So it's been six days since Google actually pulled the plug on Reader, and I think I'm finally done being mad about it and just resigned to whatever comes next. July 1st came and went and the little orange icon that's lived in my bookmarks bar since sometime in 2007 just stopped doing anything. Click it, get a "this service is no longer available" page. That's it. Six years of habit, gone in one release note.
I know, I know, everybody and their cousin wrote about this back in March when Google first announced it. I didn't, mostly because I figured I had time to be annoyed about it later, and later is apparently now. What I actually want to talk about isn't the shutdown itself, it's what the week after has actually been like, because nobody tells you about the week after.
The migration wasn't the hard part
Exporting was fine, genuinely. Google Takeout spit out an OPML file with my 340-something feeds in about ninety seconds, and Feedly had already been quietly building toward this for months with that "Normandy" backend project of theirs, so importing was basically instant. I had my whole subscription list, folders and all, sitting in Feedly before I'd finished my coffee. If you'd told me in March that the technical part would be the easy part I'd have believed you. Google actually did the responsible thing here and gave everyone a real off-ramp, which, credit where it's due, is more than I expected from a company that also just axes products with about the same warmth as a landlord changing the locks.
The hard part is that nothing else works the same
Here's my actual complaint. Reader wasn't just a feed aggregator, it was a shared read state that a dozen other apps quietly depended on — Reeder on my phone, a couple of browser extensions, that one Chrome dashboard thing I used at work. All of that plumbing is just broken now. Feedly's own app is fine, better than fine honestly, the UI is nicer than Reader's ever was. But every third-party client I used is currently either dead, half-broken, or scrambling to build against somebody else's API, and I don't fully trust any of them yet because I don't know which ones survive the next six months.
I also tried Digg Reader, which only opened up to the public a couple weeks back. It's got the bones of something decent but it choked on my import twice and marked about 200 items read that I hadn't touched, which is exactly the kind of bug you don't want in the app whose entire job is tracking what you've read. NewsBlur I bounced off of years ago for unrelated reasons and didn't feel like giving a second chance this week. So Feedly it is, for now, with the asterisk that "for now" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Unrelated tangent, but it's my blog so I get to have one: my left shift key has been sticking for about a month and typing this post I've had to backspace and refix about fifteen "hift" typos, and I still haven't fixed it because I keep telling myself I'll just get used to using the right shift key instead. I have not gotten used to it. Anyway.
The bigger thing bugging me isn't really about RSS readers at all, it's the reminder that anything free and useful that isn't making anyone money is basically borrowed. Reader had a real, if small, user base that genuinely loved it, and none of that mattered against a spreadsheet. I don't think that's some grand insight, everybody already knows it, but knowing a thing and having it happen to your own daily routine are different amounts of annoying. I moved my email off a service that shut down back in 2009 and I still remember the scramble.
I'm not going to pretend I've got some five-step plan for immunizing myself against the next one of these. I exported my feeds, I picked a new app, I'll probably pick another new app in a year when this one gets bought or killed too. That's just what using free web tools is like right now, apparently, and I don't see it changing anytime soon.