Consuming content in the post Google Reader era
For a long time I used to keep up with all of the things I cared about on the internet via Really Simple Sindication (RSS). If you don’t know what that is, you’ve probably heard the phrase “RSS feed”, or at least you’ve seen this logo:
RSS made it possible to “subscribe” to a website using an RSS “reader” (an app), which eliminated the need to visit the website to check for new content. Just open your RSS reader and see what was new on as many websites as you dared subscribe to. At some point in time Google launched a web-based RSS reader application called Google Reader, and later it released an app for Android (and iOS?), which made it easy to keep track of what you had read regardless of which device you read it from. Internet addicts rejoice!
So much has been written about this, and an endless supply of “Google Reader alternatives” or other “news reader” and/or “magazine” apps & services have attempted to fill the void, but none of them really do it for me - and I’m not alone. It’s probably not their fault though. The rise ot Twitter and other social media outlets, and the FOMO-induced result of following a website’s RSS feed as well as their Twitter feed (and their Facebook account, Instagram account, Pinterest account, etc) has resulted in a kind of redundancy that has made subscribing to RSS feeds seem irrelevant.
Who is going to tell the normal people that RSS is dead? Wait. Who is going to explain to normal people what RSS was?
— M.G. Siegler (@mgsiegler)
(For the record, I don’t think RSS is dead by any means; the “workflow” just isn’t there for me anymore)
So now what? The reality of seeing my Twitter feed filled with the 75% of the stories I would see in my RSS feed(s) has prompted me to give up RSS and rely on Twitter as my one and only source for news. Doing so has also helped me clean up my actual Twitter feed, so casual glances at Twitter throughout the day are primarily filled with updates from actual people rather than news outlets. Here’s how I setup and how I currently consume my internet content:
I created a single Twitter list: my “newsfeed” I chose to keep my Twitter list private, because I’m not interested in advertising what I’m reading (unless I enjoy something, in which case I’ll tweet about it).
I added Twitter accounts to my Twitter list for all of the RSS feeds I was subscribed to. I also ended up “unfollowing” most of these accounts - especially the “noisy” ones. The only accounts I continued to follow are those that I would care to interact with in realtime (because I usually check Twitter throughout the day, whereas I usually only catch up on my news feed in the evening).
I consume my news using different apps, depending on which device I’m reading on:
On my phone & tablet I read all my news using Flipboard, which I have setup so that the only “topic” I’m following is my Twitter “newsfeed” list.
On my laptop I check up on my newsfeed from TweetDeck, which I actually quite like. If something looks interesting I’ll click through to the story and then either read it immediately, or in the case of longer form content I’ll save it to my Pocket to read later (I’ll have more words on Pocket another day; the tl;dr is “I really like it”)
Discovery happens naturally (as new things appear in my Twitter feed), and subscribing to that content is a fully native / integrated experience - just visit the Twitter account I want to follow & add it to my list!
There’s nothing very special about this setup, but I thought I’d share because I keep meeting people who have shared my #ripgooglereader woes, so I figured there might be more people out there like me who had lost their way.
How do you consume internet content? I’d love to hear about your setup.
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