Too Much Information

I am one of these insane people who actually has Twitter come as SMS on my phone. Not everyone I follow, mind you, but probably somewhere between one and two dozen people’s tweets come to my phone.

Whoa nelly. Today, at least three of those people were at the DEMO conference. I was getting a fair bit of duplicate commentary about all the different companies that were there. Before I told Twitter to bug off at around 11am, I literally received something on the order of 200 SMS messages. Makes me real glad I got the Unlimited Messaging enabled on my account.

Between that and the press releases I got in email today, I basically tuned it all out. Massive, massive amounts of noise. I suppose if I were in news junkie mode, I would have ate it all up. And in a way, I found it cool.

Today was not one of those days. In fact, my work Exchange server decided to be flaky today. I flat out didn’t care. I actually welcomed it. I was able to get my work inbox to almost zero.

I’ve gone both ways on whether or not Twitter is annoying and distracting. The fact is, I have plenty of things that, at times, can be annoying and distracting, Twitter being one of them. The trick is: knowing where the off switch is and having the good sense to know when to use it.