Social Sharing FTW!

by dez on August 5, 2010 · 5 comments

in Social

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I used to be a bit obsessed over being the first of my online social graph to discover and share a video. I’m not sure how I got sucked in on it, but maybe it was the recognition or getting the RT’s or the comments on my Facebook post. I’ve become rather bored lately with trying to find the latest funny thing on the interwebs.

Bill Roehl (@garciasn) and I were having a conversation today about our feed subscriptions and what we’ve been unsubscribing from. I mentioned that I’ve now unsubscribed from all but one Cheezeburger Network site. They just aren’t fun for me anymore. I used to have 16 subscriptions in my “Fun” feed folder. I’m down to seven.

But why aren’t they fun?

Here’s a short list:

  • Repetitive
  • Strings of not so funny posts
  • Cross-posting
  • Too many videos

This brought Bill to say “Social Sharing FTW”. He has a good point. I (and I assume others) depend on their social stream to show them content that they otherwise would not have known about. Without realizing it I had unsubscribed from many of the big news sites out there in favor of discovering them through my Twitter stream or by visiting the sites when I wanted to read something.

I’ve been subscribing to the thought of not treating my feed reader as I do my email inbox, but it’s difficult to ignore a folder that has over 1,000 unread posts in the period of a week. Even harder to ignore is when you have 5-6 folders with that many unreads in them. I’ll never get around to reading all of it, and I hardly get around to reading any of it.

I do however pound through posts of a more personal nature in my “Personal” folder. The content in these posts vary between strategy, learning, personal experiences, and some sales. The reason they are in the folder is because they are written by one person and usually someone that I already have a relationship with (online and offline). These are also the posts that don’t necessarily make it onto Twitter and Facebook by the person that wrote them.

What do you find yourself reading or ignoring?

Photo Credit: masochismtango

  • http://www.jayphilips.com Jay Philips

    Great post. I used to have a huge folder for “Check Daily” that would give me the latest and greatest on various topics. I also noticed that some of the sites seemed to have the same links so I’ve removed them from my “Check Daily” list. I still check http://popurls.com all the time because it gives me the latest from various sites.

    BTW – I also have the Cheezeburger Network on my list, gotta have that fun site on the list when you need a laugh.

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  • billhelm

    I’ve been doing the same thing. I still get value out of using Reader but had to trim a lot of stuff because I just couldn’t keep up.

    There are certain sources that I’d normally keep but I cut because I know my friends will link to the relevant things in Buzz, etc…

  • http://betweengirl.com PikaPikaChick

    I have a folder called “Leftist” that I put things like Pharyngula, AlterNet.org, and things of that nature. I’ll do a quick scan and maybe read a post or two, but for the most part it all gets marked as read.

    I do read every single post in my Blogs folder and I have to keep up with my webcomics, of course. There are some blogs that I’ve been culling because of too much product whori– I mean giveaways, too many Look At My Baby posts, and too many Look At How Much I Love Jesus posts. Feels good to hit that unsubscribe menu option in Google Reader.

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