Let me be the first to admit that pre-2013 I had a serious RSS addiction. This was primarily due to just how awesome Google Reader was, yes “was” because Google decided to kill off this service July 1st 2013 after almost 8 years of activity. To this day I still do not understand why they made this move. Their original announcement only stated that it was because “While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined”. At the time this was baffling to me, maybe it was just the crowd I was around but everyone was using Reader. So yeah, it certainly had a loyal following, quite a large loyal following.
As far as my current thoughts on why the service was terminated. For one I blame Google+. Yes that notorious service Google implemented that they try and shove down your throat at every turn. You see Reader used to have a social feature to it, this came to an end in 2011 with Google+ being launched on June 28th 2011. I feel Google intentional stripped Reader of any social functions in order to market Google+ as a direct competitor to the almighty Facebook. The second reason, well that has to do with what everything this day and age revolves around, advertising. To put it simply Reader and RSS is a difficult platform to advertise on and without ads there is no profit. So why would Google a profit gobbling monster want to keep something around that brought in none? In any case those are my shorthand reasons why I think the service went away. A little bit of a rant but I wanted to get it out there.
Alright on to this week’s assignment. As stated already I used to use RSS heavily but have fallen out of it this past year. So to begin the selection process of a new reader I decided to check out Google’s official About page where they offer a link to reader alternatives which is through alternativeto.net. On this page and listing of platforms Feedly looked like the clear winner, which I was not too surprised about. I do like the Feedly platform, adding new feeds is a breeze, along with organization and categorization. It was rather satisfying adding pages like The Onion, Stephen's Lighthouse, and the Librarian in Black to a feed page again.
As for social bookmarking, I personally do not get the appeal of them, at least not in this current age of cloud saving. Now before the cloud was a thing, this kind of bookmarking tool was a lifesaver. It is so nice being able to go back and forth from work and home computers or to a laptop and have all your bookmarks readily available. However, now I have things like Chrome as a browser where all of my folders and bookmarks are saved on the cloud. When I open up Chrome at work or at home they all come with me. Now there are some positive elements here, especially when it came to using Delicious, which is the platform I went with. The tagging feature is handy for categorizing different sites and the social features of being able to following individuals is rather nice. If you know of someone who happens to be very good at stumbling across resources of a specific type it is cool being able to check back in with them and see what they have discovered.
I do believe that is it for me this week. Looking forward to seeing what everyone else involved with ILST came up with.
As far as my current thoughts on why the service was terminated. For one I blame Google+. Yes that notorious service Google implemented that they try and shove down your throat at every turn. You see Reader used to have a social feature to it, this came to an end in 2011 with Google+ being launched on June 28th 2011. I feel Google intentional stripped Reader of any social functions in order to market Google+ as a direct competitor to the almighty Facebook. The second reason, well that has to do with what everything this day and age revolves around, advertising. To put it simply Reader and RSS is a difficult platform to advertise on and without ads there is no profit. So why would Google a profit gobbling monster want to keep something around that brought in none? In any case those are my shorthand reasons why I think the service went away. A little bit of a rant but I wanted to get it out there.
Alright on to this week’s assignment. As stated already I used to use RSS heavily but have fallen out of it this past year. So to begin the selection process of a new reader I decided to check out Google’s official About page where they offer a link to reader alternatives which is through alternativeto.net. On this page and listing of platforms Feedly looked like the clear winner, which I was not too surprised about. I do like the Feedly platform, adding new feeds is a breeze, along with organization and categorization. It was rather satisfying adding pages like The Onion, Stephen's Lighthouse, and the Librarian in Black to a feed page again.
As for social bookmarking, I personally do not get the appeal of them, at least not in this current age of cloud saving. Now before the cloud was a thing, this kind of bookmarking tool was a lifesaver. It is so nice being able to go back and forth from work and home computers or to a laptop and have all your bookmarks readily available. However, now I have things like Chrome as a browser where all of my folders and bookmarks are saved on the cloud. When I open up Chrome at work or at home they all come with me. Now there are some positive elements here, especially when it came to using Delicious, which is the platform I went with. The tagging feature is handy for categorizing different sites and the social features of being able to following individuals is rather nice. If you know of someone who happens to be very good at stumbling across resources of a specific type it is cool being able to check back in with them and see what they have discovered.
I do believe that is it for me this week. Looking forward to seeing what everyone else involved with ILST came up with.