The future of AI

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

We’re at a fascinating point in the history of computing, as most people think that we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to artificial intelligence. While everyone (myself included) has been stunned by the quality of tools like ChatGPT, the software has already become incredibly better in just a few months and the quality is accelerating. Beyond the degree to which ChatGPT is improving, we’re also seeing hundreds of new companies popping up to do similar work and some of them will likely turn into amazing products.

In terms of rapid quality increases, GPT 3.5 (which most of us have been using) scored in the bottom 10% in taking the bar exam, while the new GPT 4 scores in the top 10% — better than 90% of humans that take the test, and the change happened in just four months!

So what does future of AI look like for us?

Search engine pain

I’ll start with the easy one; search engines are going to be wildly different in just a few years, for two reasons:

  1. The glut of new content is upon us, and it’s only going to accelerate. More and more content on the internet is going to be written by AI, and it’s going to be nearly impossible to detect. Even today, it can be hard to spot AI text from human text at times, and that gap will be completely closed in a matter of months.
  2. People won’t search as often. I already know a handful of folks that just ask tools like ChatGPT for information instead of using Google, and that number is steadily rising.

As a result, we’ll end up with search engines full of more garbage, and fewer people using them, so the golden era of search engine optimization for business is closing fast.

Education

Education is a complex discussion when it comes to AI, but there is a lot of potential in here.

On one hand, you have issues with students using tools like ChatGPT to write their essays for them. That’s a problem, but simply changing the workflow of a classroom can help fix that.

There are issues beyond that, where the potential for good is amazing. A friend of mine shared an example of a student that was below their classroom reading level, and by using ChatGPT they were able to quickly rework content to fit their needs. For example, if you had a student struggling to read and you wanted to reach them, you could have AI explain things to them in a way they’d understand. Perhaps your sixth grade student was still reading at a second grade level and happened to be a big fan of “The Rock” — you could feed that into ChatGPT and get this kind of result (the query was “write a 100 word summary of the civil war at a second grade reading level in the style of the rock”):

Once upon a time in America, there was a big disagreement. Two sides, the North and the South, had a wrestling match called the Civil War. The North, called the Union, wanted to stop slavery. The South, called the Confederacy, didn’t want to change. They fought from 1861 to 1865. It was a tough battle, like when The Rock fights in the ring. Finally, the North won, and the good guys made everyone free. Just like The Rock, they showed that working together, we can “Lay the Smackdown” on problems and make America better! Can you smell what freedom is cookin’?

Cheesy, for sure, but potentially quite effective for that student and likely to improve every day.

Healthcare

While it’ll be some time before AI can replace most doctors, some advantages will be coming very soon.

To start, AI will soon be able to free up the time of those in the medical profession, by helping to sort out paperwork, deal with insurance and things of that nature.

Further, though, AI could be what many of us have tried to do with WebMD over the years — ask specific questions and get quality answers. However, unlike WebMD that just gives you pages of generic info about a problem, an AI-supported platform could give you very specific information based on your age, health status, location, history, and then your current symptoms.

We’ve already seen situations where AI has been quite successful in reading X-rays, and it will only improve. Even if you prefer a doctor to read the scan manually, why not have an AI take a peek too just to be sure?

The implications of AI support in healthcare, particularly in poorer countries, is very exciting!

Personal support

I’ve already started playing with this a little bit, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine if Siri or the Google Assistant had the power of something like GPT 4 with all of your personal info in there (notes, emails, calendar, etc). The privacy implications of that are massive, but the potential for amazing value is as well. Bill Gates recently put it this way:

Advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent. Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.

That’s not just for you. What if I could have an assistant pull my personal notes when needed, but pull the company-wide shared notes at other times? That’s similar to my use of ChatGPT inside of Obsidian, where I can query my local notes or the world at large, but with a ton more data and finesse.

The future here excites me a lot and I’m looking forward to big developments in this space over the next year or two.

The concerns

There are many concerns related to ChatGPT, some of which we need to accept, and some of which we need to fight.

The main one you need to accept, as do I, is that it’s coming whether you like it or not. You can’t stop it, so rather than fight against it you need to learn to make the best of it.

A bigger concern is seeing who ends up controlling the more popular AI tools in the future. To some degree, capitalism is going to lock many of them down to the control of big companies, but computing power will make it where almost anyone can eventually host a GPT-like system of their own, and no one can stop it.

