Death to Aggregators

Frank Steele thinks that aggregators should be subsumed into browsers

I’ve got a fair amount of sympathy for what he says. Syndication is about browsing, so why not do it in the browser?

The case is even more persuasive because browsing in current aggregators generally sucks – NNW launches new browser instances, nothing in windows blocks popups and so on and so forth.

But, having said that, Mozilla/Firefox has shown that the world is moving away from swiss army knife browsers. Feed browsing (for me and presumably a big chunk of other people) is a different kind of consumption experience than normal web browsing. The difference is subtle but it’s there. If I wanted to read feeds in my browser I could use bloglines or amphetadesk, but I don’t.

I’d hope that rather than vanishing, desktop aggregators will raise their game when it comes to the browsing experience.