Random links

[liv]

Lots of people saying sensible things about Google closing down its Reader (RSS feed reading system). j4 linked to an article with a fairly novel take on the issue, and one I agree with: the loss of private and silent reading. Actually I left Google Reader a while back because I thought it had too much social, it wasn't achieving the goals Roberts sets out of being able to read and think without getting caught up in popularity contests and emotional echo chambers. But those are certainly my goals. ursamajor makes a good point about why proposed Reader alternatives aren't if they're "popularity" algorithm-driven, ooh-shiny picture magazine style social networking apps.

Personally, I'm pretty happy with Netvibes as a reader that lets me read and doesn't broadcast my reading habits to friends or advertisers, nor shout at me to "share" the latest cool / shiny / funny meme. And it's not fuelled by self-reinforcing outrage cycles. I should mention about Netvibes that the actual feed reader part of it is kind of a side-benefit; what it actually is a business-focused analytics tool, which is why the paid version costs several hundred dollars a month. I like the fact that its business model is very much users as customers rather than users as product, and if all you want out of it is the feed reader, the free version is more than adequate. And as for social reading, I am basically using Twitter for that; people retweet interesting articles and I read them, which fulfils a different niche from blogs and ongoing conversations I want to follow on a regular basis. Right now I don't think I need anything more fully featured than that for social.

I am not so impressed by those who are being smug about "what do you expect if you rely on a free, proprietary service?!" For one thing, Google is a giant, they have pretty successfully killed off all possible rivals in this market niche, so what choice does one have? For a second thing, not everybody has the technical skill, time, spoons or resources to install stuff completely under their control on their own server. And if that were in fact the default behaviour any time you wanted to use any sort of service, can you imagine the security holes amateurs would be introducing all over the place? Yes, we can have a conversation about the importance of open standards as opposed to proprietary walled garden systems. That's not going to be achieved usefully by looking down on people who do in fact use Google's services, or Facebook (again, it sucks, but it's pretty much killed off all possible rivals, so what do you do?)

Talking of sharing information and standards, skibbley has a good rant on what he calls microbarriers. I think his piece is a very good example of why accessibility / usability is good for everybody, it's not just a concession generously made to those poor unfortunate disabled people. And a very big part of usability is presenting text as actual text, not expletive pictures of expletive text! (PDF: bad enough that it's proprietary, but it's a graphical format, which is useful if you need things to display exactly as composed, but extremely sub-optimal way of transmitting informational content.)

And finally, something that's cool and not really at all related to the above: Sica on Making Light posted a wonderful comment about Icelandic words for weather which appeals to the language geek in me. Also, If the person who made the awesome post about Swedish terms with stacked-up consonants recently wouldn't mind making a public version of it I would love to link to that too. I'll put it here as a guest post if you don't want your name associated with it.

Comments

[threeringedmoon]

Yes: so many of the "use twitter for discovery instead" misses the point that one of the reasons I use(d) Reader was to follow updates to small blogs that are NOT popular.

[ursamajor]

This, this, this. I follow several hundred blogs in Reader, some of which do post 20 stories a day (hem hem, Lifehacker and your ilk), but the majority were personal or niche blogs (hello, cycle chic/bike-centric non-roadie bike blogs) that might update a few times a week/month/year. Twitter's ability to let you scroll back for things you've missed is minimal and shrinking, and even its "lists" aren't all that helpful for this purpose. And Facebook's is even worse.

[liv]

Yes, DW has really spoiled me for static, chronological lists that stay there when I'm offline for a few days. I care more about being able to read everything comprehensively than the instant gratification of new stuff showing up.

[liv]

Definitely, a feed reader serves a completely different purpose for me from reading articles recommended by my friends. I do that as well, definitely, but sometimes after I've discovered something this way, I want to keep following and see where the conversation goes. And I do read a bunch of things that are not at all popular because they are full of thoughtful, nuanced articles rather than outragey or image-heavy linkbait.

[ptc24]

PDF... the standard quip is that it bears the same relationship to a good document format as a hamburger bears to a cow.

(One of these days we'll be able to make that quip again without thinking about horse)

[liv]

I don't actually hate PDFs; they're completely fine for things like downloading journal articles where it's somewhat important to preserve the layout in a device-independent way. But I do hate people emailing me or linking to PDFs when plain text would do the job better. Though I suppose that's not unlike hamburgers, if what you want is a quick, tasty meal then starting with a live cow is really not the answer.

[amadi]

I've been using the Mail app that comes part and parcel of my operating system as an RSS reader for the better part of a decade. Why do people think that they need to set up a server or use a service of some sort to read feeds?

