Use the tech that brings you value

... and use that tech in a way that brings value to the people you use it with.

Hello, Rocketboom viewers!

Twitter is good for keeping in touch, but be sure to populate your list of friends you follow with only those whose updates you really want to see.

Also, you don't have to get every message sent to your phone or IM client. As a quick thermometer of what a group of people are up to, the web page view is a nice service. Brief, frequently silly, ignorable as necessary.

If Twitter isn't for you, you can probably get a similar effect from your Flickr contacts page or blog post titles in an RSS reader.

Bottom line: just because you're friends you're not obligated to keep up with the entirety of each other's electronic output.

Comments

[Ed]

I find that periodically pruning systems like Twitter (or your newsfeeds or your email list subscriptions) is quite valuable. You can only deal with so much interruption in a day, and if the channels you are tuned into have too much static, remove some of the static.

It can be instructive from time to time to tune in to your own electronic output and see what kind of droppings you are leaving behind - there is certainly a balance and moderation between tell-all and hermit for each one of us.

[Mark Vane]

Hi, Found a cool news widget for our blogs at http://www.widgetmate.com/news . Now I can show the latest news on my blog. Worked like a breeze.

[Dinah]

Uh, right. So to illustrate my point, do you or your readers actually need the electronic noise of a news widget? I'm thinking that's highly unlikely in a personal site or a blog like this one.

[jim]

where oh where has discardian gone?

[Dinah]

Hi Jim. It was a one year writing project: http://www.metagrrrl.com/discardian/2007/01/public_thanks.html