OK, the title of this blog post is a little tongue in cheek :-)

I was listening to TWig this morning (this week in Google) and Laporte and friends were talking about the new look of Google Reader.  As I've written previously, I don't dislike the new look; I was actually on the same boat as one of the guests of the program in that I just dislike the dramatic cut-back of sharing features.  Google could have easily taken the "share" and "share with comment" buttons and made them +1 and +1 with comment (simple).

In any case, the discussion that the TWig crew eventually went from "no one visits organizational websites anymore, they all use [insert social media facet] to get to things" (so in other words no one goes to engadget.com any more) and this discussion lead to "well no one uses reader any more, I just get my news from Google+, twitter or Facebook."  Now, I have to admit that I personally don't often go to websites for news, I tend to get them through Google Reader, but I do understand that this isn't everyone's cup of tea - especially people like my parents or some of my less "tech savvy" friends...I think the Pew Internet research people have indicated this as well, and research done on the characteristics of so called digital natives also prove this.

The discussion then went to the other extreme of having your twitter peeps filter things out for you and provide you with links.  While that might work for some people, like Laporte and gang, how do you give up control of what is presented to you?  By using an RSS reader to subscribe to multiple sites, sure you get a lot of things that you don't read (I may only really read through  10% of what comes in through my RSS reader), but at least I have an idea of what I am missing and I have control over what I subscribe to.  On the other hand, waiting for my Google+, Twitter and Facebook contacts to filter information for me would make for a very shallow view of the world (not to mention that this behavior is leeching behavior, not contributing much to the overall sharing since you have cut yourself off from other sources).

I don't know; I like TWig, but sometimes it feels that the 1% of tech junkies are talking and not really thinking about the broader user base.