NSFW - I'm letting rip, and there will be swearing!
I'm a little bit pissed off right now. Hell I'm fucking livid! This morning, like every morning, I turned on my computer and went straight to Google Reader to catch up on my 422 blog feeds. Without reader I would have found it very hard to keep abreast of such a mass of incoming 'news' items and the best stuff would have been lost in the noise. But now I (and every other user) have found out that Google are shutting down Reader effective 1st July. To say I'm annoyed would be an understatement.
I'm a little bit pissed off right now. Hell I'm fucking livid! This morning, like every morning, I turned on my computer and went straight to Google Reader to catch up on my 422 blog feeds. Without reader I would have found it very hard to keep abreast of such a mass of incoming 'news' items and the best stuff would have been lost in the noise. But now I (and every other user) have found out that Google are shutting down Reader effective 1st July. To say I'm annoyed would be an understatement. 
I should make it clear that I'm not the sort of person that Google should be screwing over, because I'm a committed and loyal Googlephile (or I was until this morning). I subscribe to most of their products including Blogger, Gmail, Drive, Calender, You Tube and of course Reader. In fact I use their family of products so much I have bought additional cloud storage for all my services and I pay for BLMA's domain through them. So shutting down a much used and well loved service and basically telling us to find a non Google alternative seems to me to be insanity. Once that move away from their products has started they may find their users like the alternatives and keep on moving.Thankfully I have found an alternative to Reader, its called Feedley. It looks pretty good although I have found its response times to be a bit slow - although that might just be down to a surge in new users! The developers of the site anticipated the closing of reader and have enabled the programme to sync with it and upload a users RSS feeds from the soon defunct system. I'm also going to try out a couple of other feed readers as well until I find one that suits me. But whatever one I eventually settle on, it obviously won't be a Google product.
Judging from the on-line response to this change I think I can safely say I'm not the only hacked off user. I think I can summarise our collective response thus:
"Shutting down Reader was the idea of a nobhead. Don't do it again!"
Whaaaa! I hadn't noticed that. That is not good news, I have too many things I keeop track of via google reader. Thanks for the heads up!
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To quote Phil Broeders - what a bunch of fudge nuggets......... I'm a big user as well - let me know how you get on with Feedly, I'm going to try Wordpress first (as I have an id) but I've heard good things about Rolio as well.....
ReplyDeleteYeah, I just read about this on Wargaming Miscellany. I'll be interested to see what else you find. Hope it's not the shape of things to come for google stuff.
ReplyDeleteOh dear. My girlfriend might be pissed...
ReplyDeleteI don't really use Google Reader though, I just follow through Blogger. Which I think *checks blogroll* has an option to import feeds from Reader. Might work as a substitute?
That was my first thought, unfortunately blogger only allows you to import a max of 300 feeds and I have 422 in Reader.
DeleteI've never used reader, like Mattias I just go through blogger.
ReplyDeleteWoof. 422 is a whole lot. I can see why you're miffed. Let us know how Feedley works!
ReplyDeleteIn the same boat as you and have also moved to Feedly. They were having lots of issues last night but they addressed on that on their website and it was due to the sudden influx of new users. My biggest gripe about feedly though is it does not seem to support IE which is what I have to use at work.
ReplyDeleteFeedly sounds good, but I might try this first:
ReplyDeletehttp://theoldreader.com/
I'm not too worried about it, but I will change readers, most likely, before the end of March...
Never really saw the point of Reader and not Blogger, but if it's capped at 300... Getting close to that now. Any other benefits to using it?
ReplyDeleteDammit that's annoying, to say the very least. Still, I 'ope you've calmed down by Saturday. Er....wait. No. Cancel that. You'll be the French. I hope your still ANGRY AS HELL!
ReplyDeleteOne highlight of Reader was the ability to add Wordpress blogs to it - can not read those on Blogger I believe.
ReplyDeleteI got the message earlier today. I have always tried to avoid google because it has always struck me as big brother on the net. since starting blogging I had moved over to using a range of google services including reader. Thinks this this justifies my earlier choices.
ReplyDeleteGrrr.
ReplyDeleteWell I've been using Feedly for 24 hours and its not bad. A nice uncluttered look, it imported all my subscriptions and folders easily. The Android App for my tablet is OK, but I'm still learning how to use it properly. Load up time is still a little slow but as already indicated that may just be down to an inrush of new users.
ReplyDeleteTalking of which I'm also experimenting with TheOldReader.com. I'm still importing my data at the moment so I can't say how well it works just yet. Remember what I said in my post about users going elsewhere and maybe not coming back...well according to TheOldReader there are 16941 users in the import queue ahead of me!!! And that just one of numerous alternatives to Reader that have just been given a sudden boost in subscriptions (and more importantly, potential Advertising revenue!). Nice one Google, just shot yourself in the foot there mate.
I'm going with OldReader too... 13278 in front of me.... makes you wonder how many users Google didn't think was enough to warrant further investment in Google Reader!
ReplyDeleteI have to thank you first for this post. I had no idea about the future of reader. I'm looking I to the alternatives to take my subscriptions too. I honestly have been losing a lot of faith in Google products. I use a lot personally and professionally at work. They have been dropping several things I used to love or found extremely useful. I still dread to this day the move from YouTube to being a Google product. I buffer so bad there I don't even bother checking it other than a few long time subscriptions. Thanks for the heads up sir!
ReplyDeleteThis is one of those bits of the internet where I never really understood what it did but the fact that Google can switch it off like that makes me worry even more about stuff going onto the Cloud where I have no control of it.
ReplyDelete