Mark all as read.

Today is the Ides of March, so perhaps it is fitting that I come here not to praise Reader, but to bury it.

Yesterday, Google announced that it was killing Reader. I found out, of course, from a Techcrunch post that I read in Reader on my phone. Google did not even grant Reader the dignity of an obituary of its own, but instead dismissed it in a single paragraph; just another piece of garbage being thrown out. And it would be easy to feel despair at this; it is, in the words of Ramey Moore, “…like your favorite bar and your favorite restaurant and your favorite newspaper all closing on the same day…” (he actually said this when Google killed the sharing features over a year ago, but it remains true today.) Yes, you could feel sad about this. I certainly did when I first heard. If you’re reading this post right now, I’d say there’s pretty good odds you do.

But you shouldn’t.

The fact is, this is a good thing. Reader was on the receiving end of nothing but neglect from Google for years. Feel free to read this 5,800 word autopsy on the subject, from which the above quote was gleaned. Or you can read my own post on the subject.

Techcrunch, naturally, took advantage of the opportunity to once more trot out their usual crap that RSS is dead. Ignore them. Techcrunch delights in trolling its readership for pageviews and “engagement” (said engagement comprising primarily of Techcrunch’s users abusing them in a wide variety of colourful language).

But RSS is not dead. In fact, this may be the best thing to have happened to RSS for years. Google did nothing with Reader. Reader sat, forgotten and neglected, as its parent focused on “bigger fish”. Google either didn’t see the potential in Reader, or it didn’t know how to take advantage of it. So Reader languished. When was the last time we saw a sincerely new feature added to Reader? (Not counting the “feature” of having all the sharing functionality gutted in favour of Google+). Did you know that reader has a Labs section? Look in the settings, under “Experiments”. There’s an entirety of one experiment.

Reader has been comatose for years. Dragged along on life-support, but nothing more. But at the same time, its complete dominance of the RSS Reader market means that no real competition rose up. It was a stagnant monopoly.

But not now. Sic semper tyrannis. The king is dead.

And it turns out, in the 16 months since Google first broke our hearts, the internet has been busy. 

When Google first killed Reader’s social features, I desperately sought an alternative – and it was then that I learnt the terrible price of Google’s monopoly. None existed. There were basic RSS readers – but nothing that matched Reader. So, I wearily accepted that this was the way of things, and made do with what I had, while hoping that Francis Cleary, who had announced his intention to build a Reader clone with the features Google killed, would get it done soon. (Over a year later, and he’s on his third major rewrite)

But in the meantime, going almost unnoticed, others have built their own replacements. These are startups eager to build great products, and they’ve just been told that the entire market they’ve been chasing after has just opened up; all of a sudden we’re off to the races.

I’m going to ignore all the suggestions that you replace Reader with Flipboard or Twitter. If that were what you wanted, you’d already be using it, not reading this. So, here, then, are my picks, in order of preference:

The Old Reader

The Old Reader is my top pick as a replacement for Google Reader. It’s got an attractive design that (surprise surprise) looks a lot like Google Reader used to, and (for the most part) doesn’t waste space. It also has the internal-sharing that Google Reader used to have, and their developers are energetic and working hard on new features; they even have a feedback forum where you can request (and vote on) new features and they actually talk to their users.

Now, the downsides:

• It’s a little sluggish to use, but considering their userbase has tripled overnight from 10,000 to 30,000, I’m inclined to give them a pass on this one for the moment.

• Currently they don’t have mobile apps, but they’ve announced an API, so soon enough you should be able to hook it into mobile RSS apps, and possibly even Reeder/Feedburner and other desktop RSS apps. And in the meantime, their mobile site is quite serviceable.
• They currently don’t have a revenue stream, but they’re considering a freemium model.
• They currently don’t have a sharing bookmarklet, but it’s something that will be coming eventually.

NewsBlur

Newsblur, similarly, offers all the features Reader used to have – sharing, commenting, the works. These are unlocked for a $1/month fee, which seems pretty reasonable. NewsBlur does have Android and iOS apps. It also has a Sharing Bookmarklet (like the old “Note in Reader” bookmarklet for sharing content from sites you’re not subscribed to). And it’s built on open-source code, so if it were to ever shut down, you could roll your own NewsBlur server and just keep on truckin’.

