Yesterday it was announced that Google Reader will be no more as of July 1st. I couldn’t be more disappointed, as well as pissed off at Google. I’ve always disliked Google to a certain degree because they seem really inflexible. It’s part of the reason why even though I have two gmail accounts I still use Yahoo for my main emailing. A lot of my dislike stems from the fact that the company I used to work for had arrangements with them to provide a service for which they would not accommodate any of our requests which made it difficult to make a profit. In fact last I heard they were coming up with other ways to bill our clients for the services we were getting from Google because the reports they provided did not allow us to automate the invoicing, thus it wasn’t making us any revenue.
In any case, I use Google Reader constantly. I do mean constantly. If I’m not checking the updated feeds via the Google Reader site in Firefox I’m checking it through Feeddler on my iPhone or iPad. I can’t imagine a better way to keep on top of the newest posts from my favorite sites and being able to keep my progress and starred articles synched. It seems a lot of people would agree, and on top of that, there really aren’t any comparable alternatives right now.
I understand that RSS feeds aren’t as popular as one might hoped, which is apparent from the crickets I got in response to my Facebook update yesterday bemoaning this development, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful or appreciated. They’d probably be utilized by more people if they understood what they were, or more importantly, how beneficial they are. Who reads articles on actual websites anymore? I rarely do. I get the majority of my news via Google Reader and Twitter, and with Twitter I send the articles to Pocket to read later.
Needless to say I’m really upset about all this and will likely delete my Google+ account soon. Might as well before Google decides to do it for me. Besides, it’s not like it’s going to end up being the Facebook killer they hoped it would be. Oh, and I might just switch to Bing for my search needs as well.
Oh geez, somehow I missed this news. I use Google Reader constantly, along with an app in Chrome that alerts me to new posts. Plus I use it on my iPhone. Ugh! Now I have to find something else.
I am also a user iGoogle, which they announced quite a while ago will be phased out in November this year. I am still dragging my feet on what I will use instead of iGoogle.
What are they going to kill next – Google Calendar? Google Drive? That would be horrible.