Thin Skin
The whole flap over Google Reader is a little weird to me. I remember some hand-wringing in the portal era of the web that we would see rampant over-consolidation, killing the independent nature of web publishing. There was that “keyword” period that was sort of the last reincarnation of even-then-bygone AOL and CompuServe’s walled gardens. You went to yourchosenportal.com and typed a keyword versus doing an open-ended web search or going directly to a URL, a thin but somewhat effective lock-in tactic for the less adept or brave.
One of the worst implementations of all this, which amazingly enough has survived in zombied form to this day, is go.com. Despite the look and feel and noisy autoplay advertisement, this is copyrighted by Buena Vista and has a Disney-themed logo. You really only know go.com from URLs like espn.go.com, which is essentially a vestigial auto-forward but survives to this day on ABC’s namesake properties as well (but not Disney’s!).
The federated nature of the service provision marks this as a failed Big Media venture, not a Tech one: weather by AccuWeather (not ABC?), maps by MapQuest, search by Yahoo (although AccuWeather.com uses Google). This was a website venture by a pure media company without the wherewithal to launch something like Bing to back it up from a technical end.
Now we’re in a weird, similar, but also totally different era, where we kind of live on these sprawling futuristic plantations and argue about the processors in the cellphones licensed by our webmail providers. The “fan boy” concept arises from the elective dependence that arises from all this; a lot of the economics of these thinly-justified “free” services relies on the network effect, value proportional to the square of the user count. In other words, your personal position is enriched by an increased overall user base.
This leads to a lot of thin skins, and people feeling like they have what skin they possess firmly in the game on behalf of their service don. We wait with cupped hands to learn what note-taking service Google will kick down the hill to us (it’s Keep), and then worry that its $0 price will undercut Evernote. It’s a weird oligopolistic thing, and hearing people gripe about Reader, perhaps the highest-profile failure case in this era, shows the weakness in the system.
Reader for me wasn’t a compelling product. Any RSS reader written by e-mail people has always seemed to me as only effective for low-volume feeds, as pointing to rss.news.cnn.com or whatever will leave you with some thousand “unread items” that very quickly fade in relevance. There are obviously ways to get around this, but I never saw the low-volume and high-volume cases merging into a unified experience.
I heard about IFTTT’s use case from an article by a Reader refugee, and for me this kind of nails the low-volume case while also merging with my normal reading “work”-flow, making it a transparent thing. This is also why I question how IFTTT stays in business without sending me a bill - which I would pay if reasonable and proportional to my trifling throughput in the system, by the way, or roll my own on my server, which would probably be a 30-line Python script. They’re too transparent.
For high-volume sources I’m toying with Twitter but leaning toward just continuing to visit the websites directly, exit through the gift shop, and provide my support in the “conventional” ways, with my eyeballs drifting across advertisements. Was this so bad in the first place?
But that’s me.
People want to get all lathered up and talk about how Google ruined their lives because they released a useful free service that made inferior costly services or applications seem stupid, then pulled the service and thus made those inferior services more attractive and ripe for improvement.
As opposed to notetaking, which is pretty much an unperfected holy grail in the true personal assistant smartphone era, RSS feeds have always been a bit of a sop to the technically adept, kind of like how DVD ripping and DVRs are despised by the entertainment industry but tolerated because nobody has figured out how to make them disruptively easy or useful enough to gum up the works. RSS feeds can drive you to the website, but with clever tools like Pocket you can pretty much use them as a way to bypass site ads and referral content altogether.
Pulling Reader was a message to us freeloaders that services not aligned with the big goals of the organization need to become boutique products, and boutique products are (1) generally not free, and (2) generally not provided by Google. We freeloaders need to accept this and look beyond the plantation when we don’t like the offerings.