Google turns out the lights on the blogosphere

Google announced this week it is discontinuing its RSS reader service on July 1st. I wonder if this will turn out to be a somewhat tone deaf decision on their part. In general it seems like Google likes any service they can provide that gets me to login to their system. The message here seems to be “go find some competitor that does this”, and maybe have a look at search providers, email providers, and video services. I’m sure the users of Google reader are a small subset of the internet population, but they are still likely a larger chunk of the early adopter population.

I’ll miss RSS approach as it allowed things to be “marked done” rather than scanned repeatedly. On the other hand, my RSS screen has some of the same features that a stale next action list can have. Lots of “I should be reading that” feeds I subscribed to at some point but that I didn’t actually read much.

I’m looking at moving to pulse.me, which can import subscriptions from google, but not from its web interface ironically. The import shows all the feeds I’ve ever subscribed to, and thus I’m going through my old subscriptions and seeing all the popular blogs I followed in the mid 2000’s that slowly (or suddenly) faded into inactivity, much as this site has in recent years. It was an enjoyable period of learning and diversion for me and I appreciated both these sites and the readers that visited here.

I still actively follow this blogs comments closely and update add-ins with feature requests as quickly as I can, but I’m not using the tools as actively as I used to. I do use outlinker daily for rapidly processing my outlook inbox, but I mainly use it to delete/archive/skip-count my messages rather than push them somewhere. Map2excel comes in very handy on occasion.

So how will you all keep up with blogs going forward? How are you learning of this post? If you’ve been using RSS, you can always now follow the site on twitter or facebook, or try the subscribe link on the map to the right (not sure its working).

I have some parting thoughts reflecting on what I learned in the area of GTD, but I’ll leave them for another post. The question is, will anyone be alerted when it goes up….

AO

1 Comment »

  1. Peter Knight said,

    March 16, 2013 @ 8:21 am

    I still have your site in my RSS reader, I switched to RSSowl quite a while ago to reduce my footprint with Google. I was very, very fond of mindreader, it was such fun to use, but stopped using it and started evolving my own app using WordPress and javascript. Mindreader was a window into what’s possible and a big inspiration, thank you for that. Outlinker is amazing too and I’d be using it today if it weren’t reliant on Outlook (Outlook is too slow, same with Resultsmanager/GyroQ when it comes down to it).

    I’m a bit sad with Gyronix, it seems like a dead end to me because it doesn’t seem to innovate. I’m not sad to see Google Reader go, because they weren’t innovating either and it’s better for the web if they (Google as a whole) aren’t so ubiquitous, with people using only their services. I wouldn’t be surprised if RSS get’s a new lease of life, blogging is becoming more popular again and there’s no other easy way to keep track of sites across the web. And now there’s a more competitive reasons to build a better RSS product since the biggest competitor is gone (it was hard to compete with free & fast).

    So are you still doing general GTD and if so why not? Look forward to the GTD post.

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