Dave Winer: Goodbye Google Reader
Dave Winer – Goodbye Google Reader:
“I won't miss it. Never used the damn thing. Didn't trust the idea of a big company like Google's interests being so aligned with mine that I could trust them to get all my news.”
Totally agree. Doesn’t hurt me. I’m using NetNewsWire without its Google Reader sync functionality; all my subscriptions are on my local disk. Sync would have been nice but since the demise of Bloglines (which I used for a long time) I don’t trust any free Web service with this. Turns out I was right.
To paraphrase a popular song: “How many times must a man be surprised by 'spring cleaning' before he can see that he can’t rely on Google? The answer, my friend…”
I’m sorry, but if you have a slight understanding of the tech world you’re stupid to think any free service cares about your content, your URLs, your identity, your e-mail address, or your feed subscriptions. Google Mail, Google+, Facebook, Twitter will all cease to exist or do bad things to your data at some point in the future. If you’re in this for the long term, host your stuff yourselves, or pay someone for it. And keep local backups in an open format.
(NetNewsWire is also free, but since I’m running it locally I can migrate away from it on my own terms if necessary.)