Something strange crept up on me over the last several months: I slowly stopped reading blogs. Part of this was due to spending more of my limited social media budget on Seesmic, Twitter, and Facebook, which sites tend to expose a certain amount of blog content. (e.g., clicking through to new posts shared in Twitter streams.) And part of this behavioral change was driven by the incredible failings of Google Reader.
Mind you, I want to like Google products. Ubiquity is convenient. But poor interface design not only kept me from adding more feeds, but also prevented effective skimming and consumption of the content that I had added. I didn't even recognize that I had been driven away from blogs by the level of friction in the product. Or that I've been hanging on to My Yahoo! (the old, column-based version focused on large news sources) by my fingernails, because it gives me both the national and local information I'm looking for, and it gives it to me fast.
So today, I've started to move my RSS subscriptions over to NetVibes and suggest that other Google Reader users do the same. (As in a meatspace move, you'll end up weeding out the junk you don't need.) Rediscover the joy of community content! NetVibes is clean-looking, relatively frictionless for adding content, and easy to skim. Interestingly, NetVibes is not included in the default feed reader list on Firefox, but you can add by clicking on the link in this blog post. I did check out Bloglines, which also has rabid fans, but it has usability challenges similar to those of Google Reader. (Again, my focus is on efficient information organization and content consumption, not on tracking traffic trends.)
And if this thing with NetVibes works out, then I'll rethink my relationship with My Yahoo!...but not until then.
