Comments on Wardrobe strength: "Social networking" killed productivity

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I've switched to ...

2009-08-03T13:08:06.786+02:00

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I've switched to TweetDeck and set up some nice grouping filters. This has greatly reduced the signal to noise ratio while allowing me to follow more people.

I have not had any nightmares about social media in a few days now, so things are getting better, but I am not satisfied with my information flow yet.

ramwell: thanks for that link, I found that presentation very interesting. Changing the way we do filtering is probably a good idea, but I think we might want to change our workflows as well. I think the way we consume information is also a bottleneck in the current system.

There is no doubt that Twitter is too influential ...

2009-08-03T11:47:56.687+02:00

There is no doubt that Twitter is too influential to ignore.
I second Michael's advice; dividing people into groups is a very powerful feature of twitter clients like Tweetdeck.

But digging deeper into the issue, we are all facing the inherent issue of "information overload"
I sometimes find it tiresome to keep up with my friendfeed account, though it is a great way to integrate news sources scattered over the web.

Your post reminded me of Clay Shirky's quote:
"Problem is filter failure, not info overload"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10142298-16.html

I do hope he is right.

Hehe - you're doing it wrong. :-) If you're only ...

2009-07-31T15:22:56.783+02:00

Hehe - you're doing it wrong. :-)

If you're only getting 15-200 tweets a day you need to follow more people. Twitter is like the gibbering of madmen - there is plenty of gold in there but also plenty of entertaining nonense.

Secondly, why on earth are you reading it *all*. See above about Twitter mainly being gibbering nonsense...

I treat twitter as a river. When I'm at my computer I have a client open and glance at it to see what is flowing currently whenever I get a moment. I very rarely go back and read what I've missed though.

What I do to make sure I don't miss the important stuff is use Tweetdeck which has a multi-columned interface.

One column is the current stream.

Next to it are any messages sent that 'mention' me. I never miss messages to me or about me and I reply to a good proportion of them.

The next column to that is a search for IronPython. Anytime *anyone* tweets about IronPython I see it - whether I follow them or not. You could set up searches for Neo4j and Jython and not miss anything important without having to read *everything* that floats by from the people you follow.

You can do more sophisticated things with Tweetdeck, like divide people you follow into different groups and put each group into a separate column. This might make it easier to follow indidivuals who you really don't want to miss anything they say (like me for example). :-) I haven't bothered with this though.