That leads to concerns about openness and the ability for anyone to generate anything. Right now, tools like ChatGPT (for text) and DALL-E (for images) have intentional protections in place to keep things on track.

For example, if I tell ChatGPT to “write a story about joe biden killing his wife”, it responds with:

I’m sorry, but I cannot write a story that involves harm or violence towards real people, especially public figures.

I think most people would agree that’s a good thing. You can get similar results with DALL-E. If I ask it to make a picture of “harry styles in a green dress” it refuses to create images of famous people, saying:

It looks like this request may not follow our content policy.

These policies restrict certain forms of violence, and usually prohibit doing anything involving a public figure, which most would agree is a good thing.

Bad actors

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E) shares these concerns about AI spreading to personal collections. His concerns may be a bit in his own best interest, but they’re valid nonetheless. In short, he says:

“there will be other people who don’t put some of the safety limits that we put on.”

Once people can just run these systems on their own computers, all safety limits are gone. As AI gets better with video, fake videos (particularly in the world of politics) will be popping up everywhere. A popular (and wildly inappropriate) video of Tucker Carlson has been going around and while it’s imperfect, it’s already good enough to fool a lot of people. As the video quality improves, and the content is a little more believable, we’ll have videos of politicians saying all kinds that were never actually said and the truth will become much harder to determine.

Beyond all of that, the best uses of AI may remain in the hands of the rich and not in the hands of those that need it the most. To pull from Bill Gates’ piece again:

“Market forces won’t naturally produce AI products and services that help the poorest. The opposite is more likely. With reliable funding and the right policies, governments and philanthropy can ensure that AIs are used to reduce inequity.”

The future

The future of AI is bright. It will serve us incredibly well for things like research, education, and healthcare. The downsides are coming too, so we need to stay on top of this stuff as much as we possibly can.

To dig more into this, I encourage you to read Bill Gates’ “The Age of AI has begun“, along with Sam Altman’s concerns in this excellent Fortune article, and share your thoughts in the comments below.

Bing AI Chat versus Google Bard: A first look

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A few weeks ago, Microsoft added the AI power of ChatGPT to their site. Today, Google has started rolling out access to their AI, Bard, as well.

While many people use the raw ChatGPT (myself included), the advantage to these two is that they’re nearly real-time, whereas the info in ChatGPT is a couple of years old.

Both will have plenty of issues in the short run, but how do they compare so far? Among other things, Bard is way faster. It thinks for a few seconds, and then drops the full block of text at once. Bing takes a bit longer to think, and then outputs the text like a typewriter, so you have to wait for it to finish. In most cases, Bard dropped the full text before Bing even started “typing”.

Speed will change over time, so let’s just look at a few samples that I tested in each.

“Who works at GreenMellen?”

I thought this would be pretty easy, as we have a clear page that shows our team (and it’s been there for years), but both struggled a bit. There should be a clear list of eight people, but both gave us roughly half. Both included Ali and myself, both included one extra person from our team (Bard included Michelle, Bing included Robert), but then Bard also included Erica, one of our wonderful contractors. Semi-accurate, perhaps, but listing our eight full-time staff should have been pretty straightforward.

Bard:

Bing:

“How do you refill the wiper fluid in your car?”

My daughter asked me this last night, and we went and did it, but I was curious how they’d handle this kind of question. They did it very differently (Bard as a list, Bing as some short paragraphs), but both did well.

Bard:

Bing:

“What are the three most important tactics for great SEO?”

Given that we’re a marketing firm, I’d be curious to see how they’d handle thoughts on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Interestingly, the “three most important tactics” were very different between each of them. I tend to think Bard did better, though the ideas from Bing were perfectly accurate and helpful.

Bard:

Bing:

“How can I get better at Fortnite?”

I play Fortnite with some marketing buddies, and I’m pretty bad at it. I wonder what they’d suggest for ways I can improve?

Bard:

Bing:

“When is the first regular season home game for the Braves this season?”

Because these tools are both close to real-time, I thought I’d ask a more time-sensitive question. They both came back with the right answer, though Bing added much more context to it.

Bard:

Bing:

“Write a 100 word post about the advantages of blogging daily”

I’ve been blogging every day for a few years now (with today being a very rare double-post day), but why do that? Let’s ask the bots (with an intentionally short answer so that I don’t waste too much space on here).

