Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
While a bundle of start-ups and incubators are ‘on crunch‘ to finish the betas of their replacements for Google Reader, there’s probably one bit of software that could do the job even better than Google Reader. GCHQ and NSA must have some really good RSS plug-ins for reading websites. If we’re going to ignore the implications of the data trawling, could we at least benefit from the code that our taxes paid for?
Christina Bonnington: No matter what Mountain View says about changing user habits, though, both Now and Plus do one thing: They keep you in Google’s world. It’s a de-emphasis of content source. In other words, rather than reading Cat Fancy religiously, you’re reading the Animals category religiously — a category populated by the sites Google’s products think you’ll enjoy most. The focus is on the places, people, and subjects surrounding an article, not the brands that create them. And instead of receiving the headlines from CNN in your reader, they’re pushed to you on a Google service like Now or Plus. Or
Google launches Google Keep, a web clipping service with huge echoes of Evernote. I suspect that Om Malik is representative of the geekerati: It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader. I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. I sent feedback, used it to annotate information and they killed it like a butcher slaughters a chicken. No conversation — dead. The service that drives more traffic than Google+ was sacrificed because it didn’t meet some vague corporate goals; users — many of them life long
Google to close Reader has caused a lot of reaction, with lots of discussion about resources, costs, impact, user base, volumes, and other business issues. But there’s another angle that’s upsetting me, and that’s the social responsibility Google had through their stewardship of Reader. It underpins many other tools on the web, and Google has killed all of these, as well as something that doesn;t quite fit in their vision with Google Plus. For example, Nick Bradbury: Then today came the news that Google Reader is shutting down on July 1. FeedDemon relies on Google Reader for synchronization, and there’s no
