Reader In Peace

Just about a month ago, I decided to fully switch from Google Reader to Twitter for news aggregation. The reason was simple, I always had 1000+ unread feeds, and at the end of the day, I’d just ‘Mark All Read’ and let go; Twitter does exactly that, all automagically.

After being a long time user of Google Reader, I want to jot down some thoughts about it.

In March 2006, after playing around with PHP for a couple of years, my best friend Keitel and I thought that maybe we could write an RSS aggregator that:

  1. Automatically fetch the news from selected sites (that had RSS feeds).
  2. Keep a record of the read and unread feeds.

That enthusiasm only lasted half a month, with the second feature barely started. The reason was simple – Google Reader. With Google Reader, I could achieve all of that and more, without installing anything on a server and configure the settings in a configuration file.

Over the past 6 years, I’ve seen Google Reader’s change, and have formed such a complicated relationship with this product. On one hand, I was glad to have such a great tool to enjoy interesting and useful information from the Internet; on the other hand, I quitted persisting on our own project, which might be popular by now. I mean, you never know, right?

Now that it’s going to an end, I wish that Google could slow down on pushing for useless, time wasting, and data collecting focused products; instead persist on innovative, useful, and practical products.