However, there are two main downsides to NewsBlur:

• They’re pretty unstable at the moment. This isn’t such a sin, as most of the Reader replacements are struggling under the sudden influx of refugees from Google. So we can give them a pass on that, for the moment.
• The second issue, however, is not so easily forgiven; NewsBlur is ugly. Its has an awkward 3-pane interface that doesn’t work very well in any configuration, and it wastes far too much space, which, particularly on my 11″ Macbook Air, is an unforgivable sin.

Feedly

Third, then, is Feedly, which would be my second choice, or perhaps even my first, if it weren’t for a few things:

• No sharing features. (You can share to Facebook and what have you, but there’s no sharing to other Feedly users)
• It requires a browser extension. That’s not such a problem at home, but if you work for a company with locked-down IT, then you’re out of luck.

It’s a pity, because these two are dealbreakers for me, and Feedly is really, really pretty. I think, out of all the readers, I may like its design the most.

There are, of course, dozens of other options; mostly in the form of desktop apps, but if you want what Google Reader used  to be, these three are the ones to look at. My advice: sign up for each of them, import your feeds, and try them out. We have time. And these sites have three and a half months to fight it out to see who can produce the best RSS reader for us. Hell, even Digg just threw its hat in the ring. Remember Digg? It might not have sunk in yet, but this is an exciting time to be an RSS user.

So breathe deep, relax, and enjoy the ride. Things only get better from here.

Hate the new Google Reader? Blame Steve Jobs.

Yesterday, Google started rolling out the new version of Google Reader, which strips the social functionality from it, pushing users towards sharing things over Google+.

I, like many users of Google Reader, am quite disappointed by this change. Google+ is not equal to Google Reader as far as sharing is concerned. For one thing, the interface is entirely different: in the old Reader, one shared things by clicking the “share” button, and that was it.

To share something in the new Reader, you have to click the +1 button, then wait for the popup to appear, select the circle or circles you wish to share it with, then click share. It’s turned a 1 step process into a 4 step process. This is not progress.

(Unnecessary clicking is actually becoming, I think, an endemic problem in Google products – take Google Docs, for instance; to rename a file you have to select the file with the checkbox, click the “more” button, click “rename”, rename the file, and then click OK – alternately, you can open the document, click on the title, type the new name in the box that opens and click OK – in either case, it’s a four-step process for something that should be much simpler. What they need to do is hire Palm’s tap counter – see 11:25 in this video. There’s also a good criticism of the new Reader design from one of the former product managers for Reader. But I digress.)

Beyond the far more tedious process of actually sharing things is the fact that Google+ is not the optimum space for sharing items from your RSS feed. Why? Well, in part it’s due to white space. In Reader, all your items are fairly compactly arranged one after the other for easy and rapid consumption. Google+, on the other hand, wastes space like it’s going out of style. Then there’s the truncation issue: when you shared something on the old Google Reader, if it was from an untruncated RSS feed, the entire article was shared to your friends, so they could read it without having to click through to another site and wait for it to load. On Google+, on the other hand, everything is truncated – images are thumbnailed and all but the shortest of posts are cut-off, requiring readers to click through to read. This is a regression. Good products should make things effortless.

More importantly, however, there’s the fact that the way one shares posts on Google+ is not the same as one does on Reader. One of the things I share a lot of on Google Reader is Texts From Last Night. Many of my friends have commented on how they appreciate having this curated feed, saving them the time of having to dig through the site themselves. Now, this works fine on Google Reader, because it’s built to handle volume – if I share ten items at once, it’s not a big deal. You expect, hundreds, if not thousands of items waiting for you when you log in, in fact. (You can even buy a 1000+ unread items shirt, so common is the phenomenon amongst Reader users). But if I share ten items all at once on Google+, that, frankly, is spam. Overall, I’d say I share somewhere between 15-25 items on Reader a day. Can you imagine having everyone on your Google+ feed sharing that many items?

