I’m not the only one, Om Malik says it is his second most used Google application after Gmail. Ditto for me. I’d like to see Google publish the real figures on the supposed decline in Reader usage. I bet it was still huge. This is just a typical big company move to push their customers, I mean products, into toeing the line they’ve drawn. They want us to go to Google+ or some darned thing where they can sell more ads or beat some competitor into submission.
What will be next, Google, turning off GMail? Or are you too intent on bashing Microsoft over the head with it?
I’m tired of companies treating me like the product instead of the customer when they’re ad-driven. It’s a sham and a bait-and-switch. It is the root of all the evil Google claims they will never do, and keep doing with ever increasing frequency.
If you think I’ll move from Reader to some other Google product, drop dead. It ain’t gonna happen. From here on out, I will look to minimize my involvement with anything new from Google. In fact, I’m shutting down my PPC advertising as soon as I am done here. At least where that is concerned, I am a customer, and I can vote with my pocket book. Learn how to save your data out of reader here.
This is bad news indeed for bloggers all over the world, who should find their own ways of letting Google know they’re not pleased.
A Modest Proposal
What Google should have done, is ceded Reader, source code and all, to a company that actually values Blogs and Bloggers. How about the WordPress folks? They should take it up, or failing that, create a WordPress theme that emulates reader and make it available for free via WordPress.com. Matt Mullenweg, are you listening?
Failing WordPress, either Microsoft or Yahoo should dive onto this just for the customer goodwill. I bet both companies would get back folks who haven’t been enthusiastic about them for years if they could field a good replacement within 3 years.
Postscript
A quick perusal of the comments in these various blog (blog == duh!) posts about Google Reader tells me there are lots of unhappy products, um customers, out there when it comes to this latest Google decree:
And, here is a list of potential alternatives:
OldReader: Very slow as I write this.
NewsBlur: Down as I write this.
Rolio: Awesomely slow as I write this.
GoodNoows: Performance not too bad.
There are likely more, but I am too disgusted to root around for them right now. Notice I’ve commented on site status, which has been poor this afternoon, no doubt due to the tiny few who still used Reader (yeah, right, there are zillions of us) looking for alternatives. I haven’t looked into any of them yet, so I have no favorites to recommend. These sites are all about to get a huge windfall of users as they choose alternatives, but it remains to be seen which ones can really take up the exodus.
There’s also things like Feedly, NetVibes and Flipboard, but I don’t want that ilk. I don’t want a magazine. I subscribe to nearly 200 blogs and need a power tool that lets me triage minimalist summary lists the way Reader did so I can get right to the good stuff. I also don’t need an iOS or other mobile app. While I often access Reader via my iPad, I also want desktop access without the nuisance of an app.