Email > Twitter > Facebook > Breakfast > RSS (on the go)

A few years ago, my email was the last thing I looked at before going to bed and the first thing I did when I woke up, often during breakfast. Fast forward to the present and now a bunch of “news” compete for my attention: email, RSS feeds, news sites, Twitter and Facebook updates and so on. Because the time-space continuum isn’t changing and I still need to rush out the door to work, there’s less and less time to cram all of this reading in.

As a result, the stuff that I actually read becomes shorter and shorter. While email is still my top priority as it probably is for many others, my priorities have shifted. I find I am more efficient when I compartmentalize my attention. It used to be that I’d login to Facebook on my computer but now, I simply scan status updates on my mobile. I used to catch up on RSS feeds through Google Reader, but now, I refresh them on the mobile and read them cached on the train to work. Most recently, I’m finding Twitter gaining in the attention competition. If one is judicious about who to follow, I believe it’s possible to get a timely pulse of what’s going on at a glance because the 140 character limit enforces efficiency and blends nicely with my morning caffeine spike. I am sure a couple of years from now, there will be something new that will shake things up.

What does your morning routine look like today?

When Google started out back in what seems like an eternity now (1998), one of their mantras was to “do no evil.” No one really knew what that meant, but for better or for worse, at the time it seemed anti-Microsoft and that resonated with many. The search wars were waged, Google won and rose to prominence. While the Myspace/Facebook rivalry plays out, the topic of “do no evil” comes back into discussion. First it was Beacon, the controversial ad service that Facebookers rejected. Then came the design changes that we live with now.

The recent controversy over Facebook’s new terms of service (ToS) essentially gave them extraordinary power: “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers)….” Yes, it’s lawyerspeak but it certainly doesn’t sound enticing to me or any potential new user.

Needless to say, the public balked and Facebook caved and went back to its previous ToS. Now, the company seems to be backing away from its authoritarian stance, taking a more democratic approach by inviting users to craft the privacy policy. In a way, this is somewhat akin to the government asking its citizens to rewrite its laws. The question now is, how can Facebook monetize its massive traffic in a way that its users can accept and what value will users get in return?