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RSS and Bookmark Overload
Last year I was sifting through over 200 new articles from RSS feeds in Google Reader every day, and then also checking updates from people I follow on Twitter. I didn’t want to miss any news, cool links, or new tools in the web development world. Whenever I discovered something useful, I bookmarked the link. My thinking was that when I needed the information I could find it later. The problem with this was that I had too many bookmarks, and I actually just search Google when I need to find some information – not my bookmarks.
Fixing RSS overload with Twitter
After doing this for a while I found that the important topics from RSS feeds were all showing up on Twitter anyway. I decided to stop using RSS, and let Twitter filter topics for me. To get this working effectively, I looked at every blog or website I was following using RSS. Most had a link to “follow on Twitter” and when they did not, I tried to follow the author by searching for them.
Often when an important article is posted, the author will also post a link on Twitter. Additionally, if it is really important it will show up in Twitter multiple times as others re-post the link. Occasionally, I found that some people continually posted about things I don’t care about. I just stopped following these people, and Twitter was a lot easier and quicker to read through.
Google can save the bookmarks
I was previously using the Delicious bookmarking service to save and tag all my bookmarks, but I never really browsed my tags to find anything useful. When I needed some information I did a Google search.
Switching to the Google Bookmarks service brings my bookmarks into search. Bookmarking in Google is the same as “staring” a search result. Tags link the bookmark to the search terms. This system brings my bookmarks to the top of my search. There are also browser extensions available to make bookmarking and tagging quick and easy.