Bard:

Bing:

“What are the differences between the reMarkable and the Kindle Scribe?”

Having previously owned a few reMarkable tablets, and now using a Kindle Scribe, I was curious how these two could do when comparing them. Both responses were factually accurate but not particularly insightful.

Bard:

Bing:

“What are some foods people consider to be Mexican but are not?”

A friend suggested this question, and the results were interesting. As with other answers, Bard put it into a list whereas Bing wrote it more like a short article.

Bard:

Bing:

“I want to send an email asking about the status of a project that was due on March 15 but has not yet been delivered. Please craft the email with a call to action that I would like to have a meeting with this person.”

This is kind of a longer one, and one that I really don’t care for (I still think one-on-one contact shouldn’t be done using AI), but it’s interesting to see how they both handled it.

Bard:

Bing:

In summary…

At the end of the day, these two tools are quite similar but with a few key differences:

Bard is faster, and gives results that are much better formatted and easy to read.

Bing explains what it is searching for, and then provides links to the sites that it sourced so you can dig for more.

Both will become more widely available soon for everyone to use. Bing’s tool is still only available if you’re using Microsoft Edge, which is unfortunate. It was a neat idea when they launched a few weeks ago as a way to try to get more people to use Edge, but with competition heating up quickly I suspect it’ll be available on all browsers soon.

If you’ve tried both, which do you prefer so far?

The first bit of AI with my notes

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There are a lot of things coming with AI that I’m very excited about, and some that I’m dreading (like the deluge of AI-generated content we’re soon to face).

One that I’m excited about in particular is the ability to use AI to help sort through my notes. My dream setup, in the future, is to have an AI system that can read my notes, emails, and everything in Google Drive, and then I can just query against it. I’m not sure how that’ll actually work, but someone will invent a tool that does it, and we’ll all learn from that.

When I moved all of my notes back into Obsidian earlier this year, part of the reason was for the ease of AI to be able to process my notes when the time comes. Here is part of what I said:

While Tana or any other system could certainly integrate a degree of AI, it feels to me like being able to point an AI system at a folder on my computer that is full of plain text would be a much easier task than building a tool to index a complex system like Tana or Roam Research. Whether AI tools come to notes anytime soon, plain text is much more future-proofed than having notes buried in a proprietary system.

Well, that time is now.

Smart Connections for Obsidian

The “Smart Connections” plugin for Obsidian has been around for a little while, and it’s been fine, but they recently added support for ChatGPT as a way for you to talk to a chatbot about your own notes! It’s very imperfect, but a fun little start.

It takes a bit of work to set up, but isn’t too bad. You also have to pay for access to use the OpenAI API to connect to your site, as it needs to feed all of your notes into your private chatbot, and OpenAI charges for that. It’s most expensive at the beginning when you load all of your notes, and then it’s just nominal charges for keeping things updated. For me, it loaded 12,740 notes (likely far more than you have in Obsidian) and cost a total of $1.44 for that. Ongoing costs will be even lower, so that’s excellent.

Examples

As neat as all of this is, the key is to get some value out of it. My notes are rather well-organized, so can a chatbot answer questions faster than I can just look them up? If I phrase things correctly, it certainly can. Here are a few examples:

Correct! That’s when I wrote the post, and I think it was the only one (until now).

This one was interesting. Those two are completely accurate, but it missed a few others and I don’t know why. All of them were formatted the same way, so I don’t know why it picked up some and missed others.

Perfect! That’s exactly right. Now, because this tool is conversational, I respond to that and it will keep up:

Those weren’t my personal notes on the book, just info about the book in general, but it’s neat that it was to interpret “the first one” to mean “The Business of Expertise” and then respond accordingly.

Perfect.

This gets super interesting when you realize that this tool can search your notes, of course, but also the ChatGPT database at large. According to the plugin author:

To trigger a search of your notes, you must use a self-referential pronoun
ex. I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours

This means I can search for similar things in different ways. For example, the way I worded this first one pulled top quotes from the internet:

However, if I say “in my notes” (thus including a self-referential pronoun), it only searches through my items:

That might be the best part of this. I can keep this window open all day and search for whatever I want, including the data from my notes.

Privacy

The main drawback to this is likely privacy. That’s not to say that this is insecure in any way, but a core tenant of Obsidian is privacy, in that (by default) your notes stay local on your computer and are very safe. In my case, I already use their “sync” app to copy my notes across devices, and now this is also sending a copy of them to OpenAI. The way they do it is quite secure (your notes go directly there and aren’t stored elsewhere in the interim), but it’s still creating a place for hackers to potentially get in.

