Everybody thinks everyone else uses the internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H RSS just like they do.
Everybody believes that everyone else should use the internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H RSS in the way they do it.
Granted, most RSS reader applications get RSS horribly wrong, and erroneously graft the email “inbox” pattern as the UI focus, instead of a river to be skimmed (with power to dive in deep, too). Google Reader is the best in a sorry lot, but mainly because Google sports an inherent advantage (even in the foolhardy sense they’ve implemented it thus far) with its ominous search capability. Read and unread item counts matter not a scintilla to me, as I care just for nimbleness in scanning “what’s new” in the subject matters of my choosing in a chronological manner.
I enjoy reading RSS on Google Reader. It has totally supplanted the time I used to allot to “reading the newspaper”. I know I’ve shared this before, but I keep pace with 2,600 subscriptions. No, I certainly do not read every item and probably only click through less than 10-20% of items. Not true for all sites, as the frequently updated sites get clicked at a 2-3% rate whereas treasured, infrequently updated sites have all their items read. But I don’t fret over unread items and even if I miss reading for a day or two, I feel no obligation to “catch up”, and instead, if I want to review items of interest I may have missed, I use the “Search” feature.
Oh, additionally, all of the mobile and/or tablet RSS reader applications are colossal failures, except for maybe Flipboard, which comes at RSS in a different tact, mainly via Twitter. The whole point of RSS is accelerating the pace at which web content is perused. Doing RSS with a subscription set count of less than a hundred is not much of an efficiency improvement. And the mobile and/or tablet offerings simply choke and sputter on a larger dataset (unless there are new, or updated, offerings I am unaware of). Also, Google Reader (as well as all the Google web products) suck massively on the mobile platforms — it’s why my iPad mostly collects dust and the MacBook Air (using Chrome/Chromium in full screen mode) shines — for the superior Google Reader experience.
I find a very great deal of agreement in what you have said here.
A good example of one of my firehose feeds is HackerNews. I don't actually know what proportion of the posts I read, but I would guess it's significantly less than 10%. Sure I'm wasting some time scrolling away most of the headlines, but since one of the primary functions of a human brain is to discard irrelevant inputs, I'm able to do this pretty quickly.
The reward is that I get to read articles that I would never otherwise have seen if I just followed 6 people I already agree with.
Everybody believes that everyone else should use the internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H RSS in the way they do it.
Granted, most RSS reader applications get RSS horribly wrong, and erroneously graft the email “inbox” pattern as the UI focus, instead of a river to be skimmed (with power to dive in deep, too). Google Reader is the best in a sorry lot, but mainly because Google sports an inherent advantage (even in the foolhardy sense they’ve implemented it thus far) with its ominous search capability. Read and unread item counts matter not a scintilla to me, as I care just for nimbleness in scanning “what’s new” in the subject matters of my choosing in a chronological manner.
I enjoy reading RSS on Google Reader. It has totally supplanted the time I used to allot to “reading the newspaper”. I know I’ve shared this before, but I keep pace with 2,600 subscriptions. No, I certainly do not read every item and probably only click through less than 10-20% of items. Not true for all sites, as the frequently updated sites get clicked at a 2-3% rate whereas treasured, infrequently updated sites have all their items read. But I don’t fret over unread items and even if I miss reading for a day or two, I feel no obligation to “catch up”, and instead, if I want to review items of interest I may have missed, I use the “Search” feature.
Oh, additionally, all of the mobile and/or tablet RSS reader applications are colossal failures, except for maybe Flipboard, which comes at RSS in a different tact, mainly via Twitter. The whole point of RSS is accelerating the pace at which web content is perused. Doing RSS with a subscription set count of less than a hundred is not much of an efficiency improvement. And the mobile and/or tablet offerings simply choke and sputter on a larger dataset (unless there are new, or updated, offerings I am unaware of). Also, Google Reader (as well as all the Google web products) suck massively on the mobile platforms — it’s why my iPad mostly collects dust and the MacBook Air (using Chrome/Chromium in full screen mode) shines — for the superior Google Reader experience.