Google’s Killing Its RSS Reader. How Will Your Readership Survive?
By Ron Daly
There are times when the leader of a business knows he or she has to kill off a product. In some cases, this is celebrated. In others, it’s met with many loud groans and much sadness.
Google Reader is a perfect example of the latter. Widely used, widely adored, free to all – but on July 1, it gets the proverbial knock on the head from Google. This simple, lovable web service is going to that big farm upstate to chase rabbits. Yeah, that’s it. Rabbits.
Hopefully, this won’t affect the “CU Blogosphere” too much. Heaven knows there are plenty of places to get your fill, including CU Insight, the CU Watercolor, various Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds…the list goes on, but you get the point. Just because Google Reader dies, that doesn’t mean the stories stop coming.
But for those RSS-heavies, it’s going to be a rough few months. Where will they go for their stories, their thought pieces, their news?
Humbly, I submit a few suggestions.
- Outlook Users, Rejoice! – I’m forever in Outlook (Neil Diamond, where are you? I’ve got a song for you and you don’t even need a new melody!), so the Reader news doesn’t bother me that much – I had one of my Nerds-in-Residence set up my RSS feeds in my Outlook. It’s a simple, painless process and it means you can use Outlook for more that just email churn and booking meetings. Here’s the Outlook team on how to set it up for yourself.
- Mac Users, Hit the App Store – The Mac App store has a few dozen RSS-app options, a few of them free, the rest only a small amount. One thing I did notice – many apps are “Google Reader Apps”, meaning they integrated with Google Reader. Wonder if their developers will try and adapt or simply close up shop.One highly recommended app, Fever, is $30 (yikes!) and its developer has stated, publicly, he really doesn’t have the time to work on it. Plus, you self-host the service. A big turn-off for the non-technical.
So what are our lonely Mac Lovers going to do? I turned to my go-to on things like this, Jimmy Marks, and – after several minutes of teasing him (he’s a big-time Google Reader Believer) – asked what he planned on doing.