So much for current awareness...

So Thing 4 is about current awareness, as a bit of a Twitterphobe (not sure why I don't like it but I don't) I wasn't looking forward to this weeks Thing.

Twitter
I signed up to Twitter when it first came out to see what all the fuss was about, it was presented to me as an alternative to Facebook, and soon came to the conclusion that I couldn't say most of what I wanted to say in 140 characters, nor did it seem, could anyone else. I personally find tweets useful as a way to have an ongoing conversation but because of the character limitation users are limited as to what is said. As a social tool for communicating this seems a bit absurd, I am a fan of Facebook fan pages where contact information is, events can be added and you can write more than 140 characters in one go. Similarly to Twitter and status updates show up in my newsfeed, I personally prefer Facebook to Twitter although I know of several people who would disagree.

RSS
As for RSS feeds, I love these! I was introduced to RSS when I attended an induction to my course presented by my librarian, one of the activities was to set up RSS feeds from online journals to my email account, this was a genius way to condense all of the searching every week into simply opening up an email. While I don't condone the lazy approach to librarianship and really believe that search strategies are vital for any librarian, I have to admit that RSS feeds cut down on a lot of search time if you are continually doing the same search, making the whole thing so much easier as the information comes to me. Subscribing to an actual blog was new to me, I follow blogs and get to see their updates in the section which shows who I'm following so subscribing to RSS feeds didn't seem important, however, I'm open to new things so we'll see how this goes and hope it works out.

Pushnote
So far I have been unable to access this as I'm using Internet Explorer, not sure whether I'll actively seek this out as I prefer to reduce the clutter on the screen rather than add to it, however, I can see the value in rating pages and think this is quite a good idea, that's all i'm comfortable saying about it without trying it out first.

Conclusion
I am a fan of Facebook, for keeping up to date with my friends and professional interests I haven't found anything that rivals it, I have everything in one place and that works for me, so sorry Twitter but I think I will probably delete my account with you. RSS feeds are one of the most useful things I have come across for cutting down search time, will have to get back to you about how useful I find it to subscribe to blogs though. And for Pushnote I am undecided as I haven't used it.