Google Reader’s list view just might reveal secret of The Matrix
There was a time some months back when I believed that a combination of Techmeme and “smart people networks” like Twitter and FriendFeed were becoming so useful that it would lead to vastly reduced reliance on an RSS reader.
I was wrong.
I’m using Google Reader more than ever, and love its social features as much as the ability to wolf down monstrous amounts of information in a relatively short amount of time. If I had to complain about something (and why not, this is my blog and I can whine if I want to, right?), it’s that right now, this very moment, the pointer finger and middle finger are sore from working the scroll wheel on my mouse!
As the story goes, I just finished a pretty good session of tearing through hundreds of feeds and noticed that the tips of my scroll wheel fingers were burning up, Sahara-meets-sun like. It was then that I “discovered” a miraculous feature: the ability to switch over from an Expanded View to a List View on Google Reader. Now, I’ve known about this feature for a while, but have kind of neglected it. I do enjoy scrolling through stories and seeing associated images and a quick glance at the content and so forth, but a long list of feeds as I’ve noted can take it’s toll.
What I didn’t realize until today is that List View can be an extraordinary way to scan ever vaster mounds of articles at once while easily letting you “drill into” article titles that interest you straight away.
And as an aside: this reemphasizes the importance of article titles from the website publisher perspective. Ironic titles and non sequiturs are great and all… but don’t tend to work all that well in the competitive (for eyeball attention) and literal world of the Interwebs.
And in conclusion: does this conclude another adventure from Captain Obvious, is this a handy-nifty tip-oid that might help others, or in fact have I stepped one small yet significant step toward discovering the true nature of The Matrix?
I’ll let y’all decide.
