I find myself at a cross­roads with new real-time tools and old school meth­ods like RSS. I’m find­ing myself more drawn into Twit­ter than ever before for track­ing the peo­ple and top­ics I care about most, but I’m always para­noid that I’m miss­ing some­thing bril­liant as the news flies by. So I keep Google Read­er locked and loaded as back­up, only to find myself over­whelmed by 1000+ unread items when I arrive, much of which I’ve seen through­out the day on oth­er ser­vices. The real-time web is a thrill ride of instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion for the news-obsessed, but the oth­er side of that coin means we’re prob­a­bly miss­ing more rel­e­vant sto­ries than we realize.

How do I rec­on­cile these things? Will real-time tools ever offer the reas­sur­ance RSS does for the news junkies among us?

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