"The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all."

I spent most of today in meetings. As a result, I didn't have time to fiddle in Twitter or check in on the web. It was the kind of day where I knew I could catch up on the day's news the way I do most busy days, through RSS. So you can imagine my suprise as I drove home today chatting with Katie Floyd on the phone and she tells me Google is uplugging Reader.

I remember back when RSS was amazing and something you paid for. I also remember when Google Reader showed up and very quickly started taking over. It was free. It was Google (back before we were all scared of Google) and it wrecked the market for all of the paid RSS services. We all wondered how Google monetized its Reader expense but we wonder that about most Google services so we all cancelled our paid services and leapt.

Now Google is yanking the cord. Since Reader is the Google service I use the most, that made me a bit sad but I didn't see it as the end of the world. I'm sure some enterprising folks have already filled the whiteboard and are spitballing ideas for the next great RSS reader service. Within a month competitors will be on the market and I'll switch. It will probably cost a few bucks but they won't be collecting data on me or selling to advertisers. (At least not the RSS service I evenutally choose won't.) In other words, with Google exiting, the free market will take over. So my initial reaction was, "meh" and even a bit of enthusiasm that with paid RSS, people may start innovating again.

Then I got home and my wife was really upset about it. My wife is a bit of a nerd too but she travels in circles of electronically connected paper-crafters and they are absolutely up in arms about this. To them, Google Reader is RSS. They don't know of alternative services and as far as they know, new services will never again exist. They think RSS is going to die on July 1 and that's that. Now some of them will figure out they can go elsewhere but some won't. Those people will stop reading blogs via RSS and those blogs will lose readers.

That got me thinking. I've spent years building up MacSparky.com. There are thousands of RSS subscribers. How many will bother to sort out a new RSS system and subscribe again? The closing of Google Reader is going to result in the great RSS purge of 2013. Then Brett Terpstra tweeted this article by Aldo Cortesi which sums it all up in the above cited paragraph better than I ever could. This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad.

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