There is a balance to be had here. Yes we can get content from places like FF but for those who only access those sites for short period there is the possibility to miss a lot even with the "bounce to the top" actions of likes and comments. RSS is no longer the be all and end all of consumption but at least subscribing to feeds means that the content is available to read at your leisure rather than having to try to drink from the fire hose. Personally, I use social media to supplement my feeds rather than replace them but everyones usage differs based on their circumstances. - Colin Walker from fftogo

I partially agree. I use my feed reader to keep abreast of certain "must see" publications. Unfortunately, I think the searching costs of finding great new blogs to read is becoming too high (there are a lot of fantastic blogs out there). For me, I use Social Media as the filter and primary entry point. - Steve Spalding

Yes, social media is a great discovery tool and primary entry point as you say but once you have someone worth following is it not easier to have their posts delivered rather than having to chase them down? It's the two working in tandem. But then this is a classic example of us wanting to be involved in everything and not wanting to miss a discussion rather than just dipping the toe in the water and dealing with those items we find while online. It's a fine line. - Colin Walker from fftogo

I think my problem is overload. I did that for such a long time that now I am constantly at 1000+ items. Those publishers that don't generate 20-30 posts a day get completely missed. - Steve Spalding

"throes" http://www.merriam-webster.com/diction... - Robert Seidman

great conversation guys :) I changed my media diet recently, more friendfeed and less google reader. I find a lot of new stuff in this way - Luca Conti

nice post - i think about this in a similar way - the ubiquitous backbone of all these social media tools are the feeds but the ability to find & read the relevant stuff (by site/by post) is becoming harder and harder for any individual - enter the social grid enabled aggregation of tools like friendfeed (& swurl) - the grid helps w/ the finding and filtering plus then annotates on top of the individual items of interest via comments & propagation - its a living social editorial process really... - mike "glemak" dunn

haha left you a comment with what you just said here Steve. I think RSS will have a slower growth and a smaller adoption, but I think it's gonna be a higher quality of traffic. Not to mention that RSS is an amazing tool for tracking just about anything on the web. I think if we can get a standardized and adopted secure RSS you'll really see a pickup in adoption - David Knight

@Robert thanks, fixed. @David that's what I was hoping wouldn't get lost in my screed. RSS as a platform is booming. Having canonical, portable data isn't going away anytime soon. That might actually be a part of the problem There are so many good feeds for so many different kinds of content out there, it's really difficult to sort that all in something as limited as a feed reader. - Steve Spalding

I totally agree that the value of RSS feed reading is shifting a bit. Now to get the most important news of the day you can turn to other places besides your RSS reader, but for the blogs you really love getting each of their posts and being able to read them when you want is super valuable. And being able to reduce the clutter in your RSS reader and streamline to the few feeds you actually read every day is valuable. - Caleb Elston

I think that's the end goal, to be able to streamline your feed reader to your absolute "must haves." Leave the rest to the aggregators, that's what they are good for. If, however, you know that you will read something every day then your reader is a great place to consume it. - Steve Spalding

If there's a redundancy in my Google Reader and FriendFeed, it gets deleted from Reader. Primarily for the ability to subscribe to a "person" instead of a feed and get all the likes and comments along with it. FriendFeed is certainly taking some of my attention-share from Google Reader these days. - Paul Reynolds

That's a great point Paul. I am much more interested in people than publications. If you are interesting enough to produce/write for a good blog -- chances are the information that you filter will be interesting to me as well. - Steve Spalding

Agreed, Paul. Exactly how I've been using FF. Subscribing to people just "makes sense" to me. We're starting to get the synergies I've been hoping for for a long time..the combination of a feed, the comments, and the meta-comments is powerful, and also brings to my attention new people to evaluate and subscribe to. I like finding new, interesting people! - Ken Kennedy

The next big thing will be finding a more coherent way to subscribe to people. Right now, it's still extremely distributed (I'm subscribed to the same people across dozens of services). I wish there was a platform to combine them all. Friendfeed does come close. - Steve Spalding

And I use Google Reader for the long form stuff that I spend more time getting into. It's still mostly hyperspecifc...except for BoingBoing and SAI, my reader subs are stuff like ArmsControlWonk, "Global Guerillas", and "Overcoming Bias" (well, plus the pure nerd stuff). But I avoid the big aggregation feeds like TechCrunch, Om, etc...I just go to the sources. Works for me! - Ken Kennedy

That's probably the best way to do it. The huge pubs really drown out everything else. - Steve Spalding

WRT subscription discovery, I actually do want it distributed, b/c I like to control myself and my own stuff. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, certainly. I have high hopes for the DiSo folks and tools like XRDS. - Ken Kennedy