google reader
I find it really ironic. Despite the fact that I’m drawn to technology, I find myself resisting dominant trends. When everyone had CD players, I was still hanging on to cassette tapes. When the world was dominated with x86 clones, I was still banging away at my 8-bit Commodore 64. When Windows 3.0 came out, I stuck with MS-DOS.
When GUIs became the dominant interface, I stubbornly hung on to the command-line, and stayed away from Mac OS for the longest time precisely because there was no command-line.
When the cel phone revolution took hold, I held out until 2001, when getting stranded in a storm without a pay phone in sight finally convinced me that being able to call for help was a good idea. And when mp3 players started making their way to the market, I didn’t buy in until 2002, just after I had finally given in and bought my first notebook, which incidentally also marked the time I finally stopped using floppy drives and started using USB flash drives.
When PDA mania was at its peak, I gave in temporarily, but I find my Palm now sitting in a drawer collecting dust. I keep my random notes in Mead notebooks (although I have recently upgraded to Moleskin notebooks.) At work, I still use index cards and little scraps of paper and dislike having to use the computer, except for using Google to search for scholarly articles.
And when Web 2.0 came to the fore, I still hung on to my command-line apps, using first Pine, then Mutt, then grudgingly moving on to the GUI desktop with Evolution and then Mail.app to read my e-mail.
But then Google finally snagged me. Working faster than Mail.app, with all of the niceties of a desktop client and even a command-line client, with powerful spam-killing abilities to boot, I’m completely hooked on Gmail.
But that’s not all.
I didn’t jump onto the RSS feed reader bandwagon until 2006. Using Safari was not all that intuitive, and I definitely didn’t want to use Mail.app (particularly not with the number of feeds I follow), so I looked around for a dedicated desktop RSS reader. I really dug (and still do dig) Vienna and I’ve been using it for a year and a half now.
But Google Reader is useful when I’m not using my iBook or my Mac Mini, and particularly useful at work, since they can’t really block Google (although they can disable Javascript, which is a real pain-in-the-ass.)
So for a while, I found myself exporting and importing OPML files. (And, quite nicely, both Vienna and Google Reader will sync feeds automatically. You don’t have to worry about duplicates.)
Then the Facebook revolution took hold, and Google Reader added the “Share This” function.
This is kind of neat, because it funnels any of the links you share from Google Reader onto your Facebook profile and onto the friend feed. But I could do something similar with Vienna and del.icio.us using the del.icio.us Facebook app, and the advantage with going through del.icio.us is that you can insert little comments about the links.
So now I have three tiers of bookmarking: 1. Links that I really want to hold onto for future reference end up on del.icio.us. In fact, del.icio.us has pretty much replaced my browser’s bookmark function. About the only use I have for bookmarks in Safari is to house those Javascript scriplets that allow me to share links to del.icio.us and Facebook. 2. Links that I find amusing or informative while I’m on my iBook or Mac Mini that might be entertaining or enlightening to my friends but which I probably won’t refer to in the future get shared directly using the “Share on Facebook” Javascript bookmark button scriplet. Mostly these are trendy memes, particularly videos and songs. 3. Link that I find amusing or informative while I’m at work or on somebody else’s machine that might be entertaining or enlightening to my friends get shared through Google Reader.
All of these find their way to my Facebook profile and the omnipresent friends feed. And if Google Reader added a way to add comments, I might never use Facebook’s bookmarklet.
Another neat feature that Google recently added were RSS Feed recommendations. I haven’t really gone crazy with this feature because I’m already following over 600 feeds, and I’m trying to prevent RSS feed reading from completely taking over my life.
But the most compelling feature that will probably end up making Google Reader my primary RSS reader is the Trends feature. Google breaks down your reading habits, tabulates things, and spits out a nice chart.
I discovered some fairly disturbing things.
So far, it appears that the feed I read the most items from is digg, despite the fact that I constantly deride the intelligence of people who use that site, although I only in fact read 4% of the articles posted. For the most part, though, I’ve been following political blogs the most, it seems. The blog that I’ve been following the closest (reading 14% of the articles published) is the political blog Balloon Juice, written by a former Republican whose intellect prevented him from following W’s disastrous neocon (with emphasis on “con” as in “convict”) administration off the precipice. Coming in second at 8% is [Crooks and Liars][17] described as “a politically left blog focusing on political events.”
So now Google is my primary mail app, and my primary RSS reader. How soon until Google makes my OS completely irrelevant?
You know, if Google wanted to rule the world, all they need is a paramilitary organization (I hear Blackwater is looking for some positive PR), and they’re pretty much there.