The chatter about how the newspaper industry is dying is massing, again, but recently I have been thinking about how my use of Twitter has been replacing their key value-generator. Years ago you read newspapers not just for national news but local news, global news, sport, weather, marriages, births, deaths, real estate, cars, jobs, travel, letters to the editor, crosswords, buckets and bouquets and more. “Ads” were broken down into print ads by businesses, and the long tail of classified ads from the locals. We looked to the newspaper to find out what was happening on the topics that interested us (as long as those were either news, sport, cars, jobs or travel) and get opinions from a select few columnists. Our newspaper of choice would be the one whose editorial tastes closest matched our own.
When I look at my Twitter right now I see the messages of 86 people, companies and objects. I have picked my own editorial team and they’re very good! These people aggregate information that they find while going about their day and share the best stuff with me in realtime. When I stumble upon an interesting new topic I do a deep dive to find and follow the 5-10 people on Twitter who are talking about it and have the profile to back up what they’re saying. Within a few days I’ll know if I want to keep them on my editorial board or whether they’re not really relevant right at this moment. This process has worked very well for the past few months and I’m continually iterating on various ideas to keep it fresh.
But how did we get here? What about RSS Readers, trackbacks and pings? I believe they were the half-way point – a good way to spread information but inevitably not practical enough to scale personally. Twitter works because everyone can understand how to share and spread messages and the barriers to use are low – you don’t need to set up a blog and dedicate 20 minutes to writing something thoughtful to get your ideas out there. I still use FeedMyInbox as an RSS Reader to complement the Twitter strategy though, because there are some blogs that fall between the cracks that I still want to read but perhaps their Twitter profiles aren’t as relevant.
FeedMyInbox takes an RSS feed and sends you a daily digest email with the goods. The great side effect of this strategy is that it takes away the guilt that you would get in a Reader. If I get an email with 100 links from News.YC and I don’t have time to read it today I can delete it, and that’s fine, because I’m sure if there was something good I’ll find it another way. If I get the same amount of items in an RSS Reader and I don’t check it for a few days though I’ll login to find thousands of unread items! Add to that the guilt you feel for pressing “mark all as read” on 25,000 items… it’s unbearable!
I’m keeping in mind a thought that Gary Vaynerchuk replied to Andrew Warner with recently – “I consume no media. Zero. I don’t watch anything. I don’t read any blogs (which is bad by the way). I very much have a sense of what you do but to say I have been watching all the episodes, I have not…” and that’s why the people I’m following right now are those who are making progress, thrashing out the iterations, getting things done. The makers, the doers, the ones who are showing us they still have a pulse. You could break it down loosely into three groups – here’s a sample:
The people I see every few days
@stevehopkins, 
@sammartino, 
@rexster, 
@secretshq, 
@nedwin and more.
The community web startup founders
@superamit, 
@heif, 
@caterina, 
@jasonfried, 
@sivers and more.
The Brands
@nodecity, 
@meetup, 
@green_dot, 
@futuresummit, 
@liftconference etc.
This group will change of course. I probably churn 50% per month. This isn’t because I’m not interested in those people anymore – just that I need to keep my influences fresh and diverse. If Twitter gets boring I’ll stop looking all together! Anyway that’s a taste of what I’m following at the moment…
What topics are you following? Who have you got on your editorial board?
By Ross Hill - July 7th, 2009 at 11:49pm with 1,564 views - amit gupta andrew warner caterina fake deloitte derek sivers etsy feedmyinbox fred wilson future summit gary vaynerchuk jason fried matt biddulph meetup michelle matthews ned dwyer nodecity peter williams scott heiferman steve hopins steve sammartino twitter ycombinator
