Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
On the End of Google Reader
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2013 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Google Reader will end on July 1st, in just a few days. It looks like many of my friends are switching to the Newsblur service, or running an instance themselves. If you subscribe to this blog in Google Reader, you should save your data and switch to an alternate service.
As you might remember from my 2010 post "Insta-RSS Feeds: A Case Study In Freedom", we've known for some time that Google Reader was not to be trusted:
Whether it's deliberate or negligent, making a webpage without an RSS feed is a way of disempowering readers, and of making it slightly harder to vacuum that data into the market-flattening maw. It's like how certain archives will keep a controversial document in a room and only let people read it in that room, no cameras, no notepaper. Google plays nice with these kinds of restrictions, so site owners can opt out and then Google Reader users won't be able to make or read feeds for those pages. Not an antifeature, per se, but definitely a technical restriction on the user to enforce other people's whims. Scrape 'N' Feed has no such scruples, of course. If you don't want me to know what's on that page, don't put it on the web.I want you to be able to read my blog. Here's the RSS feed.
