Kevin Hale of Particletree wrote an interesting essay about the importance of RSS and speculates that the success of social bookmarking sites like MemeStreams have got Google worried about the reputation agent becoming the new search.

The pace of information development is forcing internet surfers to skip the eye-candy for the luxury of skimming.

Here enter the noteworthy blog, whose tagline is "Pick up the pace. Skip the click-through."

And so imagine my surprise when I started reading from news services that Google created Personal Pages to compete with Yahoo’s portal services. I think the analysts have it all wrong. I don’t think Google really feels threatened (or has ever felt threatened) by portal strategy.

This is definitely true. During Eric Schmidt's interview with Charlie Rose:

Rose: And a lot of people said that's why I go to My Yahoo. That's what My Yahoo delivers for me. And here you come wanting them to come to you first. Because if they come to you first, you hope they'll stay with you for a while because they'll read your ads.

Schmidt: Again, people didn't understand what we announced. We did something different but everybody confused it with something else.

Back to the Hale article:

In the race to find what deserves face-time, services like Del.icio.us in combination with the rapid adoption of web apps like kinja are making Google’s search seem very, very slow.

Have you tried Kinja? It looks pretty cool.

If you want to see a good example of what I’m talking about, check out Gataga, a bookmark search engine that’s powered by social bookmarking services and an RSS feed for every search.