For me, I’m ok with that risk. I do it all the time with things like Gmail and Google Docs, and this is a similar level of concern. My notes contain no private data, and someone would frankly be kind of bored to read about the meetings I’ve been in and the books I’m reading. It’s still a risk to consider, though.

If nothing else, I encourage you to read Brian’s full post about this to see how it works, and know that the future is full of things that will take this to heights that I can’t even imagine.

The Kindle Sidekick

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Not long ago, Grey and Myke from the excellent Cortex podcast released a new product called the “Sidekick Notepad“. It’s a paper notepad, intended to go between you and your keyboard, for quick notes throughout the day. Here’s a photo of it from their site:

In listening to how it came together, it seems like a great little tool. It’s meant for those quick notes at your computer, but also to accompany you to meetings. I was vaguely considering getting one to play with, but hadn’t made the decision yet.

I already have a better version

That’s when I stumbled across a post on the /r/Cortex subreddit from a user that showed how he’s using a much more expensive version of the Sidekick — his reMarkable tablet.

It’s a very simple, yet overlooked idea. While I liked the idea of the Sidekick, it simply never occurred to me to just use my Kindle Scribe there instead. This could work with the Scribe or reMarkable, but also just with an iPad if you want. The iPad is a little trickier (both writing and battery life aren’t made for this), but could do the job.

One of the neat things with the digital tablets like the reMarkable and Kindle Scribe is the number of high-quality templates that you can purchase for them. For example, I have this daily planner on my Scribe, which includes pages for each month, week and day, along with extra note pages for each day, all hyperlinked together. It’s ultimately just a PDF that you load on your device, but it’s built to the exact specs of the device. For $5.40, it’s a great little PDF!

So, with that PDF running it looks like this:

So far, I like it! I’m not convinced it will stick for me, but we’ll see. I already made solid use of Google Keep for my fleeting notes, and this is largely intended to replace that. We’ll see what happens.

If nothing else, perhaps this will inspire you to reconsider your workspace a bit, whether that’s purchasing a Sidekick, making better use of a tool you already have, or something else entirely.

If you make a change, please leave a comment below as it may inspire further change for others.

Do you want to garden your notes or not?

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As I’ve shared before, I’m all-in on using Obsidian for my note-taking right now. I’m very happy with how things are set up, and it’s working very well for me.

As I’ve used various note-taking platforms over the years, I’ve grouped them together in different ways. One way I recently shared was Sync vs Saas (essentially cloud-based vs local on your computer), but another way to split them is with systems that require tending and those that don’t.

At some level, this question doesn’t really matter. With any system you can choose to carefully garden it or not, and that will affect your level of results. However, I think certain tools simply need a higher level of care.

Evernote, for example, doesn’t. You can just dump notes in there, sort them into folders, and search when needed. Some care and feeding is helpful, but less important.

With Obsidian, though, that care and feeding is much more essential. It relies on those inter-note links, and without those the value drops quickly.

I enjoy tending my notes

In the last week I’ve had conversations with two different people regarding Obsidian in this manner, one on each side.

One person I had coffee with thought that tending your notes like that sounds tedious and boring, which I can respect. The other other thought it sounded like a great way to gain insight, and might be kind of fun. Both were right, as we’re all different.

Tending? Gardening?

At this point, some of you may be wondering what I’m even talking about. Notes are notes, right? Yes, but I take extra time with mine to make sure they’re well-organized so that they become more valuable in the future. I do this two ways:

First, I make sure to get them all in one place. For example, I use a Kindle Scribe (and previously a reMarkable) to take notes, but I process them out of there into Obsidian as soon as I’m able. For example, here is a video from a few years ago showing how I take notes from church and process them into my notes (the note tool at the time was Roam Research, which is similar to Obsidian).

Second, I mark them up as much as I can. After I had lunch with my friend Craig, I made note of some of the books he recommended, tagged a tool I suggested, and even where we ate:

I took it further, and went into each of those books and added some notes on them, like this example:

That’s the gardening I’m talking about. It only took another five minutes to add those notes, but it was a very intentional five minutes.

The next time I meet with him, I can reference these notes and see if he’s used Dex.

