Call me a luddite, but I’m rediscovering RSS.
The rise of Google+ has caused me to reconsider my social network use and information needs. And, strangely enough, the losers are the Big 3 social networks themselves.
I used to be a heavy RSS user. Then, at some point, I began to rely more on Twitter for social curation and news feeds and stopped reading RSS. But I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated by Twitter’s signal to noise ratio. In my case, the worsening feed hasn’t been caused by a bigger list of sources; rather, it’s been caused by my sources tweeting more and more about less interesting things (check-ins, link bait, off-topic RTs, Instagram, and so on). Unfortunately, this loss of fidelity hasn’t been offset by an increase in serendipity.
Enter Google+.
Google+ exacerbates the fidelity problem by focusing on threaded conversations and commentary, often by people I don’t know. Although Google+’s topical organization is helpful for creating conversations, the noise within these threads is exceedingly high and will only get worse as more people join the network. “Engagement” appears to be trumping “relevancy” and serendipity is low. This has long been a problem on discussion boards and doesn’t appear to be solved on Google+.
I’m still using Twitter for real-time updates and chat, Google+ for occasional threaded topical conversations, and Facebook for friend network posts. But I’m spending more time as a consumer with raw signal and, by and large, that seems to be long-form articles or micro-blog posts distributed via RSS.
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Update (July 23, 2011)
Robert Scoble has posted a Google+ thread about the noise issue, which serves to illustrate the problem beautifully.
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Update (July 24, 2011)
One unexpected benefit of my return to RSS is the fact that I can enjoy the writing of certain authors without suffering from the terrible website designs of their employers.