I have recently fallen into a peculiar workflow arrangement between various social networking applications and Read It Later’s Pocket application. When I am following the flow of status updates from my Twitter stream I prefer to stay in-the-moment with the stream and select interesting-looking tweets that have links attached to them, but instead of actually following them in a browser, I send them to Pocket. My preferred Twitter application, TweetBot makes this as easy as tap and select “Send to Pocket” with a happy little sound confirming that my action worked. This really works well for me and doing this has spread beyond the confines of Twitter out to Facebook – however there is no convenient interface between Facebook status posts and Pocket so the workflow is a little more convoluted. I command-click on perhaps-interesting Facebook posts and this opens them up in tabs. Then I switch to the tab, click the Pocket extension, send the link to Pocket and close the tab. I don’t really want to see the links right now, I’d rather send them all off to Pocket and then queue them up that way.

Another really neat web tool that I’ve fallen in love with is IFTTT.com. This site allows you to connect a huge collection of services to their site and then construct “If This Then That” rules. This has actually simplified the Twitter-to-Pocket interface, in so far that if I like a Tweet then that is plucked by IFTTT and sent off to my Pocket automatically. This particular bit does muddy the waters between TweetBot and Twitter itself, but it’s not really a problem, just a build-up of near-miss convenience. IFTTT in this arrangement shines when it comes to Google Reader. I have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS and ATOM feeds from various sites and manage them all in Google Reader. If I “star” something in Google Reader, then IFTTT notices and copies that entry to my Pocket for later reading. As I am quite fond of having my cake and eating it too I’m always on the lookout for multi-product synergy and convenience. I really do not like Google Reader’s web interface, in fact, I really don’t like many “Web Interfaces” for products and would prefer the gilded cage of specialized client software instead. So there is a nice synergy between Reeder on my Mac computers which presents my Google Reader contents in a visually appealing way as well as Flipboard, which is the preferred way to view Google Reader on my iPad. By using IFTTT as the middleman-behind-the-scenes I can funnel all the stories that catch my interest and collect them right into Pocket.

All of these things can also be done with Instapaper and I was an ardent fan of Instapaper for a very long while, but I’ve switched over to Pocket. I still regard Marco Arment and his product to be very good, but for me personally I found that Instapaper on my 1st Generation iPad would jettison too much for my liking. It wasn’t as much a problem with Instapaper as it was the iPad itself. Embarrassingly outclassed by the applications that I was trying to force on it. I’d be able to stand by this, but Instapaper on my 3rd Generation iPad also jettisoned. I didn’t really want to bother the author with the yackety-schmackety bug reports and Pocket edged out Instapaper when it came to displaying video and audio media. The core functions between the two are quite similar and the only other small feature that pushed me over to Pocket was the ability to search on my Pocket list and perform actions on multiple items. I have no doubt that Instapaper will catch up and may already have caught up. The money I spent on Instapaper was money well-spent and I would suggest that people look at both apps before deciding for themselves.

So back to the workflow, this is how I naturally started navigating my social network stream of information. In a way, I follow sources which curate the noise of Reddit and other news aggregators into categories that I find most interesting and then I self-curate the longer pieces into Pocket for later consumption. As I used this workflow it occurred to me that what was happening was an emergent stratification of curation. Living generates a noisy foam of information, which crashes on the coral reefs of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Engadget, HuffPo and the like. Information seagulls, like @geekami (for example) fly over these coral reefs of information and pluck out the shiniest bits, linking them to tweets and shipping them out. Then I come along and refine that for things I really find interesting and all of this ends up crashing into Pocket. Arguably, Pocket is the terminal for all this curation, but it doesn’t have to be. I could (but I don’t) cross-link Pocket and Buffer using IFTTT and regenerating a curated flow of information turning me into an information seagull. I suppose I don’t follow that path because I already have enough to do as it is, reading, comics, FOMO, work, gym… the list goes on and on.

For all the apps and people I mentioned in this blog entry, I really do recommend that you Google them and see if any of this fits in your life as it did mine. If It works for you, or you found a better way of managing this flow of information foam, please comment with your workflow description. Just more curation. Lexicographers and Encyclopedists eat your heart out. 😉