227 RSS feeds. Podcasts. Radio. TV. TiVo. Vimeo. YouTube. SMS. My iPhone. Netflix. My real life work-related content…
News, culture, friends, followees, entertainment, work, fun, sport — I watch it all go rushing by and, like [data]fishing, dip in to see what I find. If it’s not interesting, I throw it back and dip again. When I find something interesting enough I search (see Steve Rubel’s video above, via James Joyner) and revel in all the dimensions of it that those multiple channels make possible.
But when I walk completely away, as I did this week, it’s overwhelming to jump back in.
Let me be a little more concrete. And self-involved. I get hundreds of emails per day that I have to directly respond to. (Hundreds more get filtered into the “will read one day” folders that get very little attention.) I do a huge amount of my responding offline (on airplanes, public transit, cafes, etc.). Thus, messages with links take much longer to get my attention than messages without links. But there’s something nice about turning an INBOX into something manageable before people have the chance to respond. The problem with Web2.0 technologies is that each one wants to replace the INBOX (or at least be an additional channel). For example, there are private messages and comments on social network sites, direct messages and @replies on Twitter. There are blog comments. And RSS feeds. And then there are all of the online communities and bulletin boards and chat spaces that have evolved from those developed in olden days. For me, it’s too much. Too much I tell you. And we haven’t even gotten to voicemail, text messages. Let alone all that’s coming.
The onslaught of places to check makes me want to crumple. And, for better or worse, it’s simply 100% not manageable if I want to keep up my research and stay sane.
Back in 2005 I wondered, Who will be the next Google? I had no names or ideas to propose, but while reading danah’s rant today it occurred to me that the company that comes up with a solution to this question, that company will easily topple Google.