For those of you still mourning the demise of Google Reader there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that, as usual, Netizens have stepped in and provided alternatives. I’m using Feedly and am happy with it but there are many other choices such as NewsBlur if you prefer something else. That’s all good; we certainly don’t want to make the mistake of entrusting our RSS feeds to a single source again.
The bad news is neatly explained by Marco Arment in his Lockdown post. While Arment agrees that part of the reason for shuttering Reader was decreasing usage—at least if you ignore API clients—he believes that there’s something else going on and it’s not the often claimed inability of Google to monetize Reader. Rather, it’s part of an effort on Google’s part to force us all into Google+. It’s easy to see why they’d want to do that. It’s all about being able to serve ads and one way to do that is be the single go to portal for users. In short, if you want to compete with Facebook, this is what you must do.
Even more alarming is that now everyone wants to do this. Instead of the 1000 flowers blooming in the form and small, interoperable Web services, the “big guys” are trying to make us all live in their particular walled garden and forget about being able to get our data out in any sort of convenient way.
Arment has a pithy response to all that, which you should read. Also follow his link to Jeremy Keith’s post for more on this. For my part, fighting back involves withdrawing my patronage of these sites. I don’t use Facebook so that’s already done. As for Google, I’ve already stopped using their search engine in favor of DuckDuckGo, I abandoned Blogger long ago, and my use of Gmail is restricted to funneling mailing list traffic. I’m now looking for an alternative to Gmail for even that function. Part of that is driven by my desire to make my email more secure from corporate and government snooping so that’s harder but in the meantime all they’re seeing is stuff from technical lists.
Realistically, Google isn’t going to notice my efforts and wouldn’t even if everyone reading these words did the same. Aunt Millie simply isn’t going to worry about this Geek stuff and will happily go right on using Facebook and Google. And there are a lot more Aunt Millies out there than there are Geeks. At least I am doing what I can to claw back some of my privacy and, at the same time, am refusing to feed the beast. As long as there are enough Geeks out there who feel the same, RSS and the Web will be just fine.
Update: After writing but before publishing this, I noticed this post, Distributed Everything, by Ven Portman that makes some additional points along the same lines.