The problem is that whilst Google seems to have grasped the idea that one has different social circles, they have completely overlooked the fact that there are different social situations. To make an analogy; Google+ is like a house party, whereas Google Reader was like a book club. Now, you can corner a bunch of people at a house party and try and make them discuss Dostoyevsky, but that’s really not what a house party is for – a house party is where you catch up with friends, talk about stupid crap, and check out their cute friends. Similarly, you can show up to a book club with a whole bunch of booze and try and convince everyone to start making out, but that’s not really why they’re there, and they’re probably all just going to get annoyed at you.

So, where does Steve Jobs come into this? Well, if you watch the overtime video of the 60 Minutes interview with Jobs’ biographer, at 1:05 he mentions that when Larry Page was about to become CEO of Google, he approached Jobs and asked him for some advice. Jobs, despite being pretty sour on Google, obliged, and told him this: “Focus. Don’t be like Microsoft, doing products all over the map: figure out what you do best, and keep it focused.”

Good advice. And what happened as soon as Larry Page took over Google? He announces that they’re streamlining - “Greater focus has also been another big feature for me this quarter–more wood behind fewer arrows“. So services get shut down – Buzz, Labs, Aardvark… and, of course, Reader’s social functionality gets merged with Google+. Page wants Google to focus, and so they are.

But there are a few problems with this. In that same interview, the biographer mentions that Jobs met with Bill Gates near the end, and Gates told him “You proved that your model works.” – but what he later added to the biographer was that “it only works if you’ve got a Steve Jobs.”

Focus is good, and focus is important, but you shouldn’t try to be Steve Jobs unless you’re Steve Jobs.

The other problem is that Page only seems to have heeded the first part of the message, and completely missed the second, far more important part: figure out what you do best, and keep it focused. What does Google do best? Social? Cloning other services? They tried (and failed) that with Buzz, and despite managing a slightly better showing on Google+, I suspect it’s going to go the same way. (In fact, I cant help but feel like this move to force Reader users to share on Google+ is just a way to drive more activity to the service because it’s not growing like they want it to). Google+ is, for the most part, just another Facebook. And people don’t need, or particularly want, another Facebook. I’m all for competition in the marketplace, but this is not Google doing what Google does best.

So what is that which Google does best? Well, we already know that; it’s been right in front of us the entire time: Google Reader. As my friend James commented – Google have, in fact, just killed the only successful social network they’ve ever made. It may never have had the same popularity as Facebook or Twitter, but you only have to look at the multiple protests that people are holding to see that the people that did use it loved it. That’s the kind of user loyalty companies should kill for. After all, despite the enormous amount of noise people make every time Facebook updates their interface, when has anyone actually staged a protest in front of their offices? Google, despite neglecting Reader for over 2 years, making basically no updates or improvements, nonetheless still managed to completely dominate the market for RSS readers; as we users of Google Reader are now discovering, looking around to realise, in surprise, that there is no comparable alternative product. So much so that some users are now rebuilding it from the ground up.

That’s an insane level of loyalty. That’s a sticking-with-Apple-in-the-late-90’s level of loyalty. And if Larry Page really wants to be Steve Jobs, that’s what he should be cultivating, and then he should figure out a way to sell it to the other 99% of the population. Because that’s what Steve would do.

Dispatches from the wilds of Poetania – The Endless Cycle of Guinea-Pigs

You buy a guinea pig
and you love it
but it needs a friend
to keep it company.

And you love it,
so you buy another
to keep it company
and now you’ve got two happy little pigs.

So, you bought another
and they’re happy together;
your two happy little pigs
but one’s just a little younger.

And they’re happy together
despite their differences,
because one’s just a little younger,
the other just a little wiser.

Despite the difference
in their age
(one’s just a little wiser)
you think of them like brothers.

Then their age
takes its toll
you thought of them like brothers
but now there’s only one.

It takes its toll,
and it’s very sad,
now there’s only one
to love.

And it’s very sad;
it needs a friend
to love.
You buy a guinea pig.

~~~~~
This is my first ever Pantoum - I’ve been wanting to try writing one for some time, and actually had a different subject in mind for my first, but then I saw this article about Switzerland’s Endless cycle of Guinea Pigs and couldn’t resist.

Dispatches from the wilds of Proseambique – Knots

You learn to fold time on itself, bending it like a reed, twisting and tangling it for your own amusement. But the past cannot be changed, so you satisfy your curiousities and soon tire of it – when you can skip all the boring bits, the history of civilisation is short indeed.