Web apps, Google and feeds

Or how an ongoing change of consuming the web forces Google to speed up their will to expand

So yeah, Google Reader sucks. They changed things and killed the sharing feature and they want to feed us with G+ until we can’t go back.

Fuck that. I’m trying other ways to read news without big G on my ass.

I have a much better understanding of why RSS readers are using Google services to synchronize news between devices: it’s really complicated to do that without the Mountain View giant:

It seems like all you have to do is make each copy of your RSS reader read and write three files to Dropbox, one file for each item in the list above.

It seems like each reader could just read the files at startup and write out new files when it quits. Problem solved!

But not even close.

It really is complicated. The solution for Dave Winer is to use web apps, like Tiny Tiny RSS (make the install WordPress like, geez). My problem as a user and designer is that web apps suck balls. Sorry, I’m using RSS since 2004 and I had a native client that was noticeably faster and which wouldn’t make my computer crawl and start up the fan like Google Reader does, even more with the last version.

Today I have 4 times the amount of RAM, 2X the amount of processing power at 2X the speed I had with my old Pentium M and Google Reader lags. Come. On. On the other side native apps, fly. Fluid, beautiful, elegant or intuitive, they always feel clearly superior, even when waiting for cloud data. The fact that web apps get better and better doesn’t matter. So native apps. The gap will stay, as long as we don’t have a badass Wifi signal everywhere and performances matching the best native apps and it’s kind of an impossible task: Google tries really hard to push its web vision, without big success (iPhone Gmail “app”, the Chrome OS  mess, redesign of web services to match native apps’ look&feel, Android’s UI lag, Chrome Native Client so what there’s Steam etc.)

That’s the first nightmare for Google. The browser taking over’s prophecy falls short. The native apps + cloud paradigm is putting them in a really awkward position.

The second nightmare that nobody talks about is this one: if everybody starts to use RSS, feeds, streams, what about the page view business model? Nobody would see ads, or so much less that the entire business model of selling ad space would stop to make sense. I’m guessing that there is much less information to get from a RSS user than a classic web browser user. The maker of the popular Feeddemon app says that you don’t know anything about the user, except that he subscribed to your content. Oops.

That would be a disaster for Google. Which is to me the reason why they jumped on Feedburner before it became huge and pretty much killed it (the API future is uncertain according to Wikipedia). This is why the Google Reader API, despite being used by hundreds of apps is not even freaking official. And it’s a nightmare to use for developers (no documentation FTW). They don’t want to encourage people to use this efficient way of consuming the web because it would hurt them so hard.

Unfortunately, the river of news is everywhere on Facebook or Twitter. Everybody is ready to make the jump to RSS now, people would immediately get it, the concept is totally mainstream and FB knows that very well. RSS still lacks usability like not having a one-click subscription system or syncable apps but it’s on, it’s going to change. A better name would be cool too. Programmers never give a shit about marketing.

So what would push people to embrace RSS instead of streams in silos like FB? Privacy. Privacy is the very strong argument that will push people to follow anything they want on the web through RSS or future standard instead of G+ or FB or Twitter without having to think about a company making money out of this information or inserting ads all over. There will be a backlash and a generation growing up without being on any of these services. There will be a generation that will be unknown from any of today’s internet social networks or search engines.  

These days the cool thing is “let’s go on G+ because FB the mega corporation, has too much information about me fuck yeah I’m so smart”. Why would you trust more Google, for what reason, as they have the same exact business model as Facebook? It doesn’t make sense. Plus G+ has a history of not giving a damn about you, banning users, removing pictures without a single notice, and they get away with it. Which is insane to me.

It’s one of the big problem with open technologies and standards: they are not brands, they can’t be branded and we live in a world where brands sadly, are everything. People worship these bitches.

On the positive side, there’s a massive business opportunity around perfectly executed private “river of streams” apps for desktop and mobile… Just saying.