When if at all, will Google+ allow people to add their own RSS feeds?Friendfeed took off when rooms were added, harnessing the power of the so-called social interest graph, but it started to lose appeal again when they allowed the automated inclusion of rss feeds into those rooms by the room owners, slowly drowning out the interesting and genuine conversations.Facebook allows the automated inclusion of feeds via 3rd party apps, but between the Facebook users and Facebook themselves, they have managed to deprecate content from feeds so that original content and human shares take priority over feeds.Now some Google+ users are clamouring for the ability to be able to add their own streams from elsewhere directly into their own circles, which would amount to the same mistake as Friendfeed made. But Google+ hasn’t even enabled some kind of groups, rooms or interests yet, either because they still don’t understand the dynamics of social networks, or because they are rolling out such features in waves, and this one hasn’t arrived yet.Google’s record with groups isn’t a good one. They bought Dejanews, the web interface for usenet newsgroups, one of the original computer facilitated social networks, and did nothing much with it for nearly a decade. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhen will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?Related posts:Friendfeed for microblogging – a screencast videoReclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron softwareFriendfeed and Social Objects
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When will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/07/when-will-google-allow-rss-feeds
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July 7 2011, 1:21pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Information overload? Time to relax then
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/22/information-overload-time-to-relax-then
Yes, it’s all about filters, recommendations and information management, but are there any new tips on offer here? Probabilism may have something to offer. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to wait for someone to email you again because you’ve simply deleted their email without reading it though.
This article titled “Information overload? Time to relax then” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 22nd February 2011 08.37 UTC The title of a fascinating Clay Shirky presentation has it that “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”, and though I rely extensively on filters to make my online life manageable, I find myself wanting to quibble with Shirky. After years of discovering a new information resource, being consumed by it, finding it too much to bear, then getting on top of it, only to find myself being sucked under by another, faster information resource, I’ve concluded that the real secret to beating information overload isn’t better filters: it’s cultivating a “probabilistic” frame of mind. The first online resources I used were dial-up bulletin board systems in the 1980s. At one point, I created accounts on every single BBS that I could connect to with a local phone call (in Canada, where I grew up, local calls weren’t metered, but long distance calls were charged by the minute). That was because most of my local bulletin board systems were hobbyist systems with one or two phone lines, and most of the time, a connection attempt would be foiled by a busy signal. In order to get my fill of online time, I’d have to create logins on dozens of systems and try to call them all until I found one that was free. Then the number of bulletin board systems increased, as did the number of lines the average BBS sported, and the number of users on bulletin board systems. Many of them joined up with syndication systems such as FIDONet, which imported the online discussions from distant bulletin board systems all over the world. I went from reading every word posted on every BBS to reading just a few choice forums. Then I had to winnow down the list of bulletin board systems I used, and then further winnow the list of groups I read. Finally, I had to content myself with skimming most of these groups and actively participating in a small number of groups that were right up my street. This was a real struggle at first. There is a world of difference between reading every word uttered in a community and reading just a few choice ones. But soon the anxiety gave way to contentment and even delight: it turned out that “overload” has a wonderful corollary: redundancy. Anything really worth seeing wouldn’t just appear once and vanish. The really interesting stuff would find its way into other discussions, and early conferencing systems made it easy enough to back my way through the forums I was ignoring or skimming to find the important thing I’d missed. This pattern went on to repeat itself again and again. Once, I could read all the Usenet discussion groups my ISP carried, then only a selection, and then only one or two plus a longer list of groups I’d dip into now and again when time allowed. Once I could read every new website that went online and was posted to Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web (now called Yahoo). Then I could only visit the interesting ones; then I could only visit the last three or four interesting ones, then I had to abandon the project altogether and just discover new sites piecemeal. Again and again, this pattern re-emerges: once I could read all the tweets emitted by everyone I followed on Twitter; now I just skim the last 20 or 30 a few times a day and rely on retweets to bubble the good stuff to the top (I do my bit by retweeting things when I think they deserve it). Once I could read every item in my list of RSS feeds; now I periodically mark them all as read without looking at any of them, just to clear the decks: if there’s something good in the missed material, someone will repost it and I’ll see it then. This is even true for my email, the most “deterministic” of media for me. Now I’ve got a mailbox for people I’ve corresponded with in the past and another that collects mails from previously unseen addresses – the latter gets a lot less attention than the former, but if I miss something and accidentally delete it, the sender often figures it out and resends the message (I keep a list of the people from whom I’m awaiting email replies and give them a nudge every so often, on the assumption that other people probably have similar probabilistic approaches to their mail). There are fascinating implications for a world of probabalistic resource use: for one thing, it points up the importance of “signal amplification” through retweets, reposts, and other recycling of interesting tit-bits – these are critical to the successful use of a medium that can’t be consumed by any one person from tip to tail. It also suggests that the most important strategy for coping with information overload is to simply relax and not worry about missing the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity lurking somewhere in one of your inboxes – it’ll be around again shortly.
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Related posts:Teaching Assistants Community The Art of Threading Are junk information diets killing us?
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February 22 2011, 2:46am | Comments »
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