Push and Pull Content Please.

One of the reasons that some networks are so annoying to a lot of people is that things get lost amongst the noise. Articles you want to hear about often won’t be seen by you because you have … *checks Friendfeed*…. 435 other people throwing content onto your screen. You can create lists to help sort this out, and that is very useful. But often between the time you check and you get back, you don’t know exactly what happened, because you were just caught up reading about the latest Scoblememe. The fact is that we can’t catch everything, and we shouldn’t try to. It is estimated that 4 Exabyte’s of information will be created this year, and your brain can only hold 10 TERABYTES! That means you about 4,194,294 terabytes short. This is important while thinking about how you consume social media, but not my current topic.

While about 8 terabytes of information being created every minute, those 280 bytes from your friend telling you to meet him at the cafe in 10 minutes could get lost fairly quickly. This is why we use email. With email, the program flashes and bangs and yells “YOU’VE GOT MAIL” in order to focus all attention on that email you just got. But what about that tweet message? It sits .. and waits … and hopes sometime you will look at your Twitter client and pull it out from all the mess. And as it waits, it keeps getting pushed further down the Twitter timeline, like any other tweet, and eventually goes off the page and you might never see it. That is a ‘pull’ medium, where you pick and choose what data to pull off the screen and scan through your brain

Now don’t get me wrong, a pull medium is a great way to prevent flooding yourself with too much information. But the problem with it is that it is just like a river. It won’t stop, and you just have to happen to glance at it and read that content before it moves on down the stream. This of course, is very annoying with things that are important.

This is where implementing a Push medium to social networking is so important. One of the coolest features I’ve found with Friendfeed is the ability to make a list, and have it sent to my IM account whenever something new happens on the list. (Given, this is a small list. Mainly because it is filled with stuff I need to know) Developers behind email clients realized this a long time ago when they alerted you with a little box and a ding whenever you had new email.

When you push a set of data, you are basically telling any content that comes through that it is more important … than anything. You saying: “I want you to jump up and down and scream and yelled and flash on my taskbar until I click on you. AND IT WORKS! To this day, I haven’t missed a single tweet that any of my friends make, because it is always sitting there yelling “OPEN ME UP, I’M IMPORTANT! YOU TOLD ME SO!”.

There is a very dangerous side to this though. Many people complain about not using their email much because they have so many emails, they can’t actually find it useful. If you get too many IM messages, sooner or later you are going to either tune it out, or turn it off. That defeats the purpose. Choose very wisely, who you put on that list. I tend to stay away from anyone that I know I’m not going to want to here about. Currently on my list is my ‘ego’ feed of everyone who has said ‘chacha102’ on Twitter (via search.twitter.com), and the Twitter streams of my real life friends.

To effectively use the internet to its highest potential, you can’t rely on yourself to dig through all the content to find the stuff that matters to you. You have to be able to both find information, and get it.

So how do you do this today?

There are several types of push mediums out there today:

- To set up Friendfeed with IM notifications:

1. Go to your Account
2. Enter in your Jabber/Gmail username
3. Select which list you would like to send to your IM account (I’d suggest a special ‘IM Feed’)
4. Click Submit
5. Click on the link in the Validation message sent to your account.

- To set up an Email Notification of everyone who replies to you

1. DO NOT USE TWRPLY (You really haven’t been around Twitter if you don’t know why
2. Either Follow this tutorial to use with Yahoo Alerts, or use search.twitter.com and search for @username. You can subscribe to this via RSS
3. Also, check out other services for it. Most likely there are a ton of them.