Too little focus in the information we get

My Whole Life in Happy Little Folders, by Jeffrey Veen

Jeffrey Veen was complaining that it seemed like all he did was un-bold things in RSS feeds. There's just so much info that you get overwhelmed. This was one of the primary reasons I unsubscribed to ridiculously prolific blogs like smartmobs, and now signal vs noise has hell of a lot more noise now. I still subscribe due to the few gems that get dropped occasionally. But once I find others that are more quality and less quantity, I'm ready to drop them off my feed reader.

But other than complaining about blogs, this was the primary reason that I moved from bloglines to reader google. I found that having the number of unread items just felt like I was being a slacker by not reading it. Google reader is much more unforgiving. News you don't read just become that--news you don't read, and it just scrolls on by as the days past by.

It's not something foresight would have seen, unless you've actually used a feed reader before. But I'm glad that google got that right with their feed reader.

I think there's always phases to technology, as others pointed out. But beyond the adoption curve, there is the phase where the users are over-saturated, and need some type of filter. This is often overlooked in my opinion.