Maybe feeds aren’t so great
Now that I’ve been using this feed aggregator for a while, and I can see all my relevant feeds in one place in an organized categorized way, I’m starting to see some of its issues.
First, the main benefit has been for news sites. For general news, tech news, and mobile news I can just go to one page and scan it to get a sense of what is going on in the world. It works out great, since most of them have descriptive titles. It works with design-related sites to a certain extent, but it can still get overwhelming.
It doesn’t work with certain sites like boing boing or WMMNA because I might read a story posted because of interesting pictures or follow-ups from other people. It’s just a much more enjoyable experience to actually be at the site scrolling through things rather than always be in the same netvibes interface. There is a lot more stimulation and possible follow up links when you actually make it to the sites. Not to mention, a lot of cultural or design sites don’t have the most descriptive titles for posts.
So I guess what I’m realizing is that feeds are best used for monitoring sites that tell you “what is going on” whether with world news, business, politics, or the people you know rather than monitoring “what is being said/created” in the form content.
