Amen to this (on Readability and Instapaper)

Anil Dash in “Readability, Instapaper, the Network, and the Price We Pay”:

Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren't in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app. But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has got people choosing "sides" between the apps and turning legitimate feature debates into some sort of moral judgment of the people building the tools. Based on what I learned during a similar stage in the evolution of the blogging market, I fear these petty squabbles will hurt both tools and leave the market open only to the biggest, best-funded, most soulless competitors and that both these cool, innovative tools will lose.

I used to use Instapaper. It’s a great little app. I now use Readability because of its minimalism, overall design, and integration with Reeder. This doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, and petty bickering and name-calling (I guess this is going on on both sides, but I’ve only seen it coming from one group of bloggers) is not going to make me change my mind.

I feel this same way about politics. If you’ve got a point, by all means make it. But make it in a reasonable, measured, and intelligent way. If you start to tend towards sensationalism, I’m going to ignore you and you’re going to lose a lot of credibility in my eyes.