It has always irked me that the carriers in UK Mobile market claimed “unlimited” data when their products are far from unlimited (usually a 500 Mb monthly cap). Something ought to be done about the unfair advertising, or more and more people are going to be facing slowed data throughputs at the end of their 30 day cycle. Now that I’ve been shopping around for broadband, I’ve noticed this false advertising also affects broadband in the UK. While it is true that the increased competition offers lower prices and more features in terms of broadband availability, they all tend to generally advertise “unlimited” plans, while the small print talks about a data cap (generally 5 – 10 GB), after which the provider can slow your available bandwidth.

Lately though, I’ve noticed that some carriers are trying to move away from this (O2 doesn’t seem to have the word “unlimited data” on their home page and it took me a while to find the words “unlimited data an downloads on the Orange website, but find it I did). I attribute this to Three UK promoting it’s One plan, which apparently has “true” all-you-can-eat data. T-Mobile, however takes a different approach on their iPhone page. The wording on this page, under the title “No scary data charges” says, “But we won’t charge you any extra if you go over your limit. And, we’ll always let you browse and email, even if you’ve reached your data limit for streaming videos and downloading files”. Vodafone’s advertising on their website is perhaps the clearest of all – they offer different “web packs” that subscribers can buy, but even the best of those has a paltry 500 MB limit.

Also, why do these companies complicate things with Boosters (T-Mobile), Bolt-Ons (O2), Animal Plans (Orange) and Freebees (Vodafone)? And while I loved the Orange Wednesdays when I used them (2-for-1 cinema tickets), isn’t it just an extra cost that they can pass on to the consumer in terms of lower prices? I wouldn’t stick with Orange for these deals, I moved my number the moment I realised their 3G service was awful.

What prompted this rant? My search for a good broadband provider, now that we’re moving flat’s and need to get our own service. We’ve been using our landlord’s Sky broadband service so far, and while it’s been decent, there are definitely times when I know they’re throttling me down. And what does Sky’s broadband page say? There are 2 plans, the first with a ridiculously low 2GB monthly data allowance. The second one, while claiming to be “unlimited” has a soft cap of 40GB and is subject to network management policies. And oh, I need to sign a 12 month contract. BT is even worse, with an 18 month contract required and the “unlimited” broadband that is capped, but their T&C don’t mention what the cap is. Forum poster seem to claim it is 100 GB, which is decent, I suppose. I can’t seem to find any information on whether BT Vision usage (IPTV) contributes towards this cap, but it shouldn’t.

Anyway, rant time over and some good news: I was very pleasantly surprised at the very decent BT customer service when I ordered a new phone line at the flat we’re moving to. It was set up fairly quick and when I had to make a change to the activation date, it was done without any fuss at all. I was quite impressed. And with regards to the broadband I finally ended up singing with? BE Broadband – apparently the only UK ISP with no caps or any traffic shaping policy.

Note: Tesco mobile (I’m currently employed by Tesco) adverstises “unlimited” web and data on their pay monthly sim only plans, while the paragraph below that says “fair use policy applies” and states the montly data allowance is 500 Mb (yes, with a lower case “b”, meaning megabits.) *sigh*

I spend on average, 3-4 hours on day, if not more on Google Reader, Twitter, various blogs and other news reader applications. It was much higher during my unemployment. What really sucked is that I’d come across a great new blog or website and want to add it immediately to my Google Reader subscription list and this meant my bloated list of 150+ websites generated a 1000+ articles before I had got my morning cuppa tea. I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that there is no silver bullet to solve the information overload problem. But along the way I’ve developed some useful tips and strategies that I’m happy to share to help reduce the stress. Here they are in no order of importance

1. I now resist the urge to add a new blog/website to Google Reader unless it’s truly exception. Instead I subscribe to their Twitter feed, where I don’t feel so compelled to read every Tweet. If for some reason more than 12 hours has passed since I’ve been on Twitter, I just scroll to the top (*wince*) and try not to to think about what I’ve missed. I also resist “liking” brands on Facebook as this pollutes my Facebook stream, which I try to keep to only personal contacts.

2. I trust the long list of people I follow on Twitter, who are mostly in tech/public policy/govt/news, will throw up or retweet anything that I shouldn’t be missing. The hardest part was getting over the feeling that I’m “missing” something on Twitter just because I skipped a few hours worth of Tweets, but now that I have, there is much less remorse.

3. A few weeks ago I ruthlessly culled my Google Reader feeds to the ones that I really read or care about. One fantastic thing about Google is that their tools have great statistics. Buried within your feeds somewhere is a Trends page that shows what articles for a particular feed you read, how many you clicked, etc. Very useful to help trim the wild growth. I also deleted feeds that don’t publish full text RSS, unless the site is something I care about. The extra click to go to the page, and wait for all the articles and ads to load was too time consuming. Additionally, I removed all news sites from my RSS feeds. NYTimes, Guardian, Cricinfo etc. sometimes published hundreds of articles a day that left my unread count very high. Finally, I stopped being afraid to click the “Mark all as read” button.

4. I bookmarked Techmeme.com (a news aggregator for tech news that has the latest, popular, and breaking news on its front page) and visit it before I go to Google reader. This gives my a very quick update on tech news and helps me skim my Google Reader articles faster.

5. For longer articles, like on the New Yorker or the Atlantic website, I save them to Instapaper and then read them from my phone when I’m on the tube or have some down time. This ensures I don’t forget about them but I’m not spending ages reading them when I’m on my computer and could be more productive. I’ve also started using Pulse on my iPad more, it’s a very well designed news reader and I use it for websites that tend to produce more in-depth, or longer articles. I generally get to Pulse in the night, just before falling asleep.

6. Finally, this morning (before I got your email, I swear) I was surfing Quora (another website that I’m now addicted to), I saw a question about RSS overload, and the answer recommend Feedly. It’s a very light Chrome extension that integrates with Google Reader and is supposed to do a good job of recommending what is popular in your feeds. I don’t know how it does this, and I’ve only used it once this morning, so the jury is still out.

Bottom line, there is no one way to reduce the RSS overload. This has what has worked for me, and I continue to refine my methods. If you find something better, do let me know!