I don’t have an issue with the 990 lb gorillas. I don’t even think people need to be running their own sites. They just need a healthy ecosystem of providers to provide competition. That’s exactly what we have with email and blogs right now. Nobody but a select few run their own email or blog software installations, but they have numerous options to go to for that service. In email, you have gmail which is the 990 lb gorilla, but because it has to interact with other systems, it’s limited in how evil it can be.
We as an internet community need to decry sites like facebook and google+ that don’t work together with each other. We need to make it super-easy for people to somehow move their facebook page from facebook to diaspora while keeping their friends. Instead, we just throw our hands up and accept the current situation. We need to fight lock-in at every step.
It’s funny that you bring up blogs as a counter-example of what I’m talking about, because blogs are a particularly good example of a system that’s working, as the article discussed.
I can’t say I disagree - walled gardens == bad is almost a syllogism.
And I think I at least partly misunderstood you - I thought that part of what you were decrying was the third party services (eg., wordpress.org, blogspot, etc.) that don’t let you have the same control as one does with your own hosting account and set up. I certainly prefer the latter, but the former is valuable for those that can’t do that themselves as well.
In short, I think we agree, and my first posts on the new Discourse system were relatively content free
I never saw it as Google trying to kill RSS. Just saw it as a company moving resources to a more profitable area. Did Apple’s refusal to mess around with Flash, kill it? Not a perfect analogy but you get my drift. And even though Google Reader was great, RSS feeds have always been something I preferred to get through Owl, Opera, or Thunderbird. The cloud, er Google, already knows too much about me as it is.
This rant makes absolutely no sense. Google’s entire income comes from scanning the open web so it can be searched and providing the best results so people keep coming back to use it. Anything they do to make it more closed makes them LOSE MONEY. That’s not the reason they closed Reader.
Dumb question: why should a for profit company like Google have to keep Reader running when they couldn’t monetize it? Is Google a charity or a government service? Just because Google killed Reader doesn’t mean that someone else can’t make a competitor. Go beg Microsoft, Yahoo, the DOD, France, or Rupert Murdoch.
Saying
“fuck them, and fuck that”
is really uncalled for. This is just spitting in the face of a company that provided a free service for several years and then discontinued it. They deserve contempt for this?
That might have been a valid point ten or twelve years ago. Google’s making money by mining your data—why do you think all their services are free? Because they’re skimming all of your Gmail messages and Google Voice messages to improve their own tech. The first time you saw an ad based on the something you’d discussed in an email, that should have been pretty clear. All the money Google is making and will make on their voice recognition tech? They built that tech because they had unfettered access to your data. Google+ is not the “open web,” either.
Exactly. Reader was the one service that made all of Google’s shifty privacy policies worth the cost—it was incredibly useful to me for years and years, so I accepted that, okay, some or all of my Google-based data would be made available for analysis and monetization. On some level, you’re making that deal with every company you do business with online.
Shutting down reader was the tipping point for me, where I realized that the company I used to admire had moved on to bigger, more profitable vistas. I decided it was time to move my Google Docs data to another service. I disconnected Voice from my phone number. I started using YouTube in private mode with cookies disabled so they wouldn’t have a list of every video I’ve watched. I kept never using Google+.
Google is not a “free” service. You pay them with your data. I decided to start paying them less because I’m no longer satisfied with their level of service.
Very few are those who, like myself, follow about 200 blogs and enjoy the power of RSS:
200? wow. The Yoleo-people told me I was an outlier with 1900 + subscriptions. And I aggressively pruned to get that down.
That being said, I miss google Reader (although Yoleo is getting better). I am mildly suspicious of attempts to get me to use G+ more, but I haven’t seen this as an attempt to kill off RSS.
You know that sleep is getting hard to get 'Cause you never know what you’ll forget And I’ve got to know of all the news 'Cause one day there’ll be news for me
I never let a headline by 'Cause every one will catch my eye And though it’s tough to keep alert You never know what could hurt me
[…]
Info Freako, there is no end To what I want to know
Okay. You really got me to check it out. It’s 272 feeds in Netnewswire on the Macs and probably an additional 30 that are left unsynced on the Linux machine. At a certain point, I did have around 500 feeds which was about when I started to feel like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice towards the flood of updates that came in each day, so at some point I cut my subscriptions down to a bearable minimum
Google still makes 95% of their profits from ads. They serve the ads when you search. They build the search data by scanning the public internet. The less public internet the less there is to search. The less there is to search the less reason to go to google.com. The less reason to go to google.com the less money google makes. So no, killing Reader is not an attempt to make the internet less public. Neither is G+. G+ is an attempt to add data meta data (what you like) to the public internet.
