Spring Cleaning: Feeds, Followers, and Favorites
Okay, many of you know that I started a new gig over the last 3 weeks. Life as I know it, has been turned upside down, sideways, shaken up, and splattered everywhere. To say I’ve been befuddled is an understatement.
How am I coping with all the activity? I’m not. I am beyond email bankruptcy, Twitter overload, and ready to abandon my feed reader.
Not good.
Where do I go from here? Two words: ‘Spring Cleaning’.
I blocked off my schedule and took about 2-3 hours going through all my feeds, followers, and friends and applying Occam’s razor. Here is the result:
Twitter:
I manage 8 different Twitter accounts which all had the same strategy, follow and be followed. I was a big fan of Scoble’s secret to Twitter, but I am afraid I need to detract.
Twitter doesn’t have enough native features to sort and manage your lists. Sure, you can manage a list of tweeps via TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop, but I find it rather inefficient to create and manage the same favorite list across web and mobile platforms. After much consideration, I decided to unfollow a good number of people I don’t have a personal relationship with.
The noise was filtering out the people I wanted to hear from the most.
As a repercussion of this new thinking, I took my follower count down to the people I maintain personal relationships with. I went from following nearly 1,000 people, down to about 200 and the result has been wonderful. My Twitter apps have been giving me more value than ever before. I find that my lists are much more manageable, the noise isn’t as deafening anymore.
I’ve done the same thing with Facebook. I’ve set up lists and limited the people that hit my primary news feed. Similarly, I reduced the number of feeds I subscribe to in Google reader from 300 to less than 100 feeds.
It was really challenging to limit my input streams to a couple hundred friends and influencers.
Less IS more. And that cliche is proving to be true once again.
2 Responses to “Spring Cleaning: Feeds, Followers, and Favorites”
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Just took a week off from managing multiple Twitter accounts, running diff businesses, making family still #1 priority and while it seemed early for spring cleaning I hear everything you are saying! I enjoy the blog – thanks! Gabriela
I'm just now really getting my feet wet with disqus. I am really loving the way it integrates with twitter and the other web 2.0 social platforms.