Google has angered lots of users today by announcing the deprecation of its Reader in the
official Google blog. I'm one of the many users who are still using Google Reader on a daily basis. So, what does this mean in practice for me. The short answer is: very little. The Google Reader app is one of Google's worst mobile apps, so I have been using Feedly (for news) and BeyondPod (for podcasts) on my smartphone and on my tablet for a long time and the feeds are saved there anyway. I have practically no use of Reader on my PC or Chromebook apart from adding feeds. Furthermore Google, lets you download your data on Google Takeout (feed in an xml file, likes, connections, etc. in json files) until June 1, when the service will close for good.
Even though there are replacement services I, like many other people, have signed an
online petition asking Google to keep Reader alive. The damage Google would cause it probably more psychological than real. So, what's the fuss on the web and social media all about?
Google Reader has always been a beacon of the web 2.0 era as one of the most important applications for RSS feeds (news and podcasts). An era in which companies like Yahoo! and Google fostered open standards and did great things with RSS feeds. Google, it's rather your support for open standards I will miss than Google Reader on the web. So, please keep the spirit of openness alive!
See also:
Why the classic Web 2.0 is going extinct in the Post-PC era
.png)
