My Sad Face but more importantly perhaps RSS vs The Regime

This week I learned of the soon to be demise of an old blogging buddy:  Google Reader.  I use reader to follow many blogs and use posts to as inputs or reposts on my blog.  So I have a sad face about no more Google reader.  But in fact there’s a much more serious problem.

Chinese and Iranian users rely on Google Reader to evade government firewalls. Did Google think of that? techdirt.com/articles/20130…

— George Musser (@gmusser) March 15, 2013

The discussion around Google’s announcement that it will shut down its Reader service has focused largely on the impact on the American blogging crowd. Zachary Seward takes a broader view:

[M]any RSS readers, including Google’s, serve as anti-censorship tools for people living under oppressive regimes. That’s because it’s actually Google’s servers, located in the US or another country with uncensored internet, that accesses each feed. So a web user in Iran just needs access to google.com/reader in order to read websites that would otherwise be blocked. And, indeed, Google Reader has long been accessible in Iran, where it is the most popular RSS reader.

RSS vs The Regime
Andrew Sullivan
Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:05:07 GMT

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The Google problem

I like this.  Google really seems to be screwing many of the users of its ‘free’ services.  I suppose I can see that ultimately they want to make money, but couldn’t they have implemented charges for reader.  I think they want a laser focus on a business model and Reader just wasn’t part of that.

I’ve been waiting for this post from Ezra Klein. It follows another good one from James Fallows, to which Ezra refers.

Together, the Gmail experience, the death of Google Reader, and the closure of Picnik all have me questioning whether I want to keep investing time and energy in “free” Google products or whether I need to start looking for paid services that are explicitly making money off the thing I am paying them to do. And if more and more of the people who would be Google’s early adopters feel as I do, and as Fallows does, then that could become a problem for Google. [Emphasis added.]

This is precisely why I am optimistic about NewsBlur as a replacement for Google Reader. To get the fully functional version, you have to pay a fee. It’s not much, a few bucks a month, but it is enough for Samuel Clay, its founder, to make a living creating and maintaining a good product. Without such a revenue source, I would worry about its sustainability. I could say other nice things about NewsBlur, but I’m going to wait. Clay is working hard to scale it up and fix bugs after being slammed with demand in the wake of the Reader pull-out announcement. When I think it’s ready, I’ll tell you to give it a try.

Meanwhile, Google is retrenching toward its revenue-generating products. Those are not products that serve up ads, per se, but products they can sell to businesses. After all, if Gmail has ads — and it does — so could Reader. The difference is that Gmail is an enterprise app. So is Calendar. And Docs (or Drive). Those are products Google has a business reason to invest in and maintain. They can sell versions of them to companies for profit. Any product that can’t, in time, is at risk of being dumped. I no longer trust Google to do otherwise, which brings me to my tweet earlier today.

When something I value stops working, I’m now tempted to say it’s been “Googled.”

— Austin Frakt (@afrakt) March 21, 2013

@afrakt

The Google problem
Austin Frakt
Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:59:48 GMT