Back in the Web 1.0 days, seemingly every Web site was morphing into a Web portal - a virtual one stop destination for news, stocks, sports, e-mail, weather, or just about anything. Excite did it. Lycos did it. Yahoo! did it. Netscape eventually did it. But while Yahoo! has done a good job at offering new services and trying to give me enough "sticky" applications to keep my attention, I find myself spending more and more time in Google Reader, catching up on the hundreds of RSS feeds I subscribe too. So today, I made the switch, and made Google Reader my start page in Safari, on all my Macs.Now, instead of seeing a static page which may have some new AP wires, updated stock prices, and occasionally current sports scores, I get the very best the blogosphere has to offer. It's rare now that I will fire up the Web browser and not be presented with a few dozen news items from around the Web.
Now that we are in the Web 2.0 days, the concept of a portal has passed on. Rather than go to a single destination to have them provide me what they believe I want to read, I would rather go to a single destination which delivers me what I want to read, based on my subscriptions. I don't see myself gravitating back to My Yahoo! or iGoogle any time soon, though both are a simple command key combination away in Safari. But today's move is a significant marker in my continually evolving Web consumption.