I love feeds. I subscribe to the content in which I’m interested and my computer grabs and stores the latest updates for me to read whenever, where ever — online, offline, on my iPhone or desktop. Basically, feeds turn the Web into email. Great!
So I subscribed to everything. If I read a couple of articles from the same source that were interesting to me, I would subscribe to that source’s feed. Over the course of a year, this lead to me be the proud subscriber to over 400 feeds. Many of the feeds published content daily or even more frequently. I grouped the feeds into categories like “Must Read”, “Should Read”, and “Read If I Have Time”. I quickly fell behind and after two years, I had over 3000 unread articles.
Feeds were a fire hose and I couldn’t take it. I needed to reassess my relationship with feeds. Instead of subscribing to everything of interest, I cut back — way back. I unsubscribed from everything and waited to see what I would miss the most.
Turns out, the two feeds I missed the most were John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and 37signal’s Signal vs. Noise. Both of these feeds publish up to several times a day, but Gruber’s posts tend to be extremely short and I didn’t have any concerns about being able to keep up.
After a while, I found (or rediscovered) other feeds that were interesting. Should I subscribe? I needed a heuristic. Only subscribe to feeds that post less than once a day. Actually, about once a week is ideal. I found that feeds posting more frequently are trying to cover news in realtime. My Twitter community fills that need nicely, so I don’t need to overwhelm myself with feeds that repeat what I already know.
It’s been three months since I’ve adopted the heuristic and I’m up to 15 feeds. I’m always up-to-date and I feel in control of my experience. I look forward to reading my feeds again.
