I was a big fan of RSS before Twitter and social news.

I used Netvibes way back when. Now they are more focused on dashboarding data but once upon a time I had my dashboard and it was a well organised and curated news reader.

I remember the transition from web browsing to news reading. I could do about an hour of browsing in five minutes with my news reader and then get back to work.

Somewhere along the way I stopped using Netvibes and replaced it with social news, Reddit, Hacker News and Twitter. late 2012 I woke up and realised that my opinion was now whatever the highest voted comment on Hacker News was and the number of articles I read and self formed opinions I had had completely dropped away.

To date this year I’ve changed my habits and I read articles before comments and form my own opinion before accepting the hive mind’s. But my tools have stayed the same and I’m back to browsing the web for news.

I’m not loosing anything with the death of Google Reader, I’m coming in fresh from a hiatus on using news readers and I’m going to see how far we’ve come from 2005.