Realtime Web is the new Attention Battle-Front

August 6, 2009

On Wednesday, the Google Reader team announced that shared items would be published via PubSubHubbub hub, meaning that anything I share will now how up on – for example – Friendfeed within seconds (there’s a great video in that post showing this behaviour in action). Louis Gray followed up with a post about he depends on Google Reader for sharing a colossal number of items from an equally colossal number of feeds, but ended the post with this:

Now, with PubSubHubbub, if there is any slowdown, it’s clear it’s with me, because Google has the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor.

This got me thinking. My Reader stats (right) are far lower than Louis’, and yet there are times when I feel swamped by the amount of information I’m trying to filter. The volume of information scrolling down my screen right now on Friendfeed is such that the first page often refreshes before I’ve finished reading one article.

Although PSH solves the problem created by the latency of RSS-client polling periods, the next challenge is making sure that we don’t miss the stuff that really interests us. As consumers of shared items, blog updates et al, we will need to get smarter about making sure that the “interesting”stuff bubbles to the top of our attention stream.

How do we do that? How can we define “interestingness”? Can we build attention flags into our software tools in such a way that we don’t lose sight of why we’re wading through our real-time river?

At the moment, I rely on a combination of Google Reader – although I find Feedly to be a more configurable, usable top layer for Reader – Friendfeed and Lazyfeed. Even then, I’ll come across articles on one or other of those services a day or so after the fact and wonder, “how did I miss that?”.

Maybe I’m not using the filtering capabilities offered by my chosen services to their fullest; maybe there are other services that are worth taking a look at. If you’ve got any insights about you filter your feeds for the interesting stuff, do share them in the comments, below.

Posted in communication, publishing, tech