Salon.com > Google Reader

Please stop the bogus tech nostalgia eulogies

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 17:17:00 +0000

July 1 is here, and Google Reader is still alive. I feel cheated. After all the grief and foreboding that have accompanied the last days of what so many people seem to believe was the greatest blog aggregator that shall ever stride the earth, the fact that the service still exists, at least for today, is hugely anticlimactic. I was expecting a pile of smoking ashes, or at least a 404 message. But it's all there, along with a note reminding us that "Reader will not be available after July 1." So July 2 is actually the drop-dead deadline? That's silly.

So much drama! So much scrambling for alternatives at the last minute! So much nostalgia for those days when everyone had a blog and every post was brilliant and the future seemed so bright ... Wait, did that actually happen? Maybe I'm getting carried away.

App of the Week: Feedly

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:45:00 +0000

Within hours of the news, one month ago, that Google had decided to shut down Google Reader, the collective intelligence of the Internet settled upon Feedly as one of the best replacements for people who can't live without their news reader/blog aggregator.

As a longtime user of Google Reader, I filed this information away but proceeded to do nothing about it, because I'm a lazy good-for-nothing slacker. Who's got time to migrate your data? What a hassle. Besides, Google wasn't going to permanently shut down Reader until July 1. So I had plenty of time. (Just like I still have plenty of time to do my taxes.)

But while researching new and interesting apps this week, I saw that Feedly had released new versions of its mobile apps for iOS and Android that were getting good reviews. Perfect! Under the guise of checking out a potential App of the Week candidate, I could get off my ass and move into new newsreader digs.

When Google lost its cool

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:45:00 +0000

A strange thing happened on Twitter in the middle of March. "Why I Left Google," a year-old post by a former Google executive named James Whittaker, went viral, for the second time.

A fairly scathing denunciation of how Google's corporate culture had changed for the worse, Whittaker's post got a reasonable amount of notice when it was first published. But this time around, the buzz was louder.

Exactly how the screed was born anew is anyone's guess. The precise mechanics of viral transmission are an enduring mystery. Maybe someone was randomly trolling the Web, stumbled across Whittaker's lament, didn't notice the date was March 13, 2012, instead of March 13, 2013, tweeted it, and hit a nerve. Or perhaps one of Google's competitors saw an opening, and struck a clever blow of Twitter meme warfare.

Death of a Reader

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:10:00 +0000

By around noon Eastern time on Friday, more than 100,000 people had signed a Change.org petition begging Google not to close Google Reader, its Web-based RSS feed aggregator -- aka "blog reader."

I understand their pain. I've been using Google Reader to organize my favorite blogs and other news sources ever since the demise of Bloglines, my previous fave. I'm annoyed that I will have to find something new and learn how to make it serve my purpose. But something about this petition reminds me of a plea to bring back the horse-and-buggy. If there's one thing we've learned about our digital, constantly disruptive era, it's that yesterday's technologies are just a new set of bowling pins about to be knocked down by tomorrow's newest arrival.

In his dark yet inspiring "closing rant" at South by Southwest Interactive, novelist and "futurist" Bruce Sterling delivered exactly such a message. One of the high points of his remarks came when he observed that he was likely to witness both the birth and death of the personal computer in his lifetime. Stuff that he helped dream up as a science fiction visionary is already almost gone.