I've been complaining about the Google Reader issue on Google Plus for a while. My method of "keeping up with things" online, for a very long time, was going through a list of bookmarks. This involved a lot of visiting sites that hadn't been updated, of course, particularly when everyone stopped blogging. Still I resisted figuring out RSS, as I resist so many innovations. Finally Google Reader was suggested to me, and since I had already stumbled, quicksand style, into the Google ecology long ago, I set it up and it has been doing the job for me for a few years.
Then The Google announced they were shutting Reader down, presumably the follow-up salvo to their instituting all sorts of unpopular changes in Reader that I hadn't noticed because I used it purely as a personal reading list, but they tell me it had a thriving community which one may deduce angered The Google because theses people weren't being social correctly, which is to say using Google Plus. Apparently this did not discourage Reader use sufficiently so the announcement of the pulling of the plug was tendered. This all seems to match Google's Cattle Chute philosophy to customer service, wherein one is chivied and unpleasantly prodded in the direction one is expected to go, and does so because one is dumb as a post and it is more difficult to go backwards than forwards, to the ultimate destination where one will presumably be electrically pacified and rendered immortal by having my brain eaten (check that biz out it's $6.99 for the ebook - that thing is like 750 pages).
In a very me fashion I dealt with this situation by ignoring it and then Google took away the Reader link from my menus in Gmail (from which location I still obstinately more or less run my digital life, making occasional and brief forays into Plus to keep up with the small segment of my compatriots that use it). This I responded to by looking up the word "reader" on the Google home page (from which I still obstinately launch almost all searches, which is pushing things beyond rebel and well into eccentric or possibly kook territory) several times a day, which was extremely stupid. Everyone suggested Feedly but I didn't like it. It stuck little Feedly icons all over everything on the internet. Feedly this, feedly that. I do not want this to be a lens through which I view the internet. I want the addition of things to be purely motivated from my end. I do not require or desire encouragement. Complaining about this resulted in a certain amount of teasing about bemoaning the features of free utilities people are giving away on the internet, and I guess things really boil down to don't use it if you don't like it. I tried a different tack, which is a Mac-based App called Reeder.
I'm deeply ambivalent about app, particularly on the desktop. I've been seriously pondering exiting the Mac ecology (and frankly if it didn't involve a ton of file conversion I'd probably be considering it even more seriously, but this computer has a good couple years in it at least anyway and who know, I may have gotten my brain eaten by then. But as things stand now installing apps (I hate that neologism too) on the iMac seems to be playing right into what I'm afraid of: the computer becoming essentially a giant gadget. Closed ecology, use it how they tell you to, pick you candy tone button from your preschool calculator array and use it primarily to Consume, Consumer!
Sometimes if I'm being honest though these objections seem specious or at least philosophical, because like a giant gadget is primarily exactly how I do use my computer. Sixty percent web browser, thirty percent super typewriter, ten percent super calculator. I have intentionally opened the terminal window on my current desktop about 3 times in 4 years.
Long story short I like Reeder, it is interacting with irregularly updated content the way I want to, as if (true to its icon) I was flipping through a plain box of files, without a lot of backtalk. Only today I finally figured out (I really am a dunce about all this business) that what Reeder is is a client for Google Reader. Which means (true to form) that it is doubtless meant to do all kinds of rad stuff with my subscriptions and I'm using it in the most unstructured, redundant manner possible (otherwise why even make a standalone client for Reader), and of course there's no guarantee it will really work post-Reader (creator says they are going to keep working on it; also says it's too soon to tell). At the least I will probably have to sign up with some other online locus of feed-read organization, so I've merely postponed my problem. But I don't have to look up Reader on Google 3 times a day anymore.
