Twittering Twitterers & other Wild Observers
I wrote http://wildobs.com with support for numerous Atom feeds (e.g. http://wildobs.com/adam_jack.atom) because they just make sense; folks can query into a database for things that interest them, and access the information when they want it. Customized notifications w/o the interruptions.
Funny thing is … I know of so few people who actually read feeds. Even techies, many just don’t. Even with wonderful tools like Google Reader I couldn’t persuade a smart friend to not just “reload the blog page”. Daft but true, and he picks what he does, not I. I fear that feeds are a great (simple) technology that is just out of sync with humans.
It dawned on me that Twitter’s growing success is a reaction to that problem. E-mail is boring/spamful/passe, Feeds are also a chore to keep up with, Tweets hold that promise of unsolicited serendipity w/o the guilt. Given we don’t know we need the information in tweets we can let it wash over us, flow onto the floor when we are sleeping, and we don’t have to keep up. We can feel wired in w/o feeling the stress of something piling up.
The other aspect is the timeliness of the information. No point reading a blog posting tonight (via feed reader) that somebody was in town this morning looking for a running partner. That tweets can follow you to your phone (in near real-time) keeps folks in the loop.
Much as it goes against productivity (when at a desk) we’ll take the interruptions for those benefits.
Anyway, in order to let Wild Observers participate, I’ve wired WildObs into Twitter.