kortina's tumblog

I am glad to see you mention Google Reader in this conversation—it’s an easily overlooked member of the stream category ( I actually read your post on Google Reader mobile in blackberry browser because I don’t have a good twitter client and browsing any stream is the way I spend downtime on my phone—these streams are definitely of the same category, behaviorally for me.)

I was thinking about this after reading your post, and I believe that Twitter has actually taught me how to use Google Reader. I used to think of Google Reader like my email inbox, because there are read/unread statuses with each article. The overwhelming number of messages on twitter and lack of read / unread status, however, made me realize that you cannot consume entire streams like you would do with email. You just jump in, browse around the recent stuff, and jump back out. Streams are reminding us just how much data is flowing through our lives everyday and that attention is a choice given only to some bits of data.

I imagine we’ll become acclimated, again, to deferring more attention choices to editors / curators of content as we become dissatisfied with just turning on the stream and seeing what’s at the top—we’re going to need some way to filter/reduce the flow of these streams to something that fits the finite bits of time we devote to these floods of data passing by us.