A video celebration of the Mainframe Computer.

As an RSS junkie, the imminent death of Google Reader terrifies me. Thankfully, someone as offered some alternatives:

futurejournalismproject:

Google Reader Alternatives

As Jim Aley writes over on Businessweek, RSS fans are going through the the seven stages of grief over yesterday’s announcement that Google is pulling the plug on Google Reader.

The move comes July 1, so between now and then, info junkies are on the hunt for new readers. Here are some to explore as you get started:

• Feedly: Allows you to choose different types of layouts for your feeds (eg., magazine style) and then bubbles up content it thinks is most relevant to you. While created as a front-end that syncs with with Google Reader, the company announced that they’re in the process of cloning the Google API and all your feeds will seamlessly be transferred (and continue to work) as Google shuts down.
• Waurb: Similar to Feedly, Waurb digests your feeds, presents it back to you in an elegant layout while also calculating “which articles are worth reading with our clever little algorithim.”
• NetVibes: A honking “real-time monitoring” service (or dashboard) for feeds, social streams and more. Just make sure you chose the personal edition or you’ll be out $499 a month.
• NewsBlur: Created by a one man startup in San Francisco, this personal reader lets you train it to give you more of the stories you want, less of what you don’t.
• Tiny Tiny RSS: For those who want complete control and an open source solution installed on your own server.
• The Old Reader: Basically a clone of the “old” Google Reader, back before the company removed some features that the community loved. Currently in beta.
• Skimr: Available for the Web but optimized for mobile and tablets, Skimr is a very quick, text only feed app.
• Skim.me: Still in invite only mode, Skim.me’s premise is to shorten or lengthen your feed based on the amount of time you have at any given moment. Want things long, it will go long. Only have time for headlines and quick summaries, it can supposedly do that too.

Obviously, there are more. List your favorite alternatives in a reblog or drop us a note and we’ll add to this list.

Meanwhile, while panicky, there is a bright side to all this.

As Marco Arment points out, there’s been very little innovation in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms over the last ten years. There just wasn’t a sustainable model with Google becoming the de facto platform and giving it away for free. With Google Reader out of the way, and a niche but very deep audience for these apps and services, we may just see wonderful new innovations that have been a long time coming. — Michael

UPDATE: A ginormus list of readers, crowdsourced, Google spreadsheet style.

Image: Screenshot, Susie Cagle responds to me responding to Bitly’s Hilary Mason about the news that Google Reader is shutting down.

perchapp:

The social network is now a local search engine

With the introduction of Graph Search and the Nearby tab on mobile, Facebook users can now search by location to discover businesses nearby. Local customers are searching for small businesses from their home, and and on their mobile phone when they are looking for something on the go.

The new additions integrate Yelp-like review features, Google-like place listings, along with the added data about which businesses are preferred by the user’s social network. The last feature is where Facebook has an unparalleled advantage, and the result is a powerful local recommendation engine. As users adopt these local search features, a great Facebook page gives your business an advantage in getting found.

The Internet of Things is coming, but it needs a semantic backbone to flourish. With some 25 billion devices expected to be connected to the Internet by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020, providing interoperability among the things on the IoT “is one of the most fundamental requirements to support object addressing, tracking, and discovery as well as information representation, storage, and exchange.”…

perchapp:

AdAge’s Judy Shapiro visits the Street Fight Summit in NYC and identifies some key trends for those in local marketing to look out for:

1. An ongoing transition from Big Media to Community Media
2. The importance of unique customer experiences
3. New availability of tools that bring market intelligence to everyone
4. A shift from customer acquisition to retention
5. Recognition that local isn’t as easy

Perch gets a nod as one of the new technologies helping to drive these transitions in a way that empowers small business owners:

“A new free app that provides businesses with local social media and promotional competitive monitoring. Powerful stuff.”

Read the full overview at AdAge

Human beings, their languages and their tools have always had a complex relationship.

This relationship plays out in constant iterations in today’s massive data ecosystem, a structure underpinned by specific technologies and deployed with the frenzy human interactions.

To successfully navigate this system, one must be able to recognize the interactions between humans and technology, and avoid the trap of man vs. machine. We are all cyborgs now.

brucesterling:

R. U. Cyberpunk?

Research shows people that once again, people do not really have a good grasp of the economics that power the tools they use. Even fewer understand their role in it.