The title I’ve give this post is the subject line from the mailing list Rands has set up.
Since the death of Google Reader a few months ago, and despite the fact that I set up my own aggregator and native client pair, having a busy work and home life means that aggregators as a separate port of call just don’t get a look in.
I think I’ve probably subscribed to about five mailing lists in the past six months. This is something I never thought would happen, and frankly, I find it reasonably depressing. Not only should most email not exist, I’m now adding to it! The mass-closure and restrictions of open ecosystems and web APIs in the past few years seems to have led to a narrowness of thought, and an approaching peak (nadir?) of the celebration of startup culture, which, whilst terribly exciting in its “let’s solve a problem!” form, is really quite awful in its’ “we’ll only solve problems that make money!” form.
So the question I ask myself now is, would I pay for a decent aggregator service which gets itself back into my day without causing me massive disruption? Well, no, not if it’s yet another data-owning service which just mines me to sell to someone else. What’s the point? I use enough of those already. What I need is something that inveigles itself into my daily flow. Uses the tools I already use. Gives me direction rather than makes me make choices. A bit..like…email 🙁