Bloglines closing down

I was looking at the new things that have been posted to my Google Reader today when I saw a new post that disturbed me. (Google Reader is a service that allows you to store RSS feeds from any website that provides them & notifies you when the website has been updated.) In a post by Alex Chitu about the similar service Bloglines shutting down, I saw this:

Most Bloglines users will probably migrate to Google Reader, which is now the most popular web-based feed reader. Unfortunately, Google Reader is still a niche service and this won't change in the future, so Google will eventually discontinue it. 

 WHAT???? Discontinue Google Reader? But... they can't! How will I keep up on anything? I love using a feed reader because it allows me to bookmark any blog or other website that I like, but in a way that brings that content together with everything else I might want to read. I sign in a few times a week & read through the new posts, spending more time on things that seem interesting & skipping the rest. If I notice that I'm finding hardly anything from a certain blog interesting, I can quietly drop it. But the important thing is that it lowers the bar for how interesting a site has to be to win me over. If I like one post on a blog, I add it to my reader with one click. If I wasn't able to do that, I would read the post & enjoy it but I would never remember what the blogger's name was & I would probably never remember to go back. And even with sites that I like that are updated regularly, like PostSecret... I would probably forget to check it out on Sundays if Google Reader didn't helpfully remind me.

Chitu's theory is that more and more people are finding out what to read by following the Twitter streams of people they think are interesting, people who post links on a certain topic & get conversations going. I think that that's true and it's an important way for new voices & ideas to get out there, but I can't imagine Twitter replacing the service a feed reader provides. How do the people who share those links on Twitter find them? By following hundreds or thousands of blogs via an RSS reader, and combing through daily to find the most interesting ones. The internet is just too big to randomly click around... you need a starting point & I think an RSS reader is the logical one for me for the foreseeable future. Then again maybe I'm just like people who still think a typewriter & some White Out are superior to a computer with a delete key :)

photo by Helga's Lobster Stew