Marco has an optimistic take: Google Reader, by dominating RSS with a free product, has stifled competition and innovation, and in a few years things will be better than ever.
1. Drive competing services out of business with a free service (subsidized by a profitable product). 2. Cancel free service. 3. ???
— John Siracusa (@siracusa) March 13, 2013
Does this help? I think there’s some kind of workalike available.
I’ve tried Feedly before, and didn’t like it’s interface. But I’m sure I’ll wind up with Feedly or one of the other alternatives.
I hated Feedly … until I went into settings and turned 90% of it off. Now it’s all right, and similar enough in feel to what I was used to (google reader) as not to bother me much.
I really wish the ‘keep unread’ button was much larger, instead of microscopic and unlabeled, but that’s a quibble.
When Bloglines went down a few years ago, I went with Netvibes. I love it. You can make a feedreader view, which has some customizability as far as appearance, but basically works the same way that Bloglines did (which I daresay is similar to Google Reader, but I never used the latter).
But there’s also a widget view, and the widgets can be anything from activities and puzzles to useful applications such as calculators and timers. I used mine to make a kind of cockpit for managing my job search, and another for my research. I describe it on my blog: http://tanglethis.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/blogs-logs-and-plugs/
I’m experimenting with netvibes right now. I’ll let y’all know how it goes.
Boy do I feel stupid. I don’t even know what this is.
Would a campaign to get Google to release the code for projects that they’ve canceled be reasonable?
I had a similar thought, Nancy. There could be legal issues, but if they’re genuinely canceling a project, I don’t see a reason why they couldn’t get one of their lawyers to write up a conditional licensing agreement that you have to accept as the cost of using or seeing their code, and have the main point of that agreement be that you indemnify Google for everything anywhere ever. They could have a free option (non-commercial, and you don’t owe them any money) and a paid option (where you still get the code free but if you end up making a product that uses it, you pay a nominal license fee) and make it a profit center.
There seems to be no interest in doing something like that on their part. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I could easily see there being some real, bona fide reason they just can’t do it, that I’m ignorant of.
Or they could just be assholes.
I was thinking that a loud public campaign to get Google to release code for their cancelled products might help.
Tim O’Reilly agrees with us.
More discussion of whether it makes sense for Google to release the code for Google Reader