Feedly seems to be the early favorite in the Replace Google Reader race. It pulled in a half a million new users right out of the gate following the announcement. I’ve now used it both on my computers and my iPad, and I’m settling in with it. You have the ability to tart things up magazine style, which I might want to do with some content, for instance Disney sites on the iPad, while you can also go straitlaced and just show full article titles, which makes more sense for debate/politics/philosophy sites. It uses Reader as a backend engine, but presumably will create its own engine going forward, which can’t be that big a deal, considering the nature of RSS. For all I know, they already have their own engine, for non-Reader users. It doesn’t matter. The point is that RSS will continue, even if it isn’t as popular as, say, tweeting. I can live with that, provided that, one way or the other, I still get to live with RSS.
(Feedly does seem to be suffering some growing pains, by the way, but that should clear up once they sort out the scaling of their growing numbers.)
Come to think of it, I could live without Twitter. I guess I use it mostly to keep up on breaking news when I’m in the office. I have it available in one of my tabs, and I check it every half hour or so to see if anything interesting is going on. The whole hit-and-miss aspect of it is why I don’t depend on it for anything. I’m following 85 accounts, and I would estimate that I see a turnover of about 100 posts an hour. Obviously, when I’m not looking at it, that means I miss 100 posts an hour. Since I never look on the weekend, that’s meaningful. Assuming fewer posts go up at night when I also don’t look, less meaningful, but still, plenty of missed content. In any case, my point is that Twitter is this endless stream of communication that, if I happen to go near it, it’s fine, and if I don’t happen to go near it, it’s also fine.
RSS, on the other hand, is there until you dismiss it (i.e., mark things as read, literally or figuratively). You select a number of sources, and you get the latest updates from those sources. Here I tend to go for sites that provide information on things in which I’m interested. Like, as mentioned above, amusement parks and debate-ish things, plus tech and books and general entertainment. I’m using the switch to Feedly to update my feeds. I had really overloaded when we were doing a daily DJ blog with 4 posts a day. Now that it’s just for my own personal entertainment, and I’m winnowing down accordingly. And then I’ll expand again, as I follow recommendations from the software of the like-this-try-that variety. Reading my feeds is what I do when I go onto the internet, hence my panic losing Reader. I gather others feel likewise.
I know that there are people out there for whom Facebook is the internet in its entirety, but I find Fb way too claustrophobic. I go on once or twice a week at most, unless I want to message somebody (it is a great connector). Otherwise, I really don’t care what my Fb connections are thinking/doing all that much. I don’t think they care all that much about me in return. Fb inflates a certain kind of information that is somewhere between real news and gossip and gives it credibility, when it’s really just empty babbling. And, I’m sorry, the number of people in whose empty babbling I maintain any interest is terrifically small. Fb seems primarily for adolescents, whose sense of community is much different from adults (and maybe this is generational and changing, but I really don’t think so). It's more tenuous and chimerical and still in a developmental mode. You don't really know who your friends are when you're not quite clear who you are yourself, so you experiment and are willing to process a lot of possibilities. The Fb universe is perfect for this. Fb also seems to bring out the adolescent in the adults who are big users, which is almost an oxymoron. Few adults are interested in maintaining large personal networks of marginal acquaintances loosely identifiable as friends of some sort. They have other things on their mind. If Fb went away, I would miss the ability to message alums easily as they keep changing their emails, but not much else.
In terms of internet phenomena, there is one other big deal that eludes me completely, and that’s Pinterest. Why people want a bulletin board of pictures from various websites, or want to look at someone else’s bulletin board of pictures, is beyond me. Even when I like the subject (say WDW), it’s just a bulletin board of random pictures. Yet Pinterest is one of the biggest new things going, and some people seem to love it. Oh, well. Some people ain’t me.
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