My presence on the web started with a Hotmail address setup sometime in 1997 from a painstakingly slow dialup connection in the middle of Malawi, East Africa. About 3 years later this was followed by active use of MSN Messenger (after dabbling with ICQ) and my first site in 2002.
My site at the time was a terrible concoction of HTML frames, horrible bright colours, and an overdose of animated gifs. All running on a Pentium Celeron, served by Apache on Windows 2000. Not pretty. The site evolved, the textured deep blue background disappeared, I started adding photos and a simple CV, and it gradually became more sensible. However, most communication was still via Messenger (with the odd IRC chat) and I did not really follow any blogs, podcasts, etc.
These days I find myself keeping track of blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Github, StackExchange accounts, a NewsBlur blog roll, about 24 podcast feeds, and a Twitter feed. Though, to be honest, my Facebook page is just so I’m searchable there. Its been great to connect with long lost friends but I only log in about once every 2 months. I haven’t felt much need to really invest in Google+ (and too lazy to circle’ize a hundred odd people), and I have given up self hosting but simplified my site and merged it with my blog on wordpress.com. Its just less hassle. Interestingly though, the majority of my communication has shifted to email. A massive step back in Web 2.0 terms. IM has completely disappeared.
Joining the Twitter crowd
About a 18 months ago I decided to create a Twitter account and see what all that was about. I was Initially quite skeptic and didn’t think I would stick around for long. However I have found the site quite useful. I like the fact that you deal with individual people/projects that you can easily (un)follow so that over time you have a very personalized news feed that stikes the right balance between “work stuff”, “hobby stuff”, and “silly/fun stuff”. Sure you can do this with an RSS reader, but I like the real time aspect and the short message format.
People also seem very accessible over Twitter, its an easy way to give a project some kudos or ask a question, and a great source of real time news. I am weary of using it for IM style conversation though. Private messages are fine for that but public discussions quickly turn messy, hard to track, and mostly come across as spam to me as you lack the context. I also continue to roll my eyes at the obsession there is with followers and the popularity contest that is Klout & co. Obligatory XKCD:
Nevertheless overall I think microblogging is a great concept. I really love the way you can track hashtags & keywords, thus literally keeping a pulse on whats happening in the world (as far as is represented by ~80M active users). Things like Twistori make for fun screensavers. Its just a pity Twitter has started locking down its API and adding usage restrictions in the name of consistency. Im also no fan of the new cards idea but I guess the plan is potential advertisers will be, though its not proving easy.
I have found that, with the 219 accounts in my following list, I have pretty much reached the limit of what I can keep track of. I used to read every single tweet in my stream, but quickly had to give up. I like to keep track of everybody I follow and on regular days I still read 80% or more. But the rate of adding new following accounts has significantly decreased. I now only follow somebody if they dont tweet more than, say, 5 times a day. This means I have to leave out many popular and interesting accounts (such as @DrTomCrick) as they would just flood my timeline. I see many people with hundreds if not thousands of people in their following list and I always wonder whats the point? Is it a courtesy thing? Or maybe in those cases you only care about direct/private messages? I guess this is where services like Prismatic and paper.li come in.
What also strikes me is the huge proliferation of (spam) bots (complete with saucy picture and cryptic URLs) and the odd logic they seem to employ (I have had some very 
strange followers in the past). Turns out though that if you are worried about your follower count, bots are not not expensive to come by. Apparently purchasing 4,000 to 80,000 followers can be done for ~$300. Something that Mitt Romney has eagerly made use of. It makes you wonder about the point of initiatives like this but it does make research into Twitter and its patterns more interesting and fun (e.g., the Truthy project). I would love to see an adjusted number of followers on everybody’s account page. It would only show human followers who could be reasonably assumed to read your tweets.
Keeping up to date
In any case, 18 months later I’m still an active Twitter user and that won’t be changing any time soon. I still have an extensive (60+) NewsBlur feed list and occasionally check news websites directly but I can feel that decreasing. I use Evernote to fill in the gaps, to keep track of interesting snippets and articles. My podcast feed still gets a lot of active listens but even there I have given up trying to catch up on everything.
Thats the thing with the internet and how things have changed. The available content has exploded, from simple sites and blogs to e-books, podcasts, video casts, online lectures, etc. There is no excuse anymore for not being aware of what happens in your field or being able to learn something new. At the same time much better judgement and timekeeping is required if you want to manage this information stream and balance it with (lets be honest here) more important things like family/social life, physical exercise, and actually doing stuff (vs. reading about it on hackernews). I would be interested to hear how others solve this (can you have it all?), for sure Im not the only person dealing with this. For now I will finish with a quote from Timothy Ferriss, shamelessly copied from Mike Rooney’s excellent post on Freelancing.
Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
– Timothy Ferriss
–Dirk
PS: no points for pointing out the irony of this page 
