I am ridiculously upset about Google shutting down Google Reader. I’m trying to write an article about it, but right now there’s too much foam coming out of the keyboard and not enough measured thoughtfulness. I use Google Reader every day and that is not an exaggeration. I was working on an article called “How Google Reader Helps Me Use Facebook Without Punching My Screen in Frustration.” But Google Reader is not social and not sexy enough so out the door it goes. Between this and the issues noted with Google Alerts, I’m becoming very wary of Google in general and painfully aware of how Google can come in, launch a tool in a space, destroy all the competition (finding a good alert service is an exercise in frustration) and then exit the space or fail to support the tool.
Twitter now supports line breaks. And I’m left wondering: do we really need to break up 140 characters of text? Apparently so…
From Copyblogger: 12 Ways to Connect, Create, and Collaborate using Google Hangouts.
Thanks to whoever mentioned this on Twitter — sourcing is one thing Undrip is not good at, but anyway: Ampergram — spell stuff using Instagram photos.
Need printable graph paper templates? Check out http://paperkit.net/ (Thanks Smashing Magazine!)
If you’re getting annoyed that Java is hogging all the security vulnerability news, feel better: Flash is having issues.
Google is threatening (I mean warning) that the next-generation Penguin update is going to be really big. Oh goody.
Still trying to get it: The Heavyweight Guide to Getting Started on Pinterest.
More Pinterest: it has started an analytics platform.
Is YouTube going to get a rival? GOOD! Also, good morning, Internet…
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I have moved to Feedly on Firefox. It’s a bit different to Google Reader, but I think it will grow on me.
I’m going with Feedly, too. Upset and sad and disappointed, though.
NewsFox for me.
I’m also ridiculously upset.
I’m tired of having useless, tiresome changes forced on me against my will.
I’m sick of new software, new applications, new interfaces, and ridiculously complex upgrades. I’m sick of being unable to do things I used to do. I hate clicking through a dozen irrelevant options to do some obvious, ordinary thing.
But don’t get me started. 8-}
Losing Google Reader is a disaster, especially as they seem to have made it as difficult as possible to export your feeds in a format anyone seems to understand. What was wrong with OPML, for goodness sake? I have no idea how I’m now going to handle my feeds (and I have a LOT of feeds) across devices.
I’m starting to think I’ve about had it with Google.
I’ve started using feedly too although it has some quirks that I am still getting used to. And it doesn’t seem to mark articles as read if I read them on my phone so I wind up reading things twice. I use Reader all the time. Google has just lost a lot of my trust, and is making me glad I never did switch to gmail – I have an account but don’t use it much.
It should come as no surprise. Google is doing exactly what other large companies, such as Yahoo!, do – or Twitter with Posterous recently; Delicious and Picnik not too long ago; the list is long and growing every day. They snap up the product and/or the talent and leave things to rot.
That’s why you can’t trust the cloud or any service (free or paid for) you haven’t built yourself or whose code you can’t access and use.
I am tired of carefully picking a new service, getting used to it, integrating it into how I work, and then seeing it be killed off, with a mad scramble to save my data (not that I can then use it easily in some cases), sometimes unsuccessfully. I’m tired of being forced into services I don’t want to use and new interfaces of existing services that take away the functionality that’s crucial to me (::cough:: Delicious ::cough::). I’m tired of “social” being forced on me for things that are not social at all.
Etc… or I’ll just keep ranting on forever.