Mark as read: Google Reader goes under

I had heard a lot of talk in the technosphere that RSS was not exactly setting the world on fire, which I guess I understood, when you get down to it. When I had to organize my troops into providing content for our now defunct DJ entertainment blog, it seemed to me that RSS was the thing to do. We could use Google Reader's group features (which went the way of the dodo long ago, sad to say) to pass along recommendations to one another and eliminate duplicated efforts. I mean, it’s not as if content on the internet is in one place and one place only. Half of what I see that’s interesting, if its not personality-derived content, I see on multiple sites, and as often as not, you have to dig like a dog to find the original posting, which was what I was always looking for. (Members of the VCA are well aware—and usually grumpy about—my enthusiasm for this sort of thing, the fires of which have finally been banked.) To overcome the problems of collecting good links, there was Reader, and I trained or attempted to train about half a dozen people in its wiles. Now, as far as I was concerned, using Reader, not just to follow sites but to add them and divvy them and so forth, was rolling off the proverbial log. For most people, however, RSS was a mystery beyond their ken. They certainly couldn’t get the hang of Reader for finding content or passing it along, much less creating a set of their own personal content. I think this was because the core idea, the underlying understanding of the nature of XML and how, essentially, you would automatically go out and grab some pre-specified data, was just too much like rocket surgery. It made their heads hurt. Also, I think, swimming in vast oceans of incoming information also made their heads hurt. They didn’t see RSS as a way to manage the information, but simply as the information itself. You can apply this to the vast universe of computer users out there, seeing (if they even ever did see) those three little letters in their url box.

They stayed away in droves.

While it was there, especially in its earlier iteration, Google Reader was the go-to application. Even when they “updated” it (for which read, dumbed it down and stripped it of a bunch of features but didn't actually add anything) it was still the standard. There are plenty of apps out there that draw on Reader for its content, for instance, either as standalone IOS or Android apps, either as pretty straightforward readers themselves, or more tarted up as tablet magazines of some sort. Surfing the internet, which was what we did once upon a time (and I’ve always assumed that Safari derives its name from the Beach Boys, although I’ve never seen this confirmed anywhere), was a pretty random activity, at best guided by bookmarks. RSS allowed a much broader scope, guided by related content. Simply put, I have hundreds of sites in my Reader feed. At least a hundred of these are of great interest to me and I like to follow them closely. Try doing that with bookmarks.

But, if anyone questioned the popularity of RSS, the demise of Google Reader pretty much proves it. It’s not that an app wasn’t popular, it’s that a whole technology wasn’t popular. Google Reader, the definitive app for that technology, apparently no longer has a reason for existence, at least in the opinion of that up-and-coming eyeglass manufacturer, Google Inc.

Of course, the scramble is now on to find a replacement. When the announcement hit (you opened Reader this morning and got a message that announced that the spigot would be turned off in July), the interwebs went wild. I’ve been out there beating the bushes, and my early recommendation is Feedly. It has a lot of features, making it either visual or more textual, and it already provides an easy transition for any Reader orphan-to-be. If something better comes along to change my mind, I’ll let you know.

As, to some extent, a content provider myself with this blog, I’ll probably start tweeting posts, just to provide a little extra coverage. I probably should have been doing that anyhow, knowing that many of my readers only came when they remembered, not because they followed religiously. (Tsk, tsk. If CL isn’t a religion, then the Pope isn’t Polish Italian German Catholic.)

And so we bid a fond farewell to Google Reader. As Mark Twain once said of the butler who ran into the burning house to save it but ultimately gave his life to the fire, “Well done faithful servant.”