News, keeping up to date and heading back to RSS

When I was a young designer, back when Twitter was still just starting to gain popularity in the tech community, I was subscribed to a ton of blogs and publications through RSS, specifically Google Reader. Reader was my jam. These all kept me up to date on latest trends and practices, kept me inspired and gave me access to the brains of some of the best designers and web people of the time. Through learning CSS and showing me how to design for the web, it was invaluable for growing as a designer.

After Google shut down Reader, I tried other services but none quite felt right. Around the same time, I felt like I had outgrown some of the feeds that had subscribed to and I started seeing an increase of value in Twitter. I more and more found myself going to Twitter to keep informed about what was sign on around the design and product world. This all came to a culmination and I decided to abandon RSS in favor of 140 character snippets to get my news, education and inspiration.

Over time Twitter has done a good job keeping me informed and inspired. Over the last few months though I’ve seen the amount of noise in my Twitter feed pick up. I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the election and even more has to do with the result. I saw myself feeling shitty after looking at Twitter. All of the people I followed started using it to complain and name call. I started to not believe a lot of the news that I was finding on Twitter. It’s lost it’s value as something that I turn to for education and inspiration. For now I need to rethink what Twitter means to me but it’s not serving the job I had used it for.

I’ve tried subscribing to newsletters but they end up cluttering up my inbox. I’m not in the mindset of looking at links when combing through email. I’m headed back to RSS, specifically Reeder on my computer and phone syncing through Feedly. The app is beautifully designed and fits the way that I want to comb through news. I’ve started to weed out the publications that I find useful and important to the design world and beyond. It allows me to be more intentional about what I’m subscribed to.

What I’ve learned through all of this is that over time I just need to start these services from scratch to clear out the codebase. To unfollow and unsubscribe from everything and rethink how and why I used these services. That’s what I’ll be doing with Twitter moving forward.

I’d love to hear any suggestions on blogs or sites that you think I should be paying attention to. Shoot me an email or a tweet.