Weep for Google Reader

Ok, maybe not weep.

Google announces that Google Reader will die and I'm ambivalent.  On the one hand, it lets me skim.  I can subscribe to a zillion different feeds, prioritize them, group them and then bang through them extremely quickly.  I am bizarrely though superficially knowledgable about a great many subjects based on scanning headlines.  And I can group some things that I always read together and bang through them quickly without having to visit a dozen sites to see if the content has been updated.  Very convenient!  A great time killer too, if i have a few minutes between things, I can fire up GR, see what's going down out there in the world and then get back to business.

Recently, I've slipped back into being retired or on break or between projects or whatever this turns out to be and GR has become a little overused.  It's no longer the thing that slips between, it's the thing I kill an hour with each evening.  And I'm not sure that's the best use of my time.  Sure, I know there's a new Pope before you do, I know when the latest upgrade to some obscure DBMS hits the web, I have my finger on the pulse of all sorts of nerdy things I'd never have time to follow any other way, on the other hand, maybe that's just a giant time suck.  Maybe I don't need all that.

I'm going to be doing some traveling and I've recently been thinking that I'm not going to want to keep up on all this noise while I'm roaming the world because, hey, I'm roaming the world.  My daily dose of Dilbert may not be that high on the critical list.  So I've been shuffling things into folders in a way that makes it easy to mark giant swatches of things "read" so I can just barrel through in a few minutes and get back to touristing.

Then Google says they're going to just kill the thing off and I think maybe this is the time to cut some cords even more drastically.  Sure, that means I won't know some stuff, but that's not the end of the world.  I've been looking at alternative readers and they're all a bit noisy and eager to be attractive.  I don't want attractive - this is about cramming, not lingering lovingly.  Some commentators have said that RSS is dead anyway, long live Twitter, but that doesn't work for me.  The signal to noise ratio in Twitter is pretty bad.  Facebook doesn't work, the stuff I want isn't there and if it was there's no way to channel it in a controllable way, so Facebook will remain the place I go infrequently to see what kind of donut this friend or that had on a given morning.  I'm sure Google wants me to think "Google Plus" and I would because that's a pretty nice interface but, bad news, Google, it's a ghost town and not really what I want anyway.  Maybe Google wants me to think "Google Currents", but it's pretty rather than efficient, doesn't have stuff and I want low friction.  I'm giving Feedly a shot, promising but again with the pretty so I have my doubts.

I suppose I could whip up something of my own, but maybe I should just let this be a time when my life gets a little less noisy.  Didn't really need to know who the new Pope was anyway.