On the death of Google Reader

2013-03-14T22:17:00+00:00

You can probably tell the sort of on-line company I keep from the deluge of noise on the social networks regarding Google's decision to shut down Reader. However we shouldn't be that surprised. In fact some companies that source content from Reader have anticipated the need to collect content themselves.

I of course will have to make a decision at some point. However I'll not do it today like a lot of Reader users have. The rush to try out alternatives has over-whelmed some open source based projects who were quietly growing organically. I don't envy those that have to suddenly gear up their back-end systems because an Internet behemoth gave us 2593 hours notice to sort out a replacement.

I'm mulling over the difference between self-hosting and having someone else do it. I'm not overly worried about going for convenience if I know I can get my data back if I need to. In fact the knowledge that you can theoretically self-host might be enough. To be fair to Google their Data Liberation team made exporting all my Reader data easy.

Before I make a choice I need to decide what my priorities are. Currently I subscribe to 250+ RSS feeds. Obviously I don't read every single post but I make extensive use of tags to quickly process through stuff I do need to see when I need to see it. Aside from news, blog posts, funny cat pictures I also subscribe to other data feeds like bug trackers, code repositories, and other data sources. I of course want access to all of this data at any point on one of a number of devices. This makes a web hosted solution pretty much a must. There is no point having the data on my desktop when I'm somewhere else. From my point of view I want it to be open source compatible because if the company hosting now decides it no longer wants to I'll only have to move the data and not break my work-flow.

It would also be very useful if it had a public API so others can interact with the data. I don't need the solution to be all provided by one company. It's perfectly fine to have multiple 3rd parties sorting out the Android integration. I might even look to doing something to integrate it with my favourite editor (the name of which even my non-geek readers probably know by now). So far my experiment with moving all of IRC and IM into Emacs seems to be working well and should be a subject of another post.

Are you a Reader user? What are your criteria for it's eventual replacement? Is RSS just a dying protocol or is the need to aggregate and sift through data becoming more important?

There may well be a much better way of solving this problem around the corner. I certainly am open to persuasion. But don't take away my current preferred solution until I'm convinced I'm ready to switch ;-)

Web 2.0 apps that are worth it?

2006-10-18T14:29:00+01:00

Web 2.0 is a lovely little marketing buzzword that is bandied about a lot. It refers to the concept of applications running on your web browser. It used to be that people thought Java apps would be what everyone would want but it turns out that AJAX can provide you with quite a powerful application experience.

The one I've been playing with quite a bit over the last few days is Google's RSS Reader. RSS readers are an exercise in saving the time poor from too many clicks. I used to use Liferea and then when that stalled I started using the Fixefox extension Sage. However I've finally come across a web application that is truly comfortable to use.

It seems a natural fit of course. RSS is a product of the web - why would you want to leave your web-browser to read stuff? Much as I find the Live Bookmark capability of Firefox useful it doesn't give the status view of what is new. However Google Reader allows you to set up aggregate feeds really easily which are an ideal compliment of Firefox's live feed view. The natural integration of feeds into the web environment is one of the key selling points of the reader for me.

Another thing which is very well done is the keyboard shortcuts. I've not seen them used so widely in a web application before. I'm definitely a keyboard person. Compared to navigating with a mouse it's far more efficient to use a couple of well placed keys. On Reader they have made the process of browsing through articles pretty painless. Switching between feed "tags" is a simple 2+n key sequence which auto-completes to the best fit tag within 2 or 3 keys. "Staring" and sharing items are similarly easy operations.

The one big bonus of all of this of course is that it's independent of which machine I'm on. I can pick up from were I left of if I'm on the laptop, desktop or work machine. For this reason Google's Reader picks up the first Bennee award for a truly use-able web application.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - rss

On the death of Google Reader

Web 2.0 apps that are worth it?