Where’s my Net dashboard?

Yesterday Luann was reading a colleague’s blog and noticed a bug. When she clicked the Subscribe link, the browser loaded a page of what looked like computer code. She asked, quite reasonably: “What’s wrong? Who do I report this to?”

That page of code is an RSS feed. It works the same way as the one on her own blog. The behavior isn’t a bug, it’s a lost tradition. Luann has been an active blogger for many years, and once used an RSS reader, but for her and so many others, the idea of a common reader for the web has faded.

There was a time when most of the sources I cared about flowed into such a reader: mainstream news, a vibrant and growing blogosphere, podcasts, status updates, standing search queries, you name it. The unread item count could get daunting, but I was able to effectively follow a wide assortment of information flows in what I came to think of as my Net dashboard.

Where’s my next dashboard? I imagine a next-gen reader that brings me the open web and my social circles in a way that helps me attend to and manage all the flow. There are apps for that, a nice example being FlowReader, which has been around since 2013. I try these things hopefully but so far none has stuck.

Information overload, once called infoglut, remains a challenge. We’re all flooded with more channels than we can handle, more conversations happening in more places than we can keep track of.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the flip side of infoglut. We expect that we should be able to sanely monitor more than we actually can.

The first-gen reader didn’t solve infoglut/FOMO, nothing could, but for a while, for me, it was better than the alternative, which was (and now is again) email. Of course that was me, a tech journalist who participated in, researched, and wrote about topics in Net technology and culture — including RSS, which animated the dashboard I used to keep track of everything else. It was, however, a workflow that researchers and analysts in other fields will recognize.

Were I were doing the same kind of work today, I’d cobble together the same kind of dashboard, while grumbling about the poorer experience now available. Instead my professional information diet is narrower and deeper than when analytical writing for commercial audiences was my work. My personal information diet, meanwhile, remains as diverse as everyone’s.

So I’m not sure that a next-gen reader can solve the same problems that my first-gen reader did, in the same ways. Still, I can’t help but envision a dashboard that subscribes to, and manages notifications from, all my sources. It seems wrong that the closest thing to that, once more, is email. Plugging the social silos into a common reader seems like the obvious thing. But if that were effective, we’d all be using FlowReader or something like it.

Why don’t we? Obviously the silos can refuse to cooperate, as FlowReader noted when announcing the demise of its Facebook integration:

These changes were made [by Facebook] to give users more control over their own data, which we support. It’s a great thing for users! However, it also means that Facebook data is no longer going to be easy to share between applications.

You know what would be a really great thing for users, though? A common reader that makes it easy to keep track of friends and family and coworkers along with news and all kinds of personal and professional information sources.

“What’s wrong?”

It’s not just that the silos can shut down their feeds. It’s that we allowed ourselves to get herded into them in the first place. For a while, quite a few people got comfortable with the notion of publishing and subscribing to diverse feeds in a common way, using systems that put them in charge of outflow and inflow. In one form or another that’s still the right model. Sometimes we forget things and have to relearn them. This is one of those things.

“Who do I report this to?”

Everyone.