Up until a couple of years ago, I had Netvibes as the start page on all my browsers and PCs. It was my personal dashboard to all the RSS feeds I was following, with a few email and task list widgets thrown in for measures. Back when blogs and feeds still had all the buzz that nowadays belongs to social media and networks, it felt like you had all the world’s relevant information at your fingertips, when clicking through tabs filled with the very latest posts from hand picked sources. Effectively it was as “real-time” as the web could be viewed in.
Then came Twitter and all the TweetDeck style clients, which claimed the “real-time” and “dashboard” titles respectively. Suddenly the old RSS reader applications started to feel like a graveyard of old and irrelevant news, when all the big stories and best articles seemed to flow from your tweeps via URL shorteners within hours or minutes from publishing. All this meant that browsing through your RSS feeds became more of a chore that you had to do every now and then, a bit like keeping your inbox clean. At the same time I had also abandoned Netvibes due to its continuous technical glitches and moved over to the simple choice, i.e. Google Reader. We all know Google is great at productivity apps for information management utility services, so this further played down the status of RSS feeds for me.
I started to feel increasingly unbalanced in this situation where my online media diet had transformed from an รก la carte meal to a series of fast food pick ups. Sure, I was getting absolutely great links through Twitter, but my ability to focus on following any single topic was rapidly eroding as the gap between RSS feeds and real-time feeds was growing. One night when sitting on a train without any headphones or books with me, I spent a couple of hours on gReader for Android and went through the unread items in by Google Reader queue. When I reached my destination, I had started to better understand what the world of information around me looked like and how I should change my reading habits. Continued…
