Not An Expert

My anger at the death of Google Reader that is…

I joined Twitter during the fall of 2008 to stay on top of the elections. The political folks that I followed were sharing links to articles relevant to the election. Following those links to the designated blogs, I found that many of those blogs were ones that I’d like to read on an ongoing basis. The difficulty was keeping up with all of them. Bookmarking at the time was all I knew and doing that for every blog, then clicking through these everyday would preclude me from doing my job, the one I got paid for. The election and my involvement in it was as a volunteer but I still need to stay on top of news and polls and things.  Somebody on Twitter, I’m not sure, who pointed me to RSS.  I could subscribe via this RSS thing and get everything in a snippet. I could get snippets from all over the web and look at them in one place (an aggregator) that aggregator was Google Reader.

Now the web is blowing up with the news that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1st.

What the f#-%/+%+#;;&(;-1($/&(&*+$++%!  I’m not happy about this news at all. For the following reasons:

1. Google Reader is so easy to set up- I didn’t even know what the hell RSS was and still don’t understand the mechanisms as to how blog posts end up in nice neat excerpts or full posts in one place.  All I know is to click subscribe via RSS, choose the reader, in this case Google Reader and all the posts end up in one spot.
2. Google Reader is easy to maintain – tagging, organizing and labeling are things that DO make sense to me.  They’re just means of organizing work flow.  I could tag, label and organize to my hearts content.  I could change the names, move subscriptions the whole nine with just a couple of clicks.
3. Google Reader works everywhere – I’ve had both excellent and craptastic pcs, phones, browsers and operating systems during my years of using Google Reader and it was operable on every single one of them.
4. Google Reader was social – to the extent that you could share to your social spaces with a click.  I have shared stuff on every social media account I’ve ever had.  I’ve shared to my blogs as well with additional commentary.
5. Google Reader was for everybody – technical expertise of any kind was not required for use. Just click the ability to click.

All of that comes crashing to halt, momentarily anyway for me.  I guess I’ll check out Lifehacker and see what they have to say about alternatives.  I’d like to know what you have to say about the end of Google Reader.  Let me know in the comments.  As for Google, shame on you!