Thing 4

Thing 4 is investigate Twitter, RSS feeds and Pushnote.

OK, I've been using Twitter for a couple of years and I either use it a lot, or not at all. I can live without 140 character status messages, much as I feel I can live without being on Facebook every day. I think I may have moved on from the excitement of the initial discovery of social networks.

That's not to say the Twitter is a bad thing. I do find it useful for keeping up to date with what other library people are doing, although most people I follow don't tweet that often, so you do get the same people popping up in your feed. And it's not that user friendly. I followed someone and added them to a list so that I could filter their tweets into a feed of like-minded people. I got bored of them, so I unfollowed them. They're still on the list and they keep appearing in my feed. Very annoying. I'm tempted to delete the list and start again!

So I still tweet from time to time, but I don't have anything that exciting to say, and who really wants to know?

RSS feeds, now, have really saved me a bunch of time. Our network at work is slow, and the cpd23 blog is very large, with lots of embedded content. So I can't access it from work, unless I want to crash my browser. Step forward Google Reader, which takes out all the extra formatting and snazzy Web2.0 stuff to give me plain text simplicity for all the blogs I follow, and RSS feeds for 23 things, and TOC alerts for some LIS journals. I'd forgotten I'd set up these feeds, but now I think I'll use them more. Using Google Reader to manage blogs is great. They're all in one place and you get notifications of new posts without having to navigate to the blog. Of course, you lose all the lovely backgrounds and colour schemes that eeryone has worked so hard on, but it's the content I'm interested in, not the style, so I don't think that matters once you've decided to subscribe to a blog.

Pushnote, I can't see the point of. I don't trawl the internet looking to comment on websites. I can mention them on the blog, or on Twitter. Besides, you have to download a browser add-on, and it only works on selected browsers, so I can't do that at work because I don't have administrator rights.

I've just got a smartphone, so I'll be trying out the mobile versions of Twitter and Google Reader and trying to keep up to date on the move.