Saturday, March 16, 2013

In Memorium


We are gathered here today to mourn the future loss of a dear friend: Google Reader, who is due to expire on July 1st of this year. I’ve known GR for only a few years, but they were great years. He taught me how to organize lists of my favorite blogs and easily click through posts. And if I wanted to save the post or favorite it, why, he was more than happy to oblige. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t terrible good with computers. He was easy to work with and required little from me, like a good aggregator should.


Seriously, Google. What. The. Hell. “Usage is down”? “It’s time to focus on other products”? Reader needs to be “retired”? You have email. You have maps. You have the freaking king of search engines. You dominate almost every other facet of internet usage. If you want to get rid of unwieldy, redundant programs, eliminate Google+ because Facebook is a thing and leave Reader alone. And the gall to call it “retirement”. Come on. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and is being discontinued like a duck, I think you might have a discontinued duck.

Don’t involve me in this mess.
There’s actually a petition going on at Change.org. Because why not? Petitions are what internet people do. And honestly, they’re about as likely to listen to us as they are to realize on their own that killing it is a dumb idea. No, it’s not going to do anything unless every user manages to band together and sign it, but accepting defeat is the first step toward failure. Or something.

Anyway, you can download your Reader data if there’s anything there you don’t want to lose. I’m going to go start looking for another blog reader. Maybe we should do like a reality show and have all the aggregators try to prove why they’re the best one for me ; ).

5 comments:

  1. Hahaha - I can always count on you to do it up good. :D

    I guess I give up too easily. I'm already trying out Feedly.
    http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/

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  2. Bummer!!! I haven't used Reader in ages 'cause I was following too many blogs, and started relying on the smaller number in my blog roll, and responding to people who had left comments, instead. But I did use it for a while.

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  3. Poor duck, being dragged into a fight. He probably doesn't even have Google Reader.

    I'm sad to hear Reader is going, too. It surely can't be causing Google that much time & effort, can it?

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  4. I was upset when I first saw the news (on a day I was home sick, so that didn't help). But now I've hit acceptance. There are others out there. Various outlets have written articles on them (that I tweeted as soon as I saw them). I'm sure that one of those is going to be so much better than Reader.

    That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

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  5. I've just used straight from my blog roll rather than a reader. I have heard of this going on, though it won't affect me... I think.

    The duck just wants some leftover bread. Or to chase you into the house.

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Please validate me.