A change is as good as a rest

I just switched my RSS feed over to Vienna this weekend. This was partly functional, it has some cool features. The one I like best is that if I find an interesting blog it opens up a window for that entry and keeps it open until I choose to close it. That saves me a lot of efforts on book marking, reminder emails and the like. The change was easy, and it’s free so all the better. However if I am honest the other reason was boredom, the season is changing and I was restless; the very basis of fashion. I wanted to play with a new piece of software and it gave me a chance to do a heavy pruning on an over cluttered set of feeds.

Now I could have done that in NetNewsWire which has served me well for the last year. It’s a good system but not good enough to fend off the attraction of something different with some improved features . Also I picked up the idea from Luis who provided some great data on his switch to Mac. A very similar process to the way my daughter chooses clothes or my son computer games. It’s all about proximate contacts and adaption, mixing form with function. This seems to me one of the ways that social computing is going, and some of the consequences (especiallyfor investment and payback for the Venture Vultures) have not been thought through. Software becomes like fashion, something you change with the seasons.