From Google Reader to Twitter

If you are a long-time Twitter user this post will sound obvious. I’m not, and even if I think this was probably said one thousand times I feel like saying it again.

I was one of those guys who had breakfast while Google-Readering. I started blogging in 2002, and since then reading feeds was the way I knew what happened yesterday.

However, when the number of feeds grew, it started to be difficult to keep up and to find what I was most interested in, so I quickly browse most of the feeds and have some of them with a lot of posts to read.

Following @shanselman’s suggestion I tried twitter and I realized it was not about saying what you are having for breakfast.

Now twitter is enough to keep me up to date. Even if I don’t follow a lot of people, I feel I know what’s happening out there. My twitter friends filter the news for me. Not following a lot of people keeps the signal/noise at a good level.

When we built Quince we exposed the changes as feeds, which was an obvious thing to do. Now that I don’t open Reader that much, I needed a new way to keep up with changes, so we made Quince tweet. Each community contribution is tweeted (using tweetsharp, which rocks).

The interesting thing happened yesterday. In Quince you can say that you ‘use a pattern’, like ‘voting’ for it, and those votes did not appear in the RSS feed so I did not want to tweet them. By mistake, Quince tweeted them. And when I was about to fix it, I realized I did not wanted to fix it. So, there was a piece of action in Quince that did not make sense to be in a RSS feed but did make sense to be tweeted.

So, it looks like the ‘real time’ sense of tweeting changes the kind information you want to consume/produce. This means I will keep thinking how every piece of software that I’m involved with can tweet. Everything looks like a nail now.