I read that Google Reader was closing on Google Reader. I have a folder in Reader named ‘Critical’ that contains key feeds from Inside Facebook, The Official Google Blog, etc. and I try to always scan that folder at least every couple of days.
For those of you not familiar with Google Reader, that’s the way it works. You subscribe to blogs you want to follow, and then rather than having to go to the blog to see the updates they come to you on Google Reader through the magic of something called RSS. Then in Reader you can see the headlines and decide if you want to read it or not. If you choose to read it you can read it right there with leaving Reader You can also share it, tweet it, or save it for later. It’s very convenient.
Google Reader is for info junkies. You can subscribe to hundreds of blogs, organize them into categories using folders and see all the new news. It can be a dashboard to start and end your day. If you fall behind you can just mark everything read and start over again.
I still find Reader extremely useful. In Twitter or Facebook your connections flag significant events and you join the conversation. Assuming your connections are the perfect arbiters and curators of what you’re interested in, you’re in good shape. But Reader lets you handle the fire-hose of information on the Internet very efficiently and in summary format. You can do it on your time, not real time like most social media.
I used to have a little gadget called Postrank that worked great with Reader. Postrank highlighted the important posts by their vitality. At a glance you could see which of the 70 daily posts in Mashable were important (as an example), snack on those, and move on. Postrank was bought by Google and then the consumer side of the product was killed a year ago as I wrote here, almost exactly a year ago.
So that brings up the obvious question. Is this the end of blogs? Yes, of course. When TV came along that was the end of radio, right? Blogs still have their place in long form content and will continue to evolve a la tumblr. But, perhaps the newsfeed features of Reader are being eclipsed by Twitter, though the tools are not as efficient or streamlined.
I still have a need for something like Reader to help me organize this fire-hose of information. There’s a lot of panic out there right now and people madly looking for replacements. Reader’s not disappearing right away. Maybe someone will buy it or Google will keep it around. There was a similar panic when Delicious was being shut down by Yahoo and it was bought by AVOS and is till healthy today. So, lets see what happens.
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