Dangit. It would seem I've been caught in the Web 2.0/social networking trap. I track some three dozen different RSS feeds on Google Reader, I get hundreds of Twitter updates from people I don't know in real life, and I've just created a Facebook, opening the floodgate of friend requests from people who, in theory, I know in real life, but whom I'd rather not talk to.

While I'm sitting at my computer, things stream in in real-time: new RSS items, new Twitter updates, and new Facebook updates. And I'm there to see it as soon as it appears. When Reader items or Twitter updates pile up (maybe because I was at school for 8 hours), I take a few hours to sift through it all until nothing has been left Unread. I reach upwards of 20 tabs in one browser window; some things I read, some I print out, some I throw into leftovers.txt to maybe be read later.

But, if I were to take a step back, how much do I really care about any of the stuff I'm constantly keeping tabs on? I wish I had the link, but I can't remember the article's name; it was a post on a blog, explaining that it only takes a day away from the Content Stream to discover you have no real dependance on it. Up-to-the-minute information is not necessary, and maybe the amount of content you consume online isn't either.

This concept is similar to one Malcom Gladwell briefly explores in the afterword of his first book, The Tipping Point. The gist of his point was that, over time, things like the internet and advertising begin to lose their impact, because you become so used to it. Gladwell explains that when email was new to him (and when he didn't get much), he took the time to read and answer every email he got. Nowadays, due to a combination of not having time, and getting a lot of email, gone are those days.

I see the same mentality in the concept of being always connected. If you have a ton of RSS feeds, or 1000+ Twitter followees (seriously? Why?), there's more stuff to sift through, less things you're really interested in, and probably not enough time to give it all any amount of thought.

Also, I don't like spending the amount of time I do looking at all this junk on my computer. This is a post for a later time, but I really wish there were more things to read. As in, read physically. The timeliness of the internet has allowed it to beat out print, but you know what sucks? Reading some long article in a browser, on a monitor. It's just not something I want to do.

In the future, I hope some application is developed that's smart enough to extract text from XML/RSS files and automatically turn it into some printer-friendly format. Maybe I'll do that. First I need to learn how to program...