I am curious how other people are handling the huge amount of information they are getting from Empire Avenue. I admit I am probably the worst one on the site, I follow a lot of people, and do tend to follow a lot on twitter. I use my headline stream a lot and like seeing who is buying and blogging and tweeting. It lets me go find people to buy and investments to up. Plus I see a lot of interesting blog posts come though my headlines that I probably would not have seen otherwise.
On the flip side of this there is an awful lot of noise going on in my stream as well. (not that it is bad, I am really noisy and don’t really have an issue with it.) However, it is making it a little hard to follow sometimes. The new ways to sort your headlines are great, I find blog posts much easier now. I think being able to “favourite” people would be great. Yes I want to follow people so they can write on my profile, and I can see what they are doing, but I would also like the option to add a few people to a list that is smaller and I have a better way to actually “follow” them. As Empire Ave gets bigger, there will be a lot more noise and being able to pull content important to you while watching content that you are interested in will become more difficult.
My poor twitter list got like this. I am not good at twitter, I really didn’t use it much before Empire Avenue. I only talked to a couple people on it. I don’t like tweet deck much, my twit bird on my iPod is nice, but I use the stupid web version all the time and when it gets too busy the noise takes over. I had to unfollow a bunch of people last week because I kept missing people talking to me in the crazy flood of information coming through. I feel bad about it, even though I can see them talking to me, it isn’t like I made them go away, I just had to slow down the flow. When you are following a bunch of people and you have both side of the conversation showing up in the stream it can get overwhelming fast. I am amazed more people haven’t unfollowed me. I talk a lot, and if you are following both sides of the conversation I am sure I am doing the same thing to your feed as well.
So where is the line between getting information, and getting overloaded? Any thoughts or tips on keeping it useful and not overwhelming?
Empire Avenue Thoughts 
Erica
June 20, 2010
Hey Fray!
Too bad you don’t like TweetDeck; that’s how I handle my info…having said that, here’s WHY I use TweetDeck:
You are right about the noise on EA. So, I first follow someone on EA and then if they still interest me a few days on, then I follow them on Twitter. I do this because I genuinely end up interested in these people. So, I use EA to find them, but then follow with Twitter.
On TweetDeck – which I would really encourage you to give a second chance – I have a column for “All Friends” (every single tweet), mentions, DMs, and the last one is for the #empireave hashtag.
I keep it running in the background, so I can literally see the tweets coming in while I’m checking my portfolio etc. I’m less interested in monitoring my portfolio that closely, so this works well enough for me.
🙂
(e)ERICA
frayclose
June 20, 2010
See I have tweet deck running all the time, the ONLY reason I like it is the pop ups on the screen, then I know whether to go back to the twitter tab and read or reply to a tweet, I can do other things. I also like how easy it is to upload a pic on it, When i put pictures into a tweet I use it. But i am not falling in love with it. I think it just the way it shows the tweets in my feed? I dont know, my eyes don’t like it lol The empire avenue hashtag I follow on my twitbird on my ipod, so i tend to read those when I am out having a smoke, and that is where I usually catch the @replies to me.
Peanutgnome
June 20, 2010
Tweetdeck is good for that – you can have your own groups of people, and you can have a whole whack of columns for different interests.
Jesse Newhart has a decent, though a year old, video on his site on effectively following thousands: http://ow.ly/20VTW
I might have to fire up tweetdeck again – been using HootSuite lately because that’s what we’re using at work as it allows multiple people to use same accounts – great for the business accounts. I handles multiple accounts more easily that Tweetdeck used to – which is why I switched. Should I switch back? how does it handle many columns and multiple accounts?
(e)PGNOME
Brent Knowles (yourothermind)
June 20, 2010
At this point I’m mostly just skimming it. There’s a few people I kind of zone in on and try to remember to read regularly. I use the ‘blog’ filter a lot since I’m more of a blog reading kind of person.
I agree with you about ‘faving’ certain people or some other similar way to organize must-reads. It is cool to have the large network but there will always be certain people that I gravitate towards paying a little bit more attention towards. I don’t really want to trim my following list to just do that.