OK, I know RSS isn’t going away, but John Gruber (@gruber) threw me down the rabbit hole tonight when he linked to NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons piece about Google Reader. The whole shebang got started with this article:
Official Google Reader Blog: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google+ features, and some clean-up.
The article states Google’s intention to “bring Reader and Google+ closer together.” This upsets me, but they say they have a plan for people like me.
That’s why we will also be extending Reader’s subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.
- Your subscriptions
- Your shared items
- Your friends
- Your likes
- Your starred items
Shocking.
Simmons doesn’t seem to believe Reader is going to buckle under Google+, but he’s not confident that the slew of apps that use Reader as a syncing hub may be in jeopardy. Simmons writes:
“When I say that the system is fragile, I don’t mean that Google Reader itself is fragile. I mean that using it as a syncing system for other apps is fragile.”
The sentence Simmons closed his article with was the most chilling (and most quoted so far):
I’m not an RSS reader developer any more. But if I were, I’d start looking for an alternative syncing system right now.
New item in my OmniFocus inbox? Learn how to export my RSS data from Reeder.
(Via Daring Fireball)