Google Reader

Trust google at your peril

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It really is that simple: No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.

Source: Stadia died because no one trusts Google | TechCrunch

The wake-up call was when google killed google reader, but it was ignored by a lot of people cos it was a free service.

Then there was G Suite (Legacy Free). They got a lot of people to rely on google services and then proceeded to straight up betray them. People still didn’t care cos it was also “free service”.

But now with Stadia people will care cos the cost of this cancellation won’t be paid by google— they already wrote off the money. The cost will be borne by developers who trusted google with their games.

I’m somewhat safe as I do pay for some google services but I am looking for alternatives now. Microsoft is not a particularly viable option.

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RSSowl

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RSSOwl screenshot

RSSOwl screenshot

The software works mosly as billed. It does have its quirks since it’s Java-based, but works. Just mind your Google Reader integration, since it is still somewhat broken (search for “rssowl http 400” to find out).

It does make you wonder about the overall quality of the code, when feeds aren’t sorted alphabeticaly by default.

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Google Reader

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It seems Google finally got around to enabling Google Reader access for Google Apps users!

However, there are some caveats:

  • It all behaves like a brand new Reader setup, which means your Trends data is a blank slate and you won’t get anything useful from the Home link.
  • You need to manually export your feeds and then manually import them. This means it’s a good chance to prune your RSS sources.
  • Sharing contacts aren’t setup automatically. You have to look them up one by one.
  • Reader doesn’t show up on the Google Apps control panel yet.

Apart from that, everything seems to work just fine.

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