That said, Apple stripped RSS out of Mail in the OSX current update. Thunderbird still has RSS capability, but Mozilla has all but abandoned Thunderbird and it's nearly orphaned. With Google getting out, it's pretty clear that the giants of tech find RSS to be outmoded, and we should be asking why. They seem to think that they know something we don't.

[liv]

That's true, there's a range of desktop programs you can use, whether specialist tools or functionality within things like browsers, mailers, OSes etc. The reason people want to use online tools is because they want to be able to synch their reading between different devices, home computer, work computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone etc. That's honestly not such a big deal for me; the kind of reading I use an RSS reader for is something I mostly do from my own home computer.

I'm a bit scared by your observation that serious tech companies are pulling out of RSS. I hope the reason isn't that there's more money to be made in popularity driven stuff. At least RSS is an open standard, so hopefully hobbyist readers will continue to be around even if the big guys stop supporting it.

[ursamajor]

I am not so impressed by those who are being smug about "what do you expect if you rely on a free, proprietary service?!"

Ugh, yes, Dave Winer in particular made me want to reach through my screen yesterday and shake him by the short hairs. And while things like Fever and Gregarius might be workable solutions for a tech-oriented person like me, it was eye-opening for me to see just how wide a variety of my friends were devastated by the GR closure announcement.

Thanks for the "nonsocial" link, too. I think part of why I want a more social option is because I feel like Pinboard mostly fills the nonsocial option for me, or maybe it's more accurate to say that it's great for archiving, but I don't feel like I've found the same sharing/crowdsourced vetted linkpool that I had in the old del.icio.us. So hearing all the talk about "sharebros" when GR got rid of the sharing aspect there, combined with some of the frustrations I'm finding in Facebook and Twitter, is probably behind my desire for a different social option.

Still, I definitely agree that privacy is not dead, continues to be a concern, and needs to be better addressed by every web service - especially as I find more of my nonfiction reading being housed online rather than in a book or library, it's a good reminder that there is value in the (American?) library policy of not sharing patron reading records, for reasons ranging from being a newbie to a particular subject to embarrassment to safety. It's like how I find Spotify annoying - nobody needs to see *every* song you listen to. But if they had an option within Spotify to share a particular song or album you were listening to, that's much less spammy, more personal, and an active choice you're making to represent yourself. And you could still go along not sharing any of your music listening choices. There need to be more options for this kind of thought-out sharing in existing tools, IMO.

[liv]

Thank you, this is really thinky. I really do hate people writing about tech in a smug, superior way. Those no0bs that you look down on, they're the ones who fall for phishes and end up having their websites and computers used for spam, which chokes up all the good things about the internet. If you actually tried communicating with people with respectful and helpful way, it would do more to make the web a more geek-friendly place than mocking people who maybe didn't learn to program from the cradle.

People keep saying the future of the web is curation, not just content-creation. I do wish there were a better middle-ground between spamming all your friends with everything you do online, and making it really difficult to use the internet in a social way. I want it to be easy to share links and content, I most certainly don't want it to be frictionless.

[ofearthandstars]

Interesting. I moved off all Google platforms a little over a year ago when I felt that they'd really turned on their "don't be evil" promise. I felt they were strangling out the remainder of the web, and their privacy policy and tracking features are right up there with Facebook's. One of the things I missed was Google Reader, but I was able to get by by following some feeds in Dreamwidth and some on my tablet using a generic "News" app. However, I don't follow a huge number of blogs and so I could easily make that switch.

It's nice to see that there are alternatives that have cropped up in the meantime. I'm sad to see that The Old Reader has no other authentication outside of Google/Facebook login. It does feel like the web is growing increasingly smaller for those of us who don't want to hand over all of our personal information for the sake of connection.

[liv]

Welcome, by the way. Yes, I started escaping out of Google's clutches sometime in the last year. They've really lost my trust and goodwill in a big way. I sort of miss Gmail, but only sort of, it's definitely got worse in recent years.

It's definitely true that authentication is a hard problem, but delegating everything to FB and Google is an incredibly awful solution. And you're absolutely right, there's only so much privacy I'm willing to give up to be able to use the internet.

[pretty_panther]

I've not been impacted much by this as I don't use a reader and tend to just to save links to blogs I follow outside of blogger, but it has been very interesting for me to see how people have reacted to it all.

[liv]

That makes a lot of sense to me. I'm by no means a heavy user of RSS myself, and I've been boycotting Google for a while now anyway. But it's very interesting to see the reactions to this announcement.

[lilacsigil]

I've started using feedly as an experiment and it was quite easy to switch off all the SHARE SHARE SHARE buttons/links/sidebars.

[liv]

Good to know! I'm still a bit reluctant, because if a tool is mainly designed for sharing and social, it probably isn't going to support my private reading use-case well, even if it does do so a bit. But then again, I'm using a tool intended for business analytics as my feed reader, so I'm not in much of a position to talk.