![]() ![]() ![]() It’s that the success of the single-developer model is contingent on the willingness of that developer to keep working on the project (paid or otherwise). It’s not that I don’t think the author shouldn’t be paid – I would be happy to pay $30 or $300 for a great RSS reader app. I don’t like the fact that its sustainability model is to charge for downloads. I’m interested in this one because (a) the screenshots make it look nice, and (b) it comes highly recommended by people I respect, like D’Arcy Norman. A number of them are cloud/service based, and for practical reasons (such as, um, Google Reader) as well as philosophical reasons (see below), I’m only considering alternative tools that I can run either locally or on my own server. There have been a number of posts over the last couple days listing Reader alternatives. That means that I’ve got to find a new app, and migrate over, and I’ve got to do it quickly. (Contrast this with Twitter, where I’m pretty fickle about whom I follow, and how many tweets/links I pay attention to.) So RSS is, for me, a partial antidote to the echo chamber tendency. I follow many blogs whose authors I frequently disagree with, or even dislike. More than that: following RSS feeds is beyond mere habit, but is check on my intellectual honesty. My RSS reading habits are too ingrained for me to abandon them, even for a short time. More immediately, though, a couple of causes for concern:įinding an alternative to Reader. So, in the long run, I’m reasonably optimistic. A year from now, I’m hoping that there’ll be many more quality players. Google’s hamstrung app has been just good enough for people like me, but non-approachable for non-geeks. I happen to think, like Marco Arment, that in the long run the loss of Google Reader will probably be good for innovation in RSS readers and for RSS in general. This is the first of Google’s “sunsets” that hits me personally – Reader has been a crucial part of my internet use for the better part of a decade. This week, Google announced that it’s shutting down Reader. ![]()
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