I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thing posited about blogging - this is from Steve Rubel:

A little over five years ago, sites like Typepad, Blogger and WordPress dazzled by empowering anyone to instantaneously share his or her thoughts with the world; My how times change. Today, however, in a world where thousands of status updates and tweets whiz by our screens every hour, blogging arguably feels slow.

I've gone back and forth on Twitter. The problem is, once you follow a few hundred people (and I'm sure it gets worse beyond that), you have a firehose, not a news source. What do you do with a firehose? Mostly you just turn it down , or find a way to filter it.

That's pretty much where I've gone with Twitter - I have a set of search feeds set up in BottomFeeder, and when something flows by on a topic that I'm concerned with, I have a look. Beyond that, I rarely even look at the tweets passing by - there are too many, and too much of it is fluff I just don't care about.

Blogging is different, because you can take the time to compose a piece, think about what you're saying (and about how you're saying it), re-edit until you're happy, and post. With Twitter it's more of a fire and forget thing. Don't even get me started with things like FriendFeed. It's not that I don't like FriendFeed; it's that I don't have enough hours in the day to pay attention to it and Twitter and my feeds.

That's why I rely more and more on search feeds that hit the web in general and sites like Twitter specifically. I have actual work to get done, and things like Twitter and FriendFeed could suck up my entire day if I let them. Better to redirect the fire hose into a filter, and only look at what comes out the other end.

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