This isn’t really an in-depth review of my6sense or even a post all about it, but I’m going to talk more about the concept of my6sense and why it and services like it prove valuable for many users.
The standard view of content consumption is that you go from beginning to end. You consume everything in between. This works fine for old media, but not so much online.
Reading a single blog post might be cool, but reading an entire blog could be a challenge. Reading all of the blogs you’re interested in is near impossible. So is reading your entire Twitter stream. Of course, this assumes you follow or subscribe to a decent number of sources.
One of the major mistakes people make when getting into social media is that they still want to read everything. They feel incomplete if they miss a single tweet, post, or status update. This is a recipe for madness. Twitter alone is pumping out 90 million tweets each day, 25% of which contain links. That’s a lot of content to dig through and we haven’t even got to Facebook or blogs yet.
The solution is to have someone (or something) to filter all that content for you and highlight those items that you probably want to read. Even as a blogger, I find my RSS subscriptions overwhelming and mostly not useful.
I find myself leaning more towards sites like Techmeme and Regator on a daily basis. Since m6sense (finally) became available on Android, I’ve been using it on a regular basis as well.
Why should I bother digging through the muck for pearls when there are teams of people already doing it and handing me the fruits of their labor?!
Even Twitter, a site built on users over-sharing the most boring bits of their lives, has moved to a content consumption model. They no longer care what you’re doing. They’ve realized that, outside of marketers, narcissists, and geeks, nobody understands why they should tweet. They’ve adjusted the site to focus on digging into the content already created and recommending people for you to follow.
Of course, their comes a time when these filters run dry. They’ve handed you all the pearls for the moment and now you’re bored. This is when you dig into the feeds yourself and take a closer look at some of those discarded bits. Maybe you have a (very small) list of favorite blogs by smart people. Until then, stop trying to read everything.
What tips, tricks, or tools do you use to read news?
Check out my6sense, Techmeme, and Regator. While you’re at it, read my post on the new Twitter.