Or how an ongoing change of consuming the web forces Google to speed up their will to expand<\/p>\n
So yeah, Google Reader sucks. They changed things and killed the sharing feature and they want to feed us with G+ until we can\u2019t go back. <\/p>\n
Fuck that. I\u2019m trying other ways to read news without big G on my ass<\/a>.<\/p>\n I have a much better understanding of why RSS readers are using Google services to synchronize news between devices: it\u2019s really complicated to do that without the Mountain View giant:<\/p>\n 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.<\/em><\/p>\n It seems like each reader could just read the files at startup and write out new files when it quits. Problem solved!<\/em><\/p>\n But not even close.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It really is complicated<\/a>. The solution for Dave Winer is to use web apps, like Tiny Tiny RSS<\/a> (make the install WordPress like, geez). My problem as a user and designer is that web apps suck balls. Sorry, I\u2019m using RSS since 2004 and I had a native client that was noticeably faster and which wouldn\u2019t make my computer crawl and start up the fan like Google Reader does, even more with the last version. <\/p>\n 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\u2019t matter. So native apps. The gap will stay, as long as we don\u2019t have a badass Wifi signal everywhere and performances matching the best native apps and it\u2019s kind of an impossible task: Google tries really hard to push its web vision, without big success (iPhone Gmail \u201capp\u201d, the Chrome OS mess, redesign of web services to match native apps\u2019 look&feel, Android\u2019s UI lag, Chrome Native Client so what there\u2019s Steam etc.)<\/p>\n That\u2019s the first nightmare for Google. The browser taking over\u2019s prophecy falls short. The native apps + cloud paradigm is putting them in a really awkward position.<\/p>\n 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<\/strong>? Nobody would see ads, or so much less that the entire business model of selling ad space would stop to make sense. I\u2019m 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<\/a> app says that you don\u2019t know anything about the user, except that he subscribed to your content. Oops.<\/p>\n That would be a disaster for Google. Which is to me the reason why they jumped on Feedburner<\/a> 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\u2019s a nightmare to use for developers (no documentation FTW). They don\u2019t want to encourage people to use this efficient way of consuming the web because it would hurt them so hard.<\/p>\n\n