So Google Reader will close at the end of this month, and something has really stood out for me in this article on the closure by Wired.
They quote Richard Gingras, senior director, News and Social Products at Google;
“Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviours of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.”
Unfortunately, there are significant benefits to the old standard behaviours in this case. Consuming news in bits and bites is deeply inefficient, as all the studies on multitasking have found. Check out the handy Wikipedia page on Multitasking for a number of references:
Mayer and Moreno have studied the phenomenon of cognitive load in multimedia learning extensively and have concluded that it is difficult, and possibly impossible to learn new information while engaging in multitasking.
I’m pretty sure that in a company as educated as Google, more than one person must realise that swapping a tool which allows you to focus and concentrate on accumulating learning and knowledge for odd grabbed bits of news throughout the day is going to actually lessen what people get from them.
So the logical conclusion has to be that Google doesn’t care if people get stupider, as long as they’re continuing to use Google Now/Google+/Google Search to do it.
Having used Reader for several years, I decided to use the closure announcement as an experiment to see how I could potentially function just by other information sources (mainly social networks and email). My conclusion is that although I’ve been able to still keep up with a superficial overview of my interests, it requires wading through a lot of social updates (which may or may not be of interest) to try and find something relevant. And that’s further cluttered by recommendations from each network which are blatantly a load of old cobblers.
At the same time, there are 2-3 email newsletters I really value, but these are collated links which can be weeks or months old. Great for discovering hidden gems I missed at the time, but not so helpful for keeping up with the latest news and articles on a subject.
In short, as someone who works in an information-heavy industry as a content producer as well as consumer, there is no adequate substitute for a decent RSS reader of relevant feeds, and the options for replacing Google Reader with something that does the job as well are sorely limited. It makes it harder to focus on learning, harder to maintain my own sites and point people to great new articles, and removes the pleasurable experience of a relaxing Sunday morning spent with great writing from around the web.
I’ve been using Feedly since Google announced the closure of Reader… works well and migrates your existing set of feeds.
Hi,
Thanks for the comment. I’ve tried a few solutions so far, but haven’t found an exact fit. But you’ve prompted me to give Feedly a go, so just importing everything now – aside from 8,000+ unread items currently stacked up in my reading list, it’s looking like all good news so far!
Dan
I use Feedly too (Reader’s impending closure has forced me to actually use it, instead of just having an account that I looked at sporadically).
Anyway, your piece struck a chord with me Dan. I appreciate and use social sharing but there’s an element of serendipity to it that makes it both more and less valuable.
Because I also want content to flow from sites *I’ve* selected (that inform me or that I just plain trust) to appear in a reader via the magic of rss. I think that makes me some sort of recidivist.
Hi Alison,
Thanks for the comment, and I think we’re both recidivists in that case. We’re already connected on social networks, so you know I’m a fairly active user of them – and I appreciate the serendipity they provide.
But at the same time, there are people that I connected with via Reader’s social functions that shared great reading material, but I don’t necessarily want to connect with on a social network and see their family life etc.
And there are some sites, particularly smaller ones, which never pop up in my social feeds, but I want to read. They might only have 5 readers at the moment but they’re still amazing sites. Which are unlikely to appear via algorithms and popular social mentions.
Finally I actively looked forward to weekends, consuming websites via a reader in the same way as I’d previously have sat with the Sunday papers.
I’m frankly sick of the real-time social bandwagon. There’s a benefit to it in context, but generally most people and businesses aren’t built in a way to make much use of it yet. And it can also lead to knee jerk reactions. We need the right mixture of tools for both real-time and time-delayed learning, insight, analytics and action…
I’m using http://feeder.co/ – which is pretty much exactly what I was looking for, a simple chrome extension with a drop down list of new stuff. It is prettier than the google reader notifier extension, and syncs with google nicely(for a few weeks)
When they announced that Reader was closing I made some sort of ‘oh no!’ comment on Twitter, but thought I was coming across as a bit of a dinosaur as someone who still used RSS feeds. Then all the tweets flooded in from all these other people who were using it as well, who were just as gutted as me. It’s such a useful service.
Anyway, I like Feedly, but I wanted something that my team could all use rather than something tied to your personal account. So we use Netvibes. Can recommend.
Hi,
I don’t think RSS feeds are for dinosaurs, but for people who tend to utilise information in some way – bloggers, writers, developers etc. The complaint has always been that it never became a mainstream technology, but I don’t think it was ever likely to…
I’ve used Netvibes in the past for dashboards for various clients (Including RSS feeds) and would also use it again for collating information to be accessed by multiple people…
Dan