Last night, I went to meet a group of friends for dinner in San Francisco after work. As I sat down at the table, two of my dining companions asked in unison, with eye-opening looks on their faces, “Did you hear the news?”
“Yes,” I replied as I shuffled my chair in and unfurled my napkin. “They picked a new pope, from Latin America.”
“No, not that,” they responded. “Google is shutting down Google Reader on July 1.” The dinner then turned into a torrent of information about the chaos that had ensued online as a result.
My friends are not the only ones upset by Google’s decision to eliminate Google Reader, the company’s service for viewing blogs through an RSS feed.
People turned to Twitter to lambaste Google for its decision and ask other people for alternative feed readers. Blogs weighed in, noting that the company was making a mistake. A few Web sites that rely on Google Reader for their own products, including FeedDemon, seemed near tears over the decision. And the Hitler meme that usually circulates online during tough times, also appeared with a video about the closing.
Outraged Google Reader fans put together a petition on the Web site Change.org to keep the RSS reader alive, and in a few hours had garnered more than 50,000 signatures.
“It’s still a core part of my Internet use,” wrote Dan Lewis, an avid Google Reader fan, in the petition. “And of the many, many others who are signed below. Our confidence in Google’s other products — Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus — requires that we trust you in respecting how and why we use your other products.”
Some people defended the decision. Dave Winer, one of the people behind the invention of RSS, said good riddance in a blog post on his Web site. But Mr. Winer was an exception as he noted later in the day that his blog post attracted “some pretty sick comments” that he was forced to delete.
Now people will be out on the news reader street by July 1, and there are few places for them to go.
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