Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Google Reader Bites The Dust

Well, fuck.

RSS never really did catch on with the masses, and I imagine that’s a big part of why Google Reader will be closing up shop on July 1st.  Why maintain a service that’s difficult to monetize and hardly anyone outside of the tech community knows about anyway?  Google Reader is going the way of the dodo as part of a round of what Google is calling Spring Cleaning.

For those of us who ARE in the know and have been using Google Reader (either directly, like me, or indirectly through one of the many apps that syncs to your Google Reader feed like NewsNetWire) for years and love it, the news comes as a pretty big punch to the gut.

Google is offering a way to get your subscription data out as an XML file, but the question is, where do I stick it once I’ve got it?  I guess it’s time to start looking out for some alternate RSS reader.

Any suggestions?