The fragility of the Google Reader universe
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Google Reader and Mac/iOS RSS readers that sync
Brent Simmons has written an excellent piece on proposed changes to Google Reader and how they might affect clients like Reeder which piggy back off it.
I use Google Reader to catalog and organize my various RSS feeds and have been since I dropped NetNewsWire (which Brent Simmons above wrote) years ago in favor of Reeder on my Mac and my two iOS devices.
My RSS feeds are the center of my online activity and I can’t imagine doing what I do online without a single application to organize and read them. I track activity at this site, my flickr account including all of my contacts, various sections of numerous newspapers and news feeds, blogs, photoblog, Apple related stuff, funny videos, and lots more. Google Reader and clients like Reeder and the RSS functionality they use is the single most important part of my computing experience and has been for many years now.
I have no doubt that the authors of the various Google Reader clients (like Reeder) are watching closely and will adapt to whatever Google does, but as Bent says, Google is looking a bit less generous and a bit more self-serving by forcing integration of their social network which may or may not be meaningful associated with RSS feeds.
This announcement isn’t just a reminder of the fragility of the system: it removes some features that people use. Google Reader’s social and sharing features are going away in favor of integration with Google+.
Crap.
mmmm crap for sure, so what now, by the way have you ever exported your list because when their is change allways potention for loss and breakage.
I’m going to try something today Edward:
Safari does RSS and if I can get all my feeds in Safari and it will share those feeds with my iOS devices through iCloud maybe I can convince the author of Reeder to consider another feed source. I don’t know if this is even possible or a good idea but it might be worth trying.
Ok cool well let me know because I am in the same boat as you.
Marco Arment seems to think that building a new RSS sync system wouldn’t be that hard. Great news, hopefully he’ll make one (he’s a genius).
http://www.marco.org/2011/10/25/brent-simmons-google-reader
mmm that is good news maybe sync with the cloud or with dropbox
Right Edward, my guess is there will be alternatives to Google Reader at some point given that Google hasn’t made a public API for Reader. I’m amazed that so many apps sprung up off it without this. But, it’s popular and a lot of people use it so that’s why.
No amount of third rate tricks from Google is gonna convince me that Google Plus is a good social networking tool and make me use it. Facebook just works for me. All of my Social content is in there. I guess i will use the ‘Send to’ feature which is still in Google Reader and post and share content on Facebook or Twitter.
This is much disappointing from Google. Not only this but i found out you can no longer Post comments on Picasa Web Albums as well. You need to be on Google Plus to post comments on Picasa Web Albums. Oh well, i guess Facebook is gonna be my way of Sharing images going forward since Facebook has started accepting High Resolution images. I’ve also fine tuned my security using Lists on facebook so sharing isn’t going to be much of a problem, i guess. Sigh!
Dilip: I don’t want to use either Facebook or google +, I just want to use my RSS on all my devices and have it work. Of source, given that we have no power and won’t until Sunday. Having power is a more essential piece of the equation. I’m at a friend’s house now where I got my first shower since Saturday. We were getting pretty ripe.