Google Reader is getting canned?!

Google just announced that they are shelving Google Reader this summer. As a nerd, I am shocked. WTF Google?!

Google Reader is Dead
This dialog box needs a Cancel option.

I accept that RSS has never been sexy. ‘What's this little orange icon mean?' Explaining it to a non-technical person almost always wound up confusing them more.

But it doesn’t mean they had to kill the service. Functionally speaking, it was fine as it was. They didn’t have to keep developing it. Stick a co-op student on it or something -- it’s not like they don’t have the resources.

I’m appalled. What a gross display of corporate indifference in the name of 'focus'. Instead of showing good stewardship for the technology and letting it sunset naturally, Google is screwing us over -- & doesn’t care. So much for trust.

Google Reader has been an essential, major interface to the web for me since 2005, and was a key factor in my readily adopting other Google services. It’s about the ecosystem, guys.

[LINK: Hitler finds out Google Reader is shutting down]

This is a teaching moment about the cloud -- don’t rely too much on any given service because it can just vanish if the provider feels like it. This act shakes my confidence in the long-term viability of every other Google service I use. Why should I use any of these tools if they’re subject to evaporating based on Google’s whims? What’s next on the arbitrary chopping block -- Gmail?

Google may profess not be evil, but on this day it has surely crossed the line into suckitude.

Other posts I’ve written on Google

Further (external) reading
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