Reflections on Technology's Pace of Change

After 90 days of blogging, here are some quick observations.

• Staying Informed: Receiving many thousands of articles from hundreds of RSS feeds, Google Reader tells me that I read hundreds a day. This yields 3 to 5 articles a day. This process is inefficient. It's not real time because RSS is delayed. Dozens of mechanisms like Google Alert, Digg, Techmeme, Technorati, and Yahoo Groups add more noise. I don't have time for more feeds like Twitter or FriendFeed. No intelligent filtering mechanism exists to feed me what I need to read. Fortunately, I've organized my feeds into a dozen rivers and minimized the inefficient process to a one hour task.
• Technology Changes: National news has stuck with the elections, economy, sports, and disasters. In contrast, technology advances on many fronts. New mobile platforms from Apple iPhone, Google Android, RIM Blackberry, and Microsoft Mobile; desktop platforms from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo; browser platforms from Apple, Firefox, Microsoft, Opera, start-ups; cloud infrastructure platforms from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Myspace, Microsoft, Yahoo challenge legacy stack choices from LAMP, Microsoft; dozens of open APIs release thousands of data sets via JSON, XML, web services, whatever; and over 300 AdNets push to change web monetization, led by AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Millions of application developers must choose platform alliances. Hundreds of millions of content providers and active social participants seek widgets and services from these developers.
  
• Conversation Richness. Everyday conversations change slowly. With the election, we are down to two choices. With tennis, hockey, and basketball, there is a winner at the finals. American Idol ended with a winner, what's-his-name. With technology platforms, there are hundreds of choices. With widgets, there are thousands. When a winner emerges like Microsoft for software, Yahoo for content aggregation, or Google for SEM - they are challenged by new companies which restarts the conversation.
• Technology Conversations. Legacy publishers continue the dead-end discussion about Yahoo and Microsoft. The blogosphere has moved on the hundreds of platform changes where little consensus has emerged. When there is consensus, conversations will start among legacy publishers. That's been the cycle.

It's a challenge to keep up with technology. Most consumers just wait for a winner to emerge like Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google.

Are you overwhelmed by technology change?