Forward

It’s biting you in you back now. Google recently decided to shut down their RSS newsreader (deadline is July, 1st). That service enabled many people to collect and read their news at a central point without too much hassle. The service was free, nobody paid for it.

Still people are complaining about the shut down of the service. Now.

In the meantime the RSS extension of the Chrome browser has been removed as well. That’s a browser like Firefox or Opera, also provided by Google. Also free of any charge.

The newsreader from Google was probably a very nice and neat. I can’t really say, because I’ve never used it. But there must have been a reason that people used it. A wild guess: It was a central point, always available and synchronized between all your devices. Stepping back from that level of comfort is quite hard, I’d imagine. The key factor was probably that you didn’t have to care about how it actually worked. You didn’t have to learn any functions of the magic that worked in the background. None of the dependencies, nothing of the risks and the challenges in getting this service to work.

The Google newsreader is just one example of many service that are available nowadays. I’m not only talking about online services, but also all other services: Mobile phones, TV, Libraries, Transport system. Most of them we pay for in one or the other way. As long as many people use them, they are not likely to be shut down - they earn money.

All the other services we don’t pay for (directly or indirectly) have a disadvantage: No matter how popular they are, as soon as they are in the way of a strategy change or in any other way an obstacle of a non-financial matter: they are more likely to be removed without hesitation. And there isn’t much you can do about it. These services aren’t owned by the public, they are private. It’s like a parking lot in front of your house which you don’t own. If the property owner decides to rent it out: you’re fucked. No matter how long you put your car there (This example might be a bit crippled, but it makes my point!).

The users are now facing the decision to move on. Most will most likely try to take their RSS feeds to another service, silently (or loudly) complaining about how Google took away their tool without asking them first. And in some time in the future they will face the same situation again.

I’m not gonna propose a solution for this. I think it’s sad that it has been decided to flip the switch on that service that made RSS to easily usable to many people. But life is going on.

OK, maybe I will propose a solution: Take a bit more time in understanding how things actually work. Yes: It’s boring. Yes, it’s not fun. Yes, it means actually learning something while using it will be most of the time. But the benefit will be: more Independence.

The reason why I’m picking up this point today with the RSS reader is, that I found myself on the opposite side this time. I haven’t used the RSS reader from Google, nor the extension of their browser. The announcement left me in my day to day life completely unaffected, though I’m a regular user of news-feeds. The difference is simple: I used a local RSS reader and sync the cache and feeds between my machines myself. In a way I’ve setup my own solution for having a central reader on my own. It took some time and I spend some hours in finding a procedure that fits my personal needs best.

What I ended up with is a solution where I can switch between different services as I like and I understand all dependencies. If something brakes, I know where to look, where to get a backup and most likely how to fix this. But that costs me a lot of time to invest into this.

It’s quite obvious not everybody has the time or the motivation of doing so. That’s why you can pay services for doing it for you. And then - only then - I think you’re allowed to complain. For a free service: Shut up and be happy that it worked for you for a while.

Of course people will complain anyway, but please don’t mind if I simply don’t care.