Goodbye Google…….

Saturday, 16 March, 2013

Google’s announcement that they are killing off Google Reader seems to have been met with dismay, including a petition to the federal government in the US (and the ubiqutous Hitler meme below)! However a far more reflective piece was written by Ruper Goodwins at The Guardian - the “do-ers” on the internet use Reader and its a huge mistake to kill it. It was the one Google location I found myself frequenting and it integrated really well with Chrome browser and the native Android apps.

Now though it’s time to say goodbye to Google. Yup, I’ll happily use the android smartphone and tablet, when search gets tricky I’ll come back to you, but you’ve largely become superfluous to requirements, the Wal-Mart of IT that just hits the middle ground.

There are alternatives to Reader with several services (Feedly, Digg) expected to bring a reader to market by July - and its certainly useful to have the integrated Android/iOS apps, but I spend most of my time digesting RSS feeds in the browser. So…. there appear to be no RSS reader extensions for Chrome so that got me looking back at portable Firefox - and Bamboo Feed Reader. There are a few rough edges but by-and-large Im happy with it. And the rest of Firefox? I’m actually amazed at how fast the user experience is - certainly faster than Chrome.

So there we have it, no contest - Chrome is now ditched, I have a feed reader and I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Au revoir, it was nice whilst the party lasted - I’m happy with your morphing in to Wal-Mart, I just don’t need your one size fits all approach.