Looks like feeds are popular enough to get criticized. I use feeds regularly to follow people. I think feeds work really well when you use them to follow the people you want to read. That is the reason I had unsubscribed to most of the group blogs a while back. Where feeds fail is immediate discovery of information and interaction. And I am sure Twitter works a lot better there. However, feeds, as a syndication technology, is still brilliant because I can quickly subscribe to articles or headlines or podcasts, blogs, tweets, trends, or search results, and catch up with them asynchronously.
Having said that, I do have problems with feed readers. Like Dare Obasanjo says, they are still being modelled as email clients and deserve to be treated differently. Another problem with the river of news is that the original article gets pushed down in the timeline. I wonder if feed readers can group articles that link to each other, something like Techmeme. The river of news frees me from classifying my subscriptions. But it will be great if the my feed reader groups articles by their relationships within that scope.
Feeds work great for me because I am not trying to be the first to know and write about something. I usually get directed to a piece of information a little late, but with opinions of people whom I respect. And it works great for me.
May 6th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I totally agree with you! Which feedreader do you use then??
May 8th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
I am writing something of my own to fit my needs, so read a lot of feeds while testing it. Otherwise I was using Google Reader.