Recently I privately declared RSS bankruptcy. I had managed to tame my feeds in such a way that I could usually get through everything and some days I'd just clear out my low value feeds in order to keep up. Then on June 30th, I attended an online webinar "Escaping the Techno ADD Loop" and as part of it, I asked the question of how to keep up with RSS? Obviously, I don't want to miss out on anything important. Well, first after I explained my organization system they pointed out that I should probably just kill my low-value folder. They also mentioned that if a website is important enough, you'll check it on your own and if you don't, maybe it isn't that important.
It really hit home with me because I was getting tired of being the guy always on his phone "checkin' my feeds" every single moment of my day. So I went in there with a big knife and now I only follow 8 feeds. And of those 8 feeds only three of them post daily. I can now check my RSS feeds once in the morning and be done with it. Maybe if I feel like it after lunch I'll check it again but there will be like one or two posts. I'm not feeling very liberated not having the Google Reader noose hanging around my neck.
So I have been without a feed reader for almost a month and a half now. Then on Monday, I had lunch with my good friend Dan and he brought up Flipboard which is sort of like a digital magazine that pulls its content from your social networks. I connect it to facebook and twitter and I get instant magazines. It doesn't show everything, but somehow curates the content and lays it out in a very attractive layout. The Facebook content is not particularly good, but I'm very impressed with the content it pulls out of Twitter. In addition to my main twitter feed, it allows me to create magazines from specific Twitter users or lists.
So far I think this is a good replacement for RSS feeds. If some piece of news is really important it will probably show up in one of these magazines. It also does not require me to dig through lists of noise as it just selects some of the best parts and makes it really easy to scan. I can check this once or twice a day and not feel like I have to clear out everything. Right now you're still somewhat limited with how you create magazines. The twitter search is pretty limited and there is (as far as I can tell) no RSS integration. I can't complain too much since it's a free app.