So that's it. Google Reader is actually gone. Not "gone in a few weeks," not "sunsetting," but gone. I opened the tab yesterday morning like I have every single day since I don't even know when, and got the little cartoon balloon graphic telling me to export my data and move on with my life. July 1st came and went and Google pulled the plug for real this time.
I'd been putting off dealing with this since March, when they first announced it. You tell yourself you have three months, that's plenty of time, and then suddenly it's the last week of June and you're frantically trying 4 different replacement services at 11pm because you have 340 unread items across 60-something feeds and nowhere to dump them.
I ended up on Feedly, mostly because everyone else did. Their signup numbers apparently went kind of nuts over the last month. I saw a number floating around that they picked up something like 3 million new users in just the weeks after the shutdown announcement, which tells you a lot about how many people were quietly running their entire information diet through a product Google was never going to bother updating again. The import went fine, took maybe ninety seconds, all my folders came over intact. Fine. Good, even. But it's not the same and I don't think it's supposed to be.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not really about Feedly, which is a perfectly competent app. It's that Reader was the last piece of the open web I used every day that wasn't trying to guess what I wanted to see. No algorithm deciding my aunt's vacation photos matter more than a blog post from some guy who writes about compiler design twice a year. Just: here are the things you subscribed to, in the order they showed up, go. That's it. That's the whole product. And it turns out that was apparently not a sustainable thing for a company to run once the internal chart showing daily active users stopped going up and to the right fast enough.
I know the standard defense here — "it wasn't profitable, RSS usage was declining, Google has to prioritize." Sure. I get it, I'm not naive about how a company with quarterly earnings calls operates. But usage was declining partly because the tools built on top of RSS kept getting killed off or left to rot, which made the format look dead, which justified killing the next tool, and round and round. Reader wasn't some experimental Labs project like Wave — it had a real, loyal user base that just wasn't a Plus-sized user base, and I think that's the actual sin here. It didn't fit the social push.
Anyway. I'm not going to pretend this is some huge tragedy, there are worse things happening in the world this week than a free RSS reader shutting down (I have opinions about some of that other stuff happening in the news lately too, but that's a post for a day when I feel like getting yelled at in the comments). It's just one of those small, dumb losses that adds up. Every year there's one more app or service you built a little habit around that just stops existing on a date some product manager put on a roadmap eighteen months ago.
A few practical notes if you're still mid-migration, since I spent an annoying amount of time on this yesterday: your Google Takeout export gives you an OPML file, and basically every reader worth using (Feedly, Digg's thing that's apparently coming, The Old Reader) can import that directly, so don't manually re-subscribe to sixty feeds like an idiot, which is what I almost did before I remembered Takeout existed. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, export it now even if you've already migrated, because who knows if these newer services stick around either.
RSS isn't dead. I still think it's the best plumbing the web ever built for actually reading things instead of having things fed to you. It just lost its best landlord.