I am in a panic. When I loaded Google Reader this morning to look at my RSS feeds, they announced that it would be retired in July. That gives me MONTHS to find a new RSS reader, but I was sincerely ANGRY.
I know I SHOULDN’T be angry. Google Reader was a service that I was not paying for. I was happy to use it and never worried for a second that Google would pull a “Yahoo” and kill my beloved reader. Even though they crippled it by taking out all the things that my friends had shared and shoveling them into their Google+ monstrosity. I STILL believed that Google wouldn’t possibly kill Reader. Call me naive. It appears that Google is heading the route of so many companies before it, killing the things that they have created despite protests and beloved status.
So, I exported my subscriptions using Google Takeout and put them into Vienna, which is an open source RSS reader. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than Newsfire, which cost me ten bucks and couldn’t import the .xml file that Google provided me… grr…
I would be bothered by going back in time by about five years to a desktop RSS reader, just like the old days, but I’m not. I realized that I only read RSS when I’m on my “real” computer, so the fact that it’s not synced with my iPhone or iPad isn’t an issue. I just don’t read RSS on my iPhone or iPad, mostly because reading RSS is my form of work and work is VERY difficult to do on my phone.
In short, I feel betrayed by Google. I know I shouldn’t because I wasn’t paying for the service, but I feel as if Google can no longer be trusted. I’m downloading all my YouTube videos and I’m suddenly worried whether shifting our email to Google’s professional email service was worth it. If they are willing to kill a service that I used EVERY SINGLE DAY, then they might just be willing to kill my email or delete all my videos. I can’t trust them anymore and suddenly, I’m looking at other options.
Thank God I don’t have an Android phone…
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