My Twitter Vacation experiment.

I've often thought lately that I should just cut myself off from the stream of social networks I enjoy every day for a couple of days, just to see how that goes. Not to this kind of extreme, but a trial of sorts.

I was at Town Hall Tap with Katie on Thursday night enjoying a rare night out when this came up, and Katie bet me that I couldn't do it.

A few minutes later it was on - 3 days starting at midnight Friday the 11th of May to Midnight on Monday May 14th.

And for good measure, I decided to extend it to Facebook, Google + and the like, and also avoid Google Reader as much as possible.

Day 1 was easy as I was at work and I have many days where I don't look at these things at all while I'm working. It got slightly more difficult when I wanted to see what food trucks were available, but I knew if I just walked out the door of my downtown office building I'd see something I wanted. I'd been wanting to try out Hola Arepa and they're always on that block of Marquette, and sure enough, they were there. Crisis Averted!

It was a little trickier in the down times on my Friday commute and while I was waiting for the food truck (long lines at Hola Arepa!). Normally I'd do a quick peek onto Twitter during these times, but not this time. I kept a podcast playing as I usually do and I did read a few things in Reeder and Instapaper which were not off limits.

The weekend was better - I do tend to zone out on things on my iPad or phone during the day when I'm home with family, sometimes to the detriment of whatever is going on in that room. It was easy to stay distracted with the kids and be present. It was definitely noticed by Katie.

The thing I did realize is how incredibly plugged in I am to this stuff and how it's probably mildly unhealthy. I did feel a little bit of withdraw symptoms throughout the 3 days, not unlike quitting smoking or other addictions I've faced in my life. That was a little wild because I did not expect that at all.

I don't feel like I missed out on anything urgent. Katie said to me at one point "Do you really need to be one of the first thousand people on earth to know about Maurice Sendak dying?". Good point, and probably not. I did miss out on the premiere league crazy championship game, but if I was really more of a fan I probably would've had that on anyway.

I was able to go back through my friends list this morning and catch up on their weekends, and just let the rest go.

If you are one of those people that's never far from a Twitter client, I highly suggest trying this yourself - it was very therapeutic. It made me realize the extent to which it was ingrained in my life and to evaluate ways in which that was probably not good for me.

So I'm back to Twitter this morning with a barrage of Tweets, some from a list I made over the weekend when I couldn't tweet. But there are some general principles I've created: 1) don't use when the kids are awake and present in the room with me. 2) don't use when out with the wife or interrupt other 1:1 time with wife. 3) don't constantly check and feel the need to read every single tweet in the timeline (I don't follow too many accounts). 4) Feel free to let it go for a day or two if life's just too busy.

Should work for now...

Stuff you can do if you run out of stuff to do on the internet

I'm sure I'm like a lot of you when I say that I've got content coming out the wazoo most of the time. Far too much stuff. My normal routine is to first hit up Twitter to see what's new. I'm something of a completeist, so I usually read most of what I've read back to the last time I read Twitter. Brizzly is a great Twitter client for that because of the J/K shortcut keys and the continuous scrolling. Can scroll through a great deal in a short amount of time. When I've just gotten too far behind, the new Twitter lists are great for checking up on certain people or things. They now work in Brizzly too, so the same scrolling principles apply. Once that's done, I usually float into Google Reader. While some notables in the Tech community have all but abandoned it, I still find it to be the most useful tool for accumulating what you want to read for later consumption. Sure, I end up seeing a good chunk in my Twitter feed (I do still try to avoid Twitter feeds that are simply mirror's of a site's RSS feed, because Google Reader does that better), but I can aggregate a lot of things.

Very rarely do I run out of things on Reader. If, by chance I happen to, there's a few things I will do if I have some time to kill and my laptop in front of me.

The Popular Feed on Google Reader - The popular feed is great to find new stuff to read and peruse what people like. I like to page through it periodically. Lots of good visual stuff on this feed. I've found multiple new blogs to follow this way.

