Back in the Web 1.0 days, seemingly every Web site was morphing into a Web portal - a virtual one stop destination for news, stocks, sports, e-mail, weather, or just about anything. Excite did it. Lycos did it. Yahoo! did it. Netscape eventually did it. But while Yahoo! has done a good job at offering new services and trying to give me enough "sticky" applications to keep my attention, I find myself spending more and more time in Google Reader, catching up on the hundreds of RSS feeds I subscribe too. So today, I made the switch, and made Google Reader my start page in Safari, on all my Macs.Now, instead of seeing a static page which may have some new AP wires, updated stock prices, and occasionally current sports scores, I get the very best the blogosphere has to offer. It's rare now that I will fire up the Web browser and not be presented with a few dozen news items from around the Web.
Now that we are in the Web 2.0 days, the concept of a portal has passed on. Rather than go to a single destination to have them provide me what they believe I want to read, I would rather go to a single destination which delivers me what I want to read, based on my subscriptions. I don't see myself gravitating back to My Yahoo! or iGoogle any time soon, though both are a simple command key combination away in Safari. But today's move is a significant marker in my continually evolving Web consumption.
I moved my start page from Google News to Google Reader myself earlier this year. It's just so much more relevant. But I get to wondering if I'm doing myself a disservice by tailoring my "intake" so much to pre-selected feeds. There was always the chance that I would get a surprise insight from News (or Yahoo before it) that is very unlikely to come from Reader feeds. I've decided which sources I care about and ignore the rest, missing all opportunity. Too bad Digg is so off the wall and Technorati has been infested by spam or I might use them instead...
ReplyDeleteStephen, despite the move, I'll still have plenty of time on My Yahoo! or other news sources. With Safari, I can just hit "Command-1" to go to stock data, or "Command-4" to go to My Yahoo! and "Command-8" for iGoogle. I'll be starting in Google Reader, though.
ReplyDeleteTechnorati for me has never been a good candidate as a start page, but it's a good tool to measure inbound links. Digg is crazy. I've added Digg/Technology to Google Reader, so I get that news through that source.
I've been tempted to switch to Google Reader but iGoogle still provides me with too much functionality to abandon. I can categorize and sort feeds into multiple pages in order to prioritize them. I can also add widgets like my Google calender, to do list, docs and gmail. Plus I can add feeds like stock and weather.
ReplyDeleteI basically have the front page of iGoogle set up as my on going workspace and then some subsequent tabs that serve as RSS feed pages sorted by category.
Gal