Great piece. I, too, wish that some of these early infrastructure features were still around. One of the features I miss the most is a real RSS reader. The common response is to watch for new article announcements on Twitter. That only works up to a certain size Twitter following set. Get that size over 1000 and it is impossible to follow all the new posts.

Another piece that has been lost is a common and easy to use public curation too. Amplify was one of the best of these. When it went away, nothing else came up that allow public curation. #mytwocents