Comment feed on friend's shared items in Google Reader - Google's implemented a bunch of features related to the social aspects of sharing items. They're implemented rather haphazardly in my opinion. However, conversations do start up on some items, and it's always worth a gander to see what people are saying.

Drop in on your Twitter Lists - Lists are a great new feature in Twitter. I've used them to find and increase the number of accounts I follow. Increasingly, I'm following people on my lists that I don't follow on my main Twitter account. Mostly because they are entities or people that I don't always need to see updates from, but are good to check in on every once in a while.

Drop in on other people's Twitter Lists - one of the other great features about lists on Twitter is that you can follow other people's lists. This allows you to sample tweets from other people without actually following them or taking the time to cultivate the list yourself. I like to go in and do this periodically to see what's going on. The Breaking News list compiled by a New York Times editor I follow is interesting when a story is breaking. The New York Times staff list is also another one I'm liking a lot. And the list of TC Journalists is also interesting for a local new perspective. There's lists for all manner of things, the sky is the limit, really. There's a list for that, so-to-speak.

Check out Friendfeed - this is something I'm doing less than a few months ago, but I follow a base of people on that site that I don't follow other places, and they're interesting people. There's always something to look at content wise there because FF aggregates an individual's content, and it does a pretty good job of filtering the best of the day for various lists you can set up. Unfortunatly, the once-thriving native-to-friendfeed community here is less of one - since facebook bought the company a few months back a lot of people have all but abandoned native participation in favor of it simply being a stream. I'm guilty of that myself.



I very rarely peruse individual sites for content anymore - I can't remember the last time I went to look at startribune.com without being linked there, for example. I very rarely look at individual blogs where I'm not either linked there or read it in Google Reader. It's an interesting shift from the way things used to be, but it's one that I find gives me more information that I want/need, versus having to go through a bunch of stuff that I don't care about.

Musings on Social Interaction on the Web

Man, like other blog endeavors that I've had over the last bunch of years, this one's not going much better in terms of timeliness of posting. It's been almost 2 months since I last joined ye, loyal readers (all four of you, judging from my stats, if my shit doesn't get buried in your google readers anyway).

At any rate, I'll leave this up as my long form forum for all things Willis/Billhelm/W/whatever you wanna call me. No harm, no foul, right?

I think Twitter consumes most of my daily posting mojo. Sadly, it's in a somewhat restrictive format.

I follow a lot of technology crazy internet celebrities on there like Robert Scoble and Dave Winer over on Twitter. These guys are constantly talking about things like Twitter and new technologies. I've been follwing both of them (and some others) for a while, both always had good blogs, and Winer was heavily involved in podcasting in the early days, which I followed closely at the time.

Scoble's always going on and on about friendfeed. He loves the service and is probably their biggest evangelist. I joined it a long time ago but found it to be not terribly useful. You can follow your friends from other services, but you only see their posts on it. If you mostly follow people that only have twitter, then there's almost no point - particuarly when you check Twitter several times a day.

Last week, I decided to make my feed public, and start following some other people. It's working. I like the stuff that comes up, and unlike Twitter, where I have this strange, insatiable need to view just about every tweet, I can just sample friendfeed when I have some time. I follow enough of a critical mass that there's always new things, and it shows friend of a friend entries.

Another thing came along this week, also courtesy of Scoble, that of feedly. It's a plugin for firefox that combined with the site, provides another way to view google reader feeds. And man, it's pretty sweet. It also integrates with friendfeed so you can see conversations that might already be going on. It has a twitter sidebar, and lots of goodies. I like the digest format when I only have a few minutes to read because it bubbles up things that I'm more interested in to the surface.

Finally, I'm giving foursquare a go again. I had deleted it a few months back because I didn't really like how it integrated with Twitter. But this time, I've scaled it back, and they've also added features to their mobile web and Iphone client to send to Twitter or not, which is helpful. A few of my friends are very big fans of the service and use it quite a bit. It's what dodgeball could have been and then some.