How to surpass social media overload

What happens when your time span becomes so narrow, that you can’t fit a couple of hours of social media browsing?

Which social media would you visit to check and submit latest news?

The problem of popular social media

I’m an active member of mixx and stumbleupon. I usually spend quite some time daily in these aggregators to read the latest news, socialize and submit worthy material. But April has been a busy month, so I don’t have time to concentrate on these social media.

I also noticed, that I really don’t have much reasons to spend much time in the popular social networks. Why?

News usually iterate in other social media sites.
Popular stories are not what I call news. Most of the time they are lists of firefox plugins, interesting pictures, comparisons of social media (mixx vs Digg) and so on. I enjoy that kind of news too, but in time shortage I prefer more “serious” news.
They are a race of self-promotion. Either by self-submission, getting the right friends, commenting on the right article or promoting the popular-to-be post, self-promotion is sometimes in the back of our heads. Nothing wrong with that; but sometimes I want 100% objectivity.

So how can you surpass this problem? What do you do, when you are fed up with all these popular social media?

Locate niche social aggregators. The popular social media sites are becoming complicated, full of all kinds of content and sometimes even unfriendly. I daily read Slashdot news. They are objective, interesting, serious and with great discussions.
Build and constantly work on your feed. Having a steady RSS Feed is not enough. Delete once in a while some feeds and add new ones. Don’t have all the hubs (techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, etc.) in your Feed, their news usually overlap.
Get FriendFeed. It’s individual based, so you can follow only the people you really trust. I follow only 4 persons - and it is more than enough.
Jump on new, promising social media. I got in Twine some days ago and the service is great. Few people, communicating with personalized messages and submitting quality content. Did I mention it is semantic? I still have some invitations left, for those interested.

I’m starting to believe, that the next generation of social media will be individual based and not collectively powered. what do you think? Are you also getting this social media overload?

marcel weiss responded on 23 Apr 2008 at 4:51 pm #

I’d like one invite for Twine!

Re: Your arguments: You’re quite right. Recently I started using Friendfeed heavily. It only shows me what people I know, respect or trust are contributing to all those sites. Great as a jumping point.And usually way better than the frontpages of those services..

Terry responded on 27 Apr 2008 at 4:32 pm #

I find I just don’t have much time for social media and as such I plan to start working with the more targeted services (like Mixx for my marketing blog and Wordsy for my literary blog).

I am interested in Twine though, would you consider passing me an invitation?

Thanks!