Absorbing Feeds
This afternoon I saw this tweet from @MaggieConv:
I see statements similar to this all the time from my peers. Personally, I tried out Google Reader a few years ago, but I was never able to routinely check it, and just left the feed count to surpass “(1000+)”. Over the past few years I’ve tried out services like Netvibes, Pageflakes, and iGoogle to see if they fit my feed reader needs.
I really like Netvibes, but it just hasn’t stuck in my workflow. One of the reasons for this is probably TweetDeck. I was using Netvibes to stay logged in to multiple Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail accounts. TweetDeck solved multiple Twitter accounts, and MailPlane (which I love so much that I bought a family pack) solved multiple Gmail accounts; I use Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail (which has become one of the poorest e-mail experiences on the web) less and less these days.
So, where do I add my blog feeds, news feeds, and podcast feeds? Well, I don’t subscribe to blogs or news, and podcasts go into iTunes — or I subscribe on Viddler.
That said, I do read blogs. If you have a blog, then I’ve probably read it from time to time. I also read the news; though, mostly technology and environmental news; I don’t care about politics, war, and the economy — well, that’s a slight lie; watch the Zeitgeist Movies.
I use Twitter as my “feed reader”. I do a lot of things in my life and if I wanted to read everyone’s blogs everyday, then I’d never get time to do anything else. If a blog post or news article is important enough, then someone will tweet about it. I may not see every tweet from the people that I follow, but I see a good majority of them, and I’ll take the time to click and read any links that my peers find interesting.
Also, my various e-mail addresses have enough unread counts; I don’t need a feed reader telling me how behind I am. 
How do you absorb the feeds you subscribe to?
