Tagged: RSS

Sorry, Silvio

Until a few months ago, I was a big fan of Reeder, Sivio Rizzi’s RSS client for Mac and iOS. The earlier iteration of those apps stopped working after Google shut down Reader last July. Once Google Reader was dead, I jumped to Feedbin as my new RSS reader, mostly because Rizzi’s Reeder for iPhone supported Feedbin.

As the summer days waned, Rizzi had not shipped new iPad or Mac versions of Reeder. Unwilling to read RSS feeds through a web browser, I searched for and discovered a couple of alternatives.

I chose these because they were well-received on their respective app stores and because both apps support Feedbin. They proved great apps for skimming my RSS feeds. I used Mr. Reader until September, when Rizzo shipped an updated version of Reeder for iOS. I gladly bought Reeder 2 and christened it my main RSS client. But then I started to miss some of the features of Mr. Reader, such as the collection of themes and fonts and even the bike-bell sound when it makes when my feeds were all updated. In an act of buyer’s remorse, I went back to Mr. Reader as my iPad RSS client.

On the Mac side, I stopped searching for news on Reeder for Mac, which, as of today, still has not been updated for the post–Google Reader era. Instead, I found another RSS client for the Mac: ReadKit. And I’m sticking to it.

Reeder was a great client for Google Reader, and after trying and buying way too many RSS apps, it was the only I loved to use. But months of waiting for updates made me receptive to some alternatives, and now I’m sticking with those.

I Can Reed Again

I know a lot of people read to help them fall asleep. But I don’t know how I fell asleep or wasted time before the advent of an RSS reader. After trying a bunch over the years, the one that made me a true RSS junkie was Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder. It had a great interface: intuitive menus, beautiful typography, and quick-and-easy sharing to other services, like Twitter, Instapaper and Pinboard. It was my most frequently used iPad app.

But on July 1, it stopped working. Like many other RSS readers, Reeder worked only with Google Reader.

Ten weeks after the shutdown of Google Reader, Reeder is back and works with current RSS services, such as Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, Fever, and other services whose names play on the word "feed."

When Google Reader was taken out back and shot in the head, I subscribed to Feedbin. It was the first service that Rizzi added to the iPhone version of Reeder version 1, and it was priced at $2 per month. (It’s now three dollars for new subscribers.)

Since then, I had been using Mr. Reeder, which has been a great substitute for Reeder. It works really well with Feedbin, and it even has amusing sound effects, such as a "bike bell" after your feeds are refreshed. But the interface is a bit cluttered, and although it’s hardly unpleasant to use, I really missed the simple, clean look of Reeder.

And now my loyal friend that follows me to bed is back.

Google’s Lost Social Network

Rob Fishman, writing for BuzzFeed on Google’s Lost Social Network, describes the situation when Google killed the sharing features of Google Reader, its RSS aggregator. Convinced that it needed to compete with Facebook in the social networking realm, Google envisioned these features would exist in Google Plus, the maligned social networking platform it launched in 2011 at the expense of an already vibrant, if not super-sized social, community.

There is a business lesson to be learned here. That Google shot themselves in the foot by integrating rather than innovating an existing social network. Google could have refined its own network rather than reproduced the social network. But there’s a cultural lesson, too, surrounding the nature of oligopolies in the digital realm.

The problem with oligopolies — markets dominated by a handful of outsized players — is not only that they quash the little guys, but that they tend to fixate on one another. In its most benign form, that makes for a lot of copycatting; Facebook releases “cover photos,” so Twitter introduces “header photos.” The dark side is a rancorous string of patent wars among smartphone makers and social networking giants, squabbling like litigious heirs to a disputed fortune.

The mentality that one big player has to eclipse another big player might make sense in traditional businesses, but the bottom-up nature of digital networks negates this rule when it comes to governing the Internet. While Google successfully killed off the Reader community by taking away its networking tools, it could not force them to migrate to Google Plus. By contrast, consider how quickly landline telephone users have been migrated to wireless cellular networks for their voice telephony needs.

At the moment, I don’t have a definitive answer for whether the Internet and the social networks it enables can be controlled as easily as they might be with other monopolies and oligopolies. But while it’s discouraging to see the big players wipe them out, it’s encouraging to see that they can’t be completely controlled, either.