Twitter and Facebook Are Not Google Reader Replacements

I have to solidly disagree with this:

RSS still matters a great deal.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ (even Tumblr)…these social gardens with their nice walls are fantastic but social “curation” isn’t the right path ahead for establishing a real presence on the web because you’re always serving a master that could go away.

There’s nothing like having a namespace that identifies and/or reflects you.

It’s something I try to get through to students, clients, friends and family.

That’s why I like the idea of dogfooding the open web and encouraging others to do so. Eventually after the social web bubble pops, we’ll get back to the realization that having yourname.com or some iteration thereof is insanely powerful and needed.

Now that Google Reader is dead, I’m switching back to Fever for my RSS reading. I literally live in my RSS reader and it’s a beyond-valuable piece of technology that drives everything from my business to my research to my studies to my obsessions to my love of history etc. Having a reliable, synced and powerful RSS reader capable of handling the 500 or so feeds I (try to) read on a daily basis is important.

Yes, Fever is a pesky self-installed piece of software that is definitely not for everyone. I’d suggest something like Feedly or Pulse or Flipboard for 99% of people.

However, for those of us who were there when blogging was The Social Network and RSS feed reading was the Newsfeed back in 2004, something like Flipboard just doesn’t cut it.

Fever is fantastic for my needs. Again, it’s a self-install and has minimal amounts of developer involvement, but it’s a fantastic program. The fact that it is self-hosted on my server that I pay for and have to keep up makes me like it even more for some Google-Reader-backlash-lizard-brain reason.

Since I’m mostly on my Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 these days when I’m not using my Chromebook or this Macbook Pro Retina, I’ve been testing out Meltdown app as my mobile interface for Fever. It seems to be doing the job just fine at the moment and is a great Android experience for Fever. It’s a no-frills and minimalistic take on feed reading, but that’s exactly what I was looking for.

Maybe Marco is right and it is excellent news for the RSS reader industry (and RSS in general) that Google Reader is shutting down.

Regardless, this is just painful to watch now.

Leave a Reply