Feed Readers

Joe Gregorio

Alex Payne has an interesting article on feed readers entitled: "Fever and the Future of Feed Readers" which is well worth a read.

It got me thinking about my subscriptions and how they've changed over time. Recently I've found myself cutting subscriptions and am now down to less than 50, and of those, 25 are for 'things' and not people; monitoring the health of some of my systems, the children's school, Tae Kwon Do school, etc. The more interesting part to me is that after filtering them down several times I refined the criteria for feeds I would put in my 'people' grouping on Google Reader to technical people that I respect, but ones that don't blog too much, and not ones I will hear about anyway. They have to sit in a middle ground. For example, it appears that anything written by Steve Yegge or Joel Spolsky will become so wildly popular that I have no chance of missing it, no matter how hard I try. With them it's redundant to have them in my subscription list. On the other end of the spectrum there are people that post too infrequently, who I have to scratch my head and try to remember who they are and why I was subscribed to their feed in the first place. Out they go. From the group that survives I also throw out anyone I already follow on FriendFeed.

Contrast this with the days when my subscription list would regularly peak at 200 and I would have to trim it back.

How has your feed reading changed over time?

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