Serendipity, Simplicity and the Art of the Stumble

First, to explain the title of this post. Serendipity is one of the ways Hutch Carpenter recommended to deal with social media overload: “Strategy: embrace serendipity, recognize you can’t possibly consume all updates”. I read that post, absorbed it and applied its recommendations. Hell, what am I talking about? I only really follow the serendipity one, but I think it’s a key one, because it’s true.

That’s how I try to live life online, and not just for social media.

Perhaps the first part of this post ought to be called “Serendipity and how I stumble”. Click here to skip.

I used to subscribe to a few dozen Atom/RSS feeds. It was far too much. I could cope on a non-working day, but working days just meant I couldn’t read everything and I could never catch up. So I found other methods of finding interesting things.

I unsubscribed from all but two feeds and decided to put my faith in serendipity. After all, it has consistently worked for science. Amongst other things, I’m obsessed with simplicity. Serendipity works with that.

I find that this ‘kind’ of serendipity is something that’s hard to ‘do’ in one place. So, rather than centralising things, I have de-centralised them. Sites I will read (almost) everything from I either visit or subscribe to. Sites I don’t frequent as much are banished to the wastelands that are Gmail’s Web Clips, something I glance up at every so often, many times spotting something of interest. Then the rest is split between places like reddit, FriendFeed, Twitter and Tumblr.

Many times, Tumblr and FriendFeed content is pulled from someone’s Twitter account, but, by visiting these places at different times, I can ‘get more’ out of serendipity.

So, to summarise: don’t centralise everything. Think about what you always read, what you sometimes read and what you rarely read. Decentralise and spread it all out accordingly. Use a feed reader for the “always read” and a random feed reader like Web Clips for “sometimes read”. Leave the “rarely read” places for occasional actual visits.

Take a stroll around online ’sharing spots’, such as the main pages of del.icio.us, FriendFeed, reddit and Twitter, or look at some of the stuff filtering through your Tumblr or WordPress.com dashboards. Don’t leave them on and obsessively check them. Take a peek every so often and you’ll almost certainly stumble upon something you like.

I hear people complain a lot about being overwhelmed online. I think the key is to simplify things. Do less of everything so you can do more of what you enjoy.