Thing #2: RSS Feeds
When I first started reading about RSS feeds in the late 90s, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around why I would want to use them. The internet was much simpler, if not a little sparse back then. Then three things happened that changed everything for me:
- Dave Winer released the RSS 2.0 specification
- Blogs (Thanks Evan!)
- Safari 2.0 incorporated RSS in the browser
Now we had a robust standard to send out the feeds. We had a web browser that had RSS integrated within it, a one-stop-shop, so to speak. But the big thing that had changed about the web, and what really mades RSS a necessity was blogs. The days of static content that was edited much like a text document were gone. Instead, we had published, periodic updates to sites that were organized chronologically.
It only made since that a chronologically updated site could be tracked by an RSS feed. Now, all you had to do was book a site’s RSS feed in Safari and the web browser would tell you when that particular site was updated. It saved time and ensured that you saw every post at a site, efficiency at its best!
But what happens when the number of sites you follow grows, and continues to grow, exponentially? Safari no longer cuts it as an RSS feed reader, that’s what happens. That is why I have stopped worrying and learned to love Google Reader.
I currently subscribe to over 160 blogs and the number keeps increasing. There is no way I would be able to keep up with all of those sites or information by visiting the sites just to check if there was new content. This way, I can organized sites into folders like ‘EdTech’, ‘ASIJ Blogs’, ‘Film’, ‘Japan’, etc. Then if I click on the folder, if will give me a chronological update from that whole group of sites at one time. And most of the posts can be read inside Google Reader without having to go to that website. It goes without saying that since it is on the web, it is accessible from any computer on any browser.
The best thing is that Google Reader keeps adding features that I love:
- The ability to share favorite posts
- The ability to send articles to Delicious, Twitter or Instapaper
- Following and finding other Google Reader users
- And now the ability to follow any website, even if it doesn’t have an RSS feed
This unintentionally turned into a profession of love for Google Reader, but I don’t regret it. There’s a reason it’s the most visited website for me, most of the time it’s the only site I need to go to.
