Tuesday, April 20, 2010

And stay awake because it will all change tomorrow...

With some sense of satisfaction and potentially equal concern, I think I am starting to understand the value of twitter (I have a tendency to be a little late to parties).

Having blogged before about the fact that I couldn't really see the value of it and admitted to worrying about those who have the time to fritter their lives away in twitter, this is mildly embarrassing.

I am an evangelical fan of RSS feeds and Delicious and love what I have learned through them over the past two years. But I have been immensely busy at work over the last couple of months and have not had the time to work methodically through the unread items in Google reader that are starting to pile up.

This was what I liked about RSS. Emails are generally chores and obligations, rarely ideas or motivators. RSS by contrast was stuff that I was interested in. But if it got on top of me I could always hit the "mark all read" button. However this always felt like a bit of a betrayal (the tyranny of the unread) and I've been doing it more often recently.

And so I got the joy in twitter. It doesn't mind if you go off and earn a living for most of the day. It will be there when you get back and will not pointedly remind you how much you have been avoiding it. And most of the good and interesting ideas get retweeted if you follow enough people with shared interests.

Learning without guilt. How marvellous!

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