Interview 1
...
Interviewee 1 is a graduate student who follows 600+ Twitter accounts
...
, has uncountably many unread items in Google Reader, and receives too much e-mail. Since she doesn't trust automatic filtering, she uses basic rules to organize information sources and just reads as much as she can.
She uses Twitter to keep general tabs on
...
groups of people
...
and areas of interest
...
, and finds the phone interface the most natural for that. She deals with following too many people by scrolling the client back as far as
...
it will go at the start of each day and reading all the tweets; since Twitter's scroll-back history
...
is limited, that prevents her from spending all day reading tweets. Some tweets are more important than others: some are worth receiving as notifications, which she does by filtering tweets by author. Some tweets are worth coming back to later: she marks those as 'favorites'.
She handles her overflowing Google Reader account by organizing feeds into 'good' and 'meh' (not her words), so that she can regularly read the 'good
...
' without being overwhelmed by the rest, but can still read the rest if she's ever interested.
She sees her
...
e-mail inbox as
...
- Would see tweets and RSS items as TODOs and doesn't want that
...
a source of stress, both because it becomes a to-do list as it accumulates messages, and because she is sometimes expecting an e-mail that she doesn't want
...
to have to deal with yet. She imagines that if e-mails and tweets were read using the same interface, she would start seeing tweets as to-do items and wouldn't want that.
Interview 2
Interviewee 2 is a graduate student. She reads information from a lot of sources, mainly Twitter, Facebook and 93 different RSS feeds via Google Reader (though many of these are comics and other things that aren’t quite news). She does most of her reading at home and at work, on her laptop and on her Kindle Fire.
...