Changing My Content Habits

I am one of the many Google Reader power users changing long-held habits cold turkey.  But while most of the noise has been about the loss of Reader, I am hit with a double whammy: I still used iGoogle, too.

A personalized iGoogle
has been my home page
dashboard

Yes, part of me is still living in Internet 2006.

While Google gave ample warning of the impending executions product changes for alternatives to emerge, I took the opportunity to re-examine some of my content consumption habits and see if it is time to change, not just substitute. While I am a creature of habit, I do have different needs than I did even just a few years ago, and with smart phones, tablets, and social media, there are likely much better habits for me to adopt.  I'm not the only one, which may have played into the services' demise.

So as I look at replacement for the two Google services, this is what I now value:

1. Dashboard
   This was the best benefit of iGoogle.  With widgets and feeds showing just the top news or information from topics and sources I could quickly scroll down the page scanning for the latest relevant information.  I kept this my browser home page and would glance at it several times throughout a day.
    
2. Organization 
   Both iGoogle and Reader allowed me to collect relevant information sources and organize them in a single location to find later.  I also loved grouping content from competing perspectives to create more balanced view.
    
3. Immersion
   When I need to learn about a new topic, after initial research I loved gathering a collection of feeds together that I could scan every day to continue the education process to quickly build up new knowledge and expertise. (Or at least quickly learn some vernacular to sound like I have some expertise.)
    
4. Discovery
   This is something neither service could do effectively.  I always want to find new voices, perspectives, and sources.
    
5. Efficiency
   I have less dedicated time to read and browse than ever before, yet the amount of content and great sources grows every day.  Years ago it was a huge breakthrough to simply have everything available on the web and in one place.  But now I need content available for whenever I have a free minute to consume, and I need help pulling out the most important and relevant content to me.
    
6. Targeted Sharing
   I have always loved sharing content, but I grew up in the golden age of email, so that is my default way of thinking.  The targeting of an email is great--it matching specific content to a specific audience.  But the process is still usually clunky, and it doesn't integrate with others' content habits as much any more.

At the end of the day no single service meets all of my needs, including the two going away.  I find myself using more content platforms than ever before.  That seems inefficient, but it is actually is okay, as each excels in different experiences and situations.

I am always experimenting and trying new content and products.  There are different paradigms of how to find the best content for someone--algorithms, human editors, social voting.  Each has its advantages so like most I find myself using a mix. I still religiously read a few publications directly, such as my great local newspaper.  But here are the services and platforms that I find myself increasingly using that are candidates to be locked into my new habits.

• Feedly.  I tried out several of the much-discussed Google Reader alternatives, and I am settling on Feedly for now.  It's still a good experience for that once-a-day immersion, although with the amount of content flowing in now from my collected feeds, it is becoming a chore to surface the most relevant stuff.
    
• Tweetdeck/Social Media.  While I am not particularly active in social media, I now follow a critical mass of relevant people and the throughout-the-day dashboard experience is pretty good with columns for custom searches and lists, and it is great for discovering new people.  Social media does filter out some of the better content, but it still has an "A1 problem."
   
• Tablet Aggregators.  I am increasingly using Flipboard now that they are adding more content sources to add directly, but I am a bigger fan of Zite.  While the presentation and user experience is beautiful, the former repeats too much content I have previously seen.  However, after investing some time to personalize my interests, Zite has become an excellent tool to discover content from new sources that is very relevant to me. This has become my end-of-day read.
   
• Apps.  I like where some of the upstart news apps are going with efficient storytelling, like Circa, Digg's News.me, and pre-Google Wavii, but I haven't locked into any yet.  Newspaper and social media apps are still the main go-to's when I have a spare moment. GoComics app has just taken my morning comics routine mobile. I also enjoy apps like NextDraft's daily curated links, which has just the right amount of context and content for a bus ride.  For longer free moments, I always have several ebooks and other documents loaded up on my Kindle app.
   
• Bookmarking / Sharing Spaces.  They are fundamentally different products, but I group together Evernote, Google Plus, and Flipboard magazines because I use them for saving and organizing content for myself and others.  

I loved Google Reader, but I also love the growing stack of unread National Geographics next to my bed that I really do plan to read some day.  Maybe some day I will change that habit, too.