Frenchman In Tokyo

Social networks: it's time for an information diet (again)

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 13:08:21 +0900

It’s that time again: lately, I have become increasingly aware of the time I spend reading (and publishing) information through social networks, and have decided it’s time for an information diet.

In the same way that I have embarked on a long-term REAL diet (it’s going fine, thanks), I want to remove the fat that is cluttering my information arteries.

By doing that, I expect to save a significant time everyday (I don’t dare telling you how much), while getting to focus on the most useful and inspiring information bits and having more time to spend for things IRL.

This kind of cleanup should really be done on a daily basis, but you know how easier it is to ignore a news item than deciding that this information source needs to be killed and acting on it. So, like the big house cleanup that you do (don’t you?) a few times a year, my information stream needs to be radically sanitized.

Until recently, this used to be mostly a matter of managing your e-mail inbox and the RSS feeds in your RSS reader. But now you also need to take care if all the social networks you’re on and all the data that they send to you.

So far, I have listed the following actions:
- go through the e-mail newsletters I receive and unsubscribe from at least 50% of them (not that many nowadays, but there are still all those product announcements and sales promotions that I need to get out of the way)
- go through my RSS feeds and remove at least 50% of them (that’s still a big one for me: I have 202 feeds in my RSS reader right now)
- go through my 2 twitter accounts and remove all the uninteresting accounts I’m following (currently I have 810 combined accounts I am supposed to be following: way too much!)
- same for Facebook (you know, all those people you barely know that send you invitations to use apps, links to funny videos etc.)
- give up using Foursquare altogether (that’s more about reducing the time I spend notifying my network of MY position: I have not seen any useful impact of doing that, besides the fun of becoming the Major in a few places I like)

Reducing the information overload nowadays often requires cleaning up your social network friends list. However, there’s always a few people who do send cluttersome stuff but that you want/need to keep in your network for various reasons. And as with all diets, you do need to get some fatty food once in a while, so there is no need to cut ties with everyone just for the sake of reducing the amount of incoming data. As per my target, cutting out half of the sources should be plenty enough. Actually, when doing so, I guess I will tend to cut out in priority the most prolific news sources (usually medias and meta-networks) rather than the more discrete ones, which should reduce the overall daily data dose by more than 50% while letting me keep most of the individuals in my network.

In reality, I’d rather find a way to separate easily what’s interesting from what’s not rather than having to cut a news source entirely. A tool that would hide from me uninteresting stuff (whatever way I am accessing the information, be it web apps on the computer or mobile apps on my smartphone) would be great, but I guess it’ll be a while before this comes out in a nice integrated and efficient fashion, like Gmail’s spam filter (and I don’t have the resources to do it myself).

I’ll try to do a before/after comparison later, but I do know that I’ll feel much lighter after I do this. It’s actually quite difficult to evaluate the time spent and the volume of data you go through daily, mostly because it’s split among several tools/apps. I’d love to get nice and clean stats on this in a graph a la Google Analytics…

What about you ? Do you feel you need to reduce the information load you get from social networks and other onlibe sources ? Do you have any advice or tips for me ?

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