I remember using NetNewsWire on my G3 iBook back in the day. I think we were all on 10.2 Jaguar and you’d add feeds to NetNewsWire and there was no syncing with a second computer but I loved the offline syncing. I could sync 50 feeds at the public library and go home to read them since we didn’t have home Internet back then. Newsgator bought NNW in 2005 while I was working at Apple. I could then view all of the NNW feeds on the web or within the application and it remembered which stories I had read and which ones I didn’t.
It wasn’t until August of 2010 that I started looking for alternatives to NNW. I had a Google Reader account that was never used. Really, it was iPad that had me seeking out a better news reader. NetNewsWire was out for iOS but there were so many competitors that I tried them all. It seemed clear that NNW was not keeping up with others and all of the others exclusively supported Google Reader’s platform to the point where, you open the application and are asked for your Google login.
In late 2010, I finally switched to Google Reader and left Newsgator who, at the time had given up on public RSS. Unable to monetize it, they abandoned the functionality so that it became Google Reader was the only game in town. Yeah, there were other RSS readers but GReader was supported by the most people and in 2010, Google was king and no one really wanted to compete with them on anything.
Reeder for iOS (iPhone and then iPad) changed the way I consumed news. While my use of RSS slowly faded, my usage of Reeder on iPhone, iPad and now Mac OS has remained a daily activity. I love Reeder for Mac. It’s so perfectly designed and easy to use. Like other RSS applications, it relied on Google Reader’s back-end
Today, Google Reader closed up shop.
While a lot of companies have tried to replace the functionality, this is yet another nail in the coffin against free services that are subsidized by advertisers. I have Fever installed on my web server. I paid for a license and pay the server costs. It’s my installation and I control it. Reeder for iPhone support it and soon, the iPad and Mac will receive the same support. I’m tired of switching from one free service to the next and being screwed over every step of the way. My use of Facebook and Twitter will also soon stop. I no longer have an interest in using free services. I uninstalled Instagram today as well.
While how I use Reader (the application) will not change once it supports my Fever installation, I can say that the reasons so many people gave for the end of Google Reader are still confusing to me.
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Maybe I’m old. That has to be it. I’m just an old guy who doesn’t understand how people use the web. The way I argue the utility of RSS (as a news reading utility) is like being a fan of a novelist. If you read every new Tom Clancy book on release day again and again and don’t want to miss a single one of his works, would you rely on Facebook’s news feed to tell you when he has a new book out? Sure, you can like Tom Clancy on Facebook and make friends with people who are as big of fans of his work as you are but the way algorithms work on Facebook, if you don’t’ like every one of the status updates and interact with the pages you like or are friends with, you’ll see less of their updates until you don’t see them at all. You missed the work from someone you’re a fan of because you didn’t interact with them enough.
RSS doesn’t have prejudice against a busy schedule or a failure to interact with something by liking or leaving a comment.
I want to see every article from 20 blogs. I don’t want RSS to guess what articles I like, to recommend things for me to read. I want to read every Laughing Squid post because the blog is fantastic. If I rely on Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr, I’ll miss something because there are 10 hour stretches where I’m not in front of a computer. RSS is a queue of things published by a blog or news service in chronological order and unread until I explicitly read it or mark as read.
While I think the fundamental premise of Fever is “show me what’s hot” as in “show me similar stories that multiple feeds I read are all linking too is a cure to a non-issue, it’s the only self-hosted RSS service I could find that is pay for and offers support. If you need an algorithm to show you hot news from your hundreds of feeds, you are subscribed to too many feeds. I have 20, so I read things as they come in and don’t ask for a “hotness meter” to tell me what to read.
Fever is flawed for the problem it’s solving but, as a feed reader with device support, it’s exactly what I need especially since I own it and not someone else.
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I don’t want an algorithm deciding what news I see. RSS is one of the last remaining technologies not full of advertisements and not guessing what you want to learn based on your location, time of day you visit a site and your behavioral data. The fundamental problem algorithms try to solve is that we have too much news to read so they filter it for us. The fact that we’re all becoming digital hoarders isn’t even discussed.
So Google Reader is gone. RSS reader software still lives on with Fever underneath. It’s a shame that we as a group decided that RSS wasn’t useful. Tech geeks got it but no one on the outside did. Maybe there will be a day when blogs stop publishing RSS feeds. I sure hope note. That’s a huge fear of mine.