So it's been four days now and I still catch myself opening Reader out of pure muscle memory. Type "goo" into the address bar, autocomplete does the rest, and then there it is, the same gray toolbar, except now it's got this weird little bit of borrowed time hanging over it. Google buried the announcement in one of those Spring Cleaning posts on Wednesday, the kind where they kill off four or five things at once so no single one gets the full blast of outrage. Reader was the one that mattered to me. I don't think I have any feelings at all about them shutting down the old Cloud Connect plugin.
July 1st is the date. So I've got a little over three months, which sounds like a lot until you remember I have somewhere north of 200 feeds in there and about six years of read history I've never once needed until the exact week someone tells me it's going away.
I want to be annoyed that this is some huge betrayal, but honestly the writing's been on the wall since they gutted the social features a couple years back and folded everything into Google+. This isn't shocking, it's just sad in a low-grade, Tuesday-afternoon kind of way. Reader was never going to make anyone money. RSS as a format lost the popularity contest to Twitter and Facebook years ago, and Google doesn't run charities for information nerds, however much it might feel like it should.
the scramble
The funniest part of the last four days has been watching Feedly. I signed up Wednesday night on a whim, mostly to see what the fuss was, and by Thursday morning their app was crashing constantly under what I have to assume was an absolutely brutal spike in new signups. They put a banner up basically apologizing and promising a "Normandy" project to build a Reader-compatible backend for people whose apps talk to Reader's API directly. Which, fine, good on them for moving fast, but I'm not thrilled about pouring six years of curation into a startup I'd never heard of two weeks ago.
Reeder is the other thing I'm worried about. It's the app I actually read everything in on my phone, and it's built entirely on top of the Reader API, sync and all. The developer's been quiet so far, which I get, there's not much to say yet, but that's the app I open at breakfast every single day and I have no idea what it looks like in July.
Small complaint that has nothing to do with any of this: SXSW Interactive wrapped up in Austin last week and a friend of mine was down there the whole time posting photos of barbecue and badge lines, and I spent the whole week mildly jealous while sitting in my usual chair doing the usual work. One of these years I'm actually going to go instead of just reading everyone's recap posts about it. Probably not this year either, let's be honest.
Back to Reader for a second, because I keep circling it. The thing that actually bugs me isn't even the shutdown, it's that I know myself well enough to know I will not export my OPML file until roughly June 29th, at 11pm, in a mild panic. I've already told myself I'll do it "this weekend" twice this week. I'm writing this down specifically so that when I inevitably complain about it in three months, past-me gets the blame.
If you're in the same boat, Feedly's import is genuinely one click if you already use Reader to log in, and it pulls your folders over more or less intact. Old Reader is trying to do a full clone too, though it felt a lot rougher when I poked at it Thursday. Neither of them replicates the trends and sharing stuff, but honestly I never used that either, so no great loss there specifically.
Anyway. Feeds still work the same whether or not Google wants to host the reader for them, which is sort of the whole point of RSS being an open format instead of somebody's walled garden. Small comfort, but I'll take it.