The word came down this week that Google is retiring Google Reader. For the uninitiated, it's an app that aggregates content from the RSS feeds of whatever sites you point it at. So for example, I can point it to CoasterBuzz, the New York Times and my friend's Flickr photos, and see that content (or links to it) in one convenient place.
The outrage and backlash has been insane. People are pissed. Reader is the gateway to content for a whole lot of people. Diana and I are certainly in that camp. Before that I used Bloglines, which was similar. What makes it so useful is that it's a great way to curate what you're interested by source. Sure, you get some cruft in the mix, but I still find it enormously useful.
I'm realistic enough to understand some things change. I publish news from CoasterBuzz to both Twitter and Facebook, because I know that's where the people are. I know that the people using both of those is greater than those who use the RSS feed. Still, the suggestion by some blowhards that RSS is irrelevant or not useful are smoking crack.
RSS is one of the Internet's great triumphs. It was a technical thing that most every publisher agreed to support, and then the browser makers started to support it back in the day. It's one of the rare instances where everyone didn't fight over standards and different variations. It became ubiquitous almost automatically.
Its only real weakness was trying to explain to people what it is, but most of the readers, including Google Reader, made it pretty easy. You just pasted in the URL of the site or content you wanted to syndicate, and it probably figured it out for you. Diana is not a computer geek (though admittedly above average in skill), and she had no problem getting it right away.
The pundits insist that there are other better ways to find content. They bring up Twitter, which sucks because of its shitstorm style of data. (And don't insist that I'm using it wrong... I hate that argument.) Not everyone publishes links to Twitter, and I'm certainly not interested in consuming everything others link to. Facebook linking is mostly to stuff that reinforces each user's echo chamber. The point is that it's not curation by my hand.
Ironically, the original Digg did an OK job at curating stuff I was interested in, by category. The "wisdom of crowds" did actually work for a short period of time. Even better, the new owners have announced they want to build an RSS reader, hopefully before Google's goes away.
Google has been doing a lot of stupid things lately. It disappoints me.
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