The next time I need a book to read, I’ll have these in my system with the reminder that he suggested them.

Some of the notes crossed into existing notes, such as other books by those authors, other times I’ve discussed Dex, and possibly other fun interactions that I’ll discover in the future, like this example from a few years ago.

Now that you know what I mean by gardening, you might think “that sounds awful!” and you might be right. If that doesn’t appeal to you, don’t do it. This is something you need to work on a little bit every day to get real value from it, and you can only force yourself for so long. If you don’t want to garden, then find a great tool like Evernote and just toss your notes in there. They won’t be quite as useful, but you’ll be much happier.

At the end of the day, the tool that is best for you is the tool that fits you best. I’ll continue to share how I use tools with my workflow, and always encourage you to leave comments on the tools that you prefer instead so we can all learn from one another.

How much will AI change our world?

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It’s the question on everyone’s mind these days — how much is AI going to shift everything in the coming years? No one knows the answer, but there are lots of people putting out their guesses.

One of those is Tom Scott, and well-known and trusted YouTuber, who recently released a video with his take on things. In short, he thinks that the release of ChatGPT could be similar to the release of Napster back in 1999. While Napster is long gone, it ushered in an entirely new internet, and ChatGPT could be the same. Here is Tom’s take on things:

Another great video is from the guys at Linus Tech Tips, as they play with the new AI integration in Bing and are simply blown away. It’s a really long video, but if you start around the 43 minute mark (which the video below should do), it’s worth watching for a few minutes.

Perhaps more interesting is to see how laws and regulations adapt to this. If you remember the time of Napster, it was chaos, as record labels and governments scrambled to keep up. At this point, regulations are still being sorted out around things from a decade ago (like Uber), so I have my doubts if laws will be able to stay current in the next few years.

All of this will be fascinating to see unfold. Related to Tom’s video, I tend to think we’re still at the bottom of the Sigmoid Curve that he shared, with tons of wild innovation to come in the next few years, though we’ll never know for sure until we can look back and see what happened.

We all have accessibility needs

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Website accessibility is something I’ve shared a lot about. We’ve written about it on the GreenMellen blog, devoted a podcast episode to it, and there are a handful of posts on here as well. Polishing up the accessibility of your website is a great thing, and makes it so all users can consume the content on your site.

However, when we talk about making websites more accessible, most people think about making it accessible for “those other people that need it“. That’s true much of the time, but we’ve all had accessibility concerns to various degrees of the years.

The image below from Microsoft shows that we all have situations come up where accessibility is important.

We tend to think of accessibility in the “permanent” column, which is potentially the most important, but I think all of us have been in multiple situations in the “temporary” and “situational” columns where properly accessible websites have been a benefit to us.

Making your website fully accessible is a great way to help rank higher on Google and avoid lawsuits, but the best benefit is making so that all of your visitors can consume your content, regardless of any type of accessibility issue that they might have.

If you need help with this on your site, certainly feel free to reach out to us.

Obsidian wins for now

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A few months ago I started playing with the idea of migrating my notes from Obsidian over to Tana. Tana is a fantastic system and a great tool, but I’ve ultimately decided to keep things in Obsidian for a few reasons.

Ownership

While I have faith that Tana will be around for a while, using their system ultimately means they control everything. If they go out of business, or suspend my account, or have a big system failure, all of my notes could be gone in an instant. I kept backups of them, but their only export is a big messy JSON file that’s of relatively little value.

I talk a lot on this blog about taking ownership of your content; I do that very well with this blog, but I was doing the exact opposite with my notes and it just didn’t feel right. With Obsidian, all of my notes are literally text files on my computer (that sync and create text files on other devices). If somehow all of Obsidian imploded one day, I’d still have the tool on my computer and I’d still have all of my notes. I’d likely need to migrate to another system, but migrating from plain text is much easier than any other solution.

AI

To a lesser degree, my thoughts about AI-assisted notes played a small role in this. While Tana or any other system could certainly integrate a degree of AI, it feels to me like being able to point an AI system at a folder on my computer that is full of plain text would be a much easier task than building a tool to index a complex system like Tana or Roam Research. Whether AI tools come to notes anytime soon, plain text is much more future-proofed than having notes buried in a proprietary system.

Community

The Obsidian community played a role as well. Tana has a bright community, but the Obsidian community is magnitudes larger. As of today there are 813 plugins and 72 themes for Obsidian, and their Discord community and their forum are both incredibly active.

