You Know What?  No, I Don't Think Your RSS Feed is for Me.

The more I think about RSS feeds, the more I realize that I've been basically pawning all of the automated action of the collectors/reader and the content distributors on my friends and people that I follow on Twitter or Facebook, or chat boards.  Rather than actively signing up to become a passive receiver of custom content, I just review my regular online sources to find out what people I respect are linking to or saying, read that, and say, "Hmm, that's interesting, but I've just lost 1 hour of my work day," or whatever.  I fear that if I ever started following these information generators directly, I'd just get further sucked into the Charybdis of Information that is the modern Internet.

I mean, honestly, how much information do we really need?  I go onto Twitter and find out that William Freaking Shatner (not his real middle name) has filled my feed with 37 tweets (and sent about a dozen more DMs) today, meaning I can't read the regular wisdom from Batman or whoever else i follow.  I can go onto Facebook and, once I hide the usual game crap (of which I admit I am a regular participant), find out what my friends are talking about - and my friends are usually intelligent enough that I know when news stories are referenced, they'll be relevant.  I can visit any one of a number of relatively interesting chatboards and find out what people are talking about, and except for the schizophrenic guy (no, seriously, he's in a home and posts on the Internet as part of his therapy and everything), I know that the six or seven actual independent topics are going to be somewhat interesting.

So, for me, what's the real point of RSS feeds?  I know I have google reader subscribers, so I don't want to shortchange your own approach to following me - especially as infrequently as I post.  Chances are it's a medium that you find value in - I know that my wife does.  But me?  I just don't get it.  If I really want to find out what someone has to say, I'll just go there directly (worth pointing out that I do go there directly on a regular basis, too).

Or maybe I'm just too old?  Have I suddenly become the crazy "get off my lawn" guy?  And if I have - what are the odds that Kirsten would let me get a cane?