Good-bye Google Reader
You were my friend, my enemy
The announced demise of Google Reader (“GR”) sent me on a quest for an alternative which was pretty much EXACTLY like GR. Cus I liked it. I liked the inbox-style capture of every single post on a feed.
GR fed my OCD desire to systematically check-stuff-off. With GR, when you followed a blog, you damn well followed it.Nothing got filtered out by someone else’s black-box algorithm which decided what I wanted to read and what was popular. I saw Every. Single. One.
Over time, as blogs accumulated in my reader, I found myself scanning hundreds of headlines daily. I became a human-filter for my friends and a purveyor of info. Every time I found something I though would interest this friend or that, I would pass it on.
Eventually I became one of those annoying people who every time you send them a link and asked, “hey have you seen this?” the answer would come back, “yeah dude that’s old news.”
The consumption of information was extremely time consuming. But I was addicted to it. I could feel a dopamine rush every time I came across something new and cool. Info was my crack.
When Google announced the impending death of my info dealer, I decided it was time to do some house cleaning. I started to pare down. Initially I cut out the feeds I got less value from. Then I removed the ones where I knew I would still somehow get their “best of” content through some other source. And so on… until the list was down to a handful of feeds and the information flow from GR slowed to a trickle.
Now perhaps it’s a coincidence or perhaps it’s a direct result, but during this time, I stopped being a consumer of information and became a producer. My energy moved from re-sharing other people’s content into creating my own.
The OCD part of me still wonders whether this is just adding to chaos in the universe instead of helping to categorise it and make it meaningful as I had been doing previously.
But whether for good or evil, quite clearly there had not been enough hours in the day to both consume vast quantities of information and also be creative.
Yes I remain saddened that Google Reader is dying. But its death has given me the possibility of rebirth.
