A lot of talk now a days is about the information overload many people are experiencing with the wealth of media sources out there and the always-on nature of the internet. There has also been some talk of the changing way that people are consuming this information.
One of the earliest methods was e-mail. Next came feed aggregators. This is when the big talk started about overloading. People got excited about being able to have the news come to them instead of going out and finding it and a lot of people (myself included) ended up subscribing to literally hundreds of feeds, later realizing it was too much and then unsubscribing from the less interesting feeds.
Aggregators kind of fell by the waste-side when Twitter began to catch on as an alternate way to consume news and information. Again, a lot of people jumped on this bandwagon, which is relatively recent (meaning in the last 7-8 months). One of the big advantages was the strong connection between Twitter and SMS. Twitter was designed for mobile usage, and so it gave people a way to stay connected no matter where they were; it was a nice parred down method of information delivery. This is probably one of the most common methods now-a-days, at least for those that are closer to the cutting-edge than most.
But one thing I’ve noticed recently, at least in my own consumption habits, is that Facebook is starting to become more of a hub than Twitter or Google Reader (my feed aggregator of choice). This I haven’t seen being talked about much yet, and I think it still has yet to really catch on with the more ‘mainstream’ cutting-edge group (as odd as that sounds). When companies and news sources started using Twitter more and more to spread news and information it was big news, but what I don’t think a lot of people are noticing is that many of these same companies and news sources are jumping on the Facebook bandwagon early and really taking advantage of the ability to create Pages and put information directly into people’s news feeds.
I am starting to use Facebook more and more and my feed reader and Twitter less and less for staying current on a lot of things. Now, I’m not saying that Facebook is going to replace both just yet, there are still news feeds that I can’t get in Twitter or Facebook (yet), and Twitter still has it’s usefulness for public communication, but Facebook is moving into that market as well. Eventually, I may end up with just Facebook, and things are definitely trending towards that, but for now it’s just one more way for companies and news sources to stick information in front of me and millions of others.