I’ll miss some things from Tana

That’s not to say it’s perfect, and there are absolutely some things that Tana does better. If nothing else, their Supertags are literally amazing, and due to how the two systems are built, they’re not something that can really be done in Obsidian.

There’s a lot to like with Tana, and I think that platform has a great future ahead of it. For me, though, Obsidian lines up more closely with how we should control our data and I’ll be using it for the foreseeable future.

Personal note-taking is going to change dramatically

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My history of using different note-taking tools over the years is well-documented in this blog, including my recent move from Obsidian to Tana. While Tana has some great features and I really enjoy using it, it’s ultimately just a slightly better version of the tools that came before it and I may end up moving back to Obsidian. Those kinds of changes may become irrelevant in the future, as we’re on the verge of some huge changes in the world of notes.

I’ve talked about ChatGPT before, and I encourage you to play around with it when you have some time. It’s a mind-blowing tool, but it’s just a tiny scrap of what’s coming. Using tools like that to reference general data is great, but what if I could have it index all of my notes and provide answers from there?

Dan Shipper recently wrote a fantastic post about this, and I’ll share some of his thoughts:

A better way to unlock the value in your old notes is to use intelligence to surface the right note, at the right time, and in the right format for you to use it most effectively. When you have intelligence at your disposal, you don’t need to organize.

That’s something I try to do with my notes, but it’s a whole different world. With mine, I need to manually create references and the follow the paths. With AI, I could simply have it bring up the information that I need immediately.

Think about starting a project—maybe you’re writing an article about a new topic—and having an LLM automatically write and present to you a report outlining key quotes and ideas from books you’ve read that are relevant to the article you’re writing.

Again, this is something I’m trying to do by hand, and it works fairly well, but doing what Dan describes there is on a whole different level.

At the conclusion, Dan simply says: “In the future, notes won’t be organized by us—they’ll be organized for us.“

Heyday

The closest example I can find today is heyday.xyz. It can pull your data from a ton of sources, including email, Slack, Dropbox, Notion, etc and help make sense of it all. In theory, they could continue to expand their sources and slowly integrate AI and start to become this kind of solution.

Really, that’s the main problem for now. Tools like ChatGPT are amazing, but their content comes from the internet at large, and not even anything from the past few years. I think the next step we’ll see is a real-time ChatGPT (“what’s happened in the Lions game right now?”), and eventually we’ll be able to pile our own content into our own system.

For now, I’m going to keep manicuring my notes to make them as helpful as possible, and hopefully one day I’ll be able to plug an AI into it to help me make even more sense of everything.

Google Reader hurt the internet the most

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Over the years, Google has killed off a lot of products, with the “Killed by Google” site listing 280 of them as of now. Most were pretty small ones you’ve never heard of, but some were rather substantial.

I was a big fan of Google+, and I’m still upset that they canceled Stadia. While those two had a bigger impact on me personally, I think Google’s biggest loss was Google Reader, because their treatment of that product has helped create some of the problems that the internet is facing today.

Google Reader?

You may not be familiar with what Google Reader was, which is part of the problem. In short, it was a popular RSS reader that helped people consume content on the internet. I’m still a big fan of RSS, but it’s unlikely to ever really make a comeback.

Before Google Reader came along, there were a lot of RSS-focused tools available. Many people I knew used them, and things were great. Google Reader was launched in 2005 and essentially swept up that market. Most people, myself included, moved our subscriptions to Google Reader because it was a great tool and it was free. Some of the other tools charged for their usage, so when users like me left, most of them went out of business.

Then, in 2013, Google killed off Google Reader. Most of the other products were long dead, and now users had to figure out what to do next. In most cases, the answer was “nothing” and they moved on to just using social media and allowing algorithms to dictate their content, which was by far the easiest path.

This is similar to when Walmart comes into a small town, wipes out the existing businesses, then closes up shop and leaves a big mess behind. That’s what Google did here.

A better internet

I believe that the internet would be a better place today if Google Reader had never existed. I’m not foolish enough to believe that RSS would be dominating today, but it would certainly be seeing much wider usage.

RSS is a fantastic way to avoid filters and algorithms and to really control your inputs, and I encourage you to give it a shot with something like Feedly (a solid replacement for Google Reader). It’ll be interesting to see how things like this shift in the coming years, but this is a move you can make right now to help improve your internet experience.