Today is the last day that Google Reader, the free RSS reader from Google, is available. It is one of the services that is going to shut down as part of a 'spring cleaning' exercise. I'm going to miss it. As a tribute, I'll nominate this tool as one of the 'take the 10 tools challenge' for Jane's challenge.
When the news was announced a couple of months ago, I was quite upset and so were many thousands of people. I don't want to be a drama queen, but over the years Google Reader had become my prime platform for tapping into the brains of a rich variety of people and friends. Actually, I consider Google Reader as an extention of my brain. I may not always remember exactly who said what when, but I can easily find it back in my starred, kept unread etc feeds. It was also a tool that allowed me to digest the stream of incoming posts quickly.
The second reason why this news upset me was the realisation that 'free' isn't what it used to be. You may also have read Chris Anderson's book "Free" years ago. It tells how in the network age it suddenly made business sense to offer services for free in a variety of models eg via advertisement or the freemium model. But as the financial and economic crisis endures, we've seen more and more free services turn into paying ones, being sold or shut down. I actually would have been glad to pay for Google Reader, but never got that chance. It is a sobering realisation that when you depend on 'free' services, you have no claim on service. What if Google shuts down blogger.com because the advertising feeds in blogs don't generate the targeted revenue? What if Microsoft merges Yammer functionality into SharePoint instead of the other way around? What if after MSN Messenger, also Yahoo Messenger and Skype close? What if Facebook decides we can only have 10 friends for free? Just paying for services might still be the most fair solution.
I suppose it has upsides too. It's time to move on. Now we are all forced to try out of the competitors, and some have stepped up in recent months. Google Reader had a faithful set of users, which made it hard for newer tools to break through. In fact, there were a lot of tools out there that used Google Reader as a platform to tap into themselves. One of the alternatives that saw its readers go up by 8 million ex-Google Reader users is Feedly. I'm using it too now. The layout is beautiful, but just as Wilfred explains in his blog post, I didn't fall in love with it. Beauty is fine - good design and looks even are essential - but Feedly is not as productive to me (I'm still adjusting old habits I suppose). I'm missing the feature to mark or unmark a post as read for example. Other alternatives that I have also exported and imported my feeds into are the new Digg Reader (good first impression) and The Old Reader. These are two services created by the upset Google Reader community. Over the next months I'll use the three tools before I settle on a final choice.
Here's a last tribute we all can make to our dear friend Google Reader as it goes for retirement: you can still vote it in Jane's new Learning Tools Top 100. She has been publishing this list for years now, and you can vote for the 2013 edition here.
Bert, I, too, mourn the loss of Google reader and have chosen to move most of my feeds into my Outlook, which does allow me to browse the feed's content (not just the titles of the posts), to see what is unread and, additionally, allows me to delete items I feel are irrelevant. Am also using both Chrome's and IE's readers. [Aside, I do love Jane Hart and use her Top 100 Learning Tools as a reminder of things I might add to my own 'bag of tools'!]
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