Content Aggregator meets Content Aggrevator

Net Vibes is, on a somewhat more aggressive scale, what many other sites are: a content repackager/aggregator. Since I’ve been a long time user, I did a slapdash comparison of Net Vibes with my homesite of choice for several years, now, iGoogle. Below are my impressions:

First off, I cannot stress how frustratingly slow Net Vibes is. No matter how awesome the content of a service is, waiting about 2 minutes as I did for login is just unacceptable. I worry this is common for the site, as it was also slow in class on Tuesday and slow now after I finally managed to log in.

(time passes)

Alright. I’ll leave that above paragraph up to make a point about usability. When I first started using Net Vibes, I experienced that slow access and felt like that’s all I was able to experience. Slow functionality impedes impressions of usability like nothing else for me. What I’ll say now is that my new impression is this: Maybe this is kinda nice after all*. Now that the insane lag between request and response has evaporated (where did it go? That makes me nervous), it’s actually a decent service. Already it’s outshone iGoogle in layout ability. Google seems to eschew a 4 column layout, and beyond that, it seems to ignore that content might look nice in mixed column width. Overall, I’ve never liked Google’s rounded-edge bubble look for something so information-driven. Moving back to sharp, clean lines and moving the tab management to the top of the pages reclaims enough horizontal real estate to make a 4 column layout manageable, even on a laptop screen.

Back to the topic of what these content aggregators are good for: a lot. Right now on both my iGoogle and Netvibes pages, you can find widgets giving me functional use (if not total) for the following applications: Mail, weather (and radar), Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and a host of news websites. Any time I log on, I check all of these websites. I’ve been using services like this almost since my time on the Internet began, although they have of course become much more robust in the past several years. Now that sophistication of programming allows for such intermixed content integration, it’s nice to get the half-dozen websites I almost always go to right when I first start out.

But what are the larger implications these services have for our digitized culture? Well, like boiling a frog by degrees, we’re integrating ourselves with our online content more. We recognize a tendency in ourselves to want to get more done, more quickly, so we oblige that urge continually. We’re constantly reaching for equilibrium between what we have to do and our means to do it because we are constantly adding more for ourselves to do. Look at me just a few paragraphs ago. I give bonus points to Net Vibes because it allows me to cram more onto a page. What these content aggregators show is that instead of choosing to slow down and get to what we get to when we get to it, we want more of it faster – continually. I also hear from people in and out of class all the time that surely we must be reaching that point where we can do no more. We’ll have to stop adding more to our plates soon.

Haven’t we always been like this, though? Has there ever been a time where, at least collectively, enough people have said, “No, we’re fine with our media the way it is. We can do no more, thanks.” We added the printed book to the town crier and public storyteller. We expanded literacy downward to the lower classes. We added the newspaper. We added the radio. We added movies. We added TV. We added cable and its hundreds of programs. We added the internet, which in itself has been a continual series of additions. Why would we stop here? Why will we ever stop at any single point in the future?

*As long as that lag stays away.