I’m getting crushed.

Not sure if it’s #newnewtwitter, the end of year rush filling my inbox or how my use case for twitter has changed over the years, but I’m coming to terms with the role twitter is playing for me these days.

Early on, Twitter was a wonderful well of serendipity that I’d dip into frequently throughout the day. During these dips I’d see comments, exchanges and anecdotes from friends that allowed for seamlessly picking up conversations with people I’d often go weeks or months without seeing face to face. It was the realest reflection of my social network and it was magical.

Those days are long gone.

Twitter has evolved from my social network to my RSS reader on a cocktail of crack, speed and steriods. It’s gnarly. And I can’t keep up.

 So, I’m going to run a little experiment over the holidays. 

Rather than skimming twitter multiple times a day (alright, multiple times an hour), I’m going to put my trust in a few services to see if they can take the work out of surfacing the most relevant links- News.me and Percolate for links from the people I follow and Techmeme and HackerNews for broader news aggregation.

Now, there’s really no way for me to quantify whether they would have captured all links I would have found in my own skimming, but it’s a start.

My reluctance in using these services is that they will simply algorithmically surface what others are seeing and responding to. And that loses much of the serendipity and humanity that made twitter so wonderful to begin with.

Speaking very practically, it’s not the stuff that everybody else is talking about that gives me any information advantage as an investor or friend. It’s those gems that are tucked under rocks and wrapped in obscurity that tend to be loaded with meaning and insight. It’s stumbling across a conversation between people I follow that I didn’t know knew each other. I’ll lose some of that with this experiment.

Twitter is too simple a tool to have such a complex relationship with. But I think that’s how the best relationships tend be- they take work. So, I’m reluctantly running this experiment and hopeful that it will give me some insights into where we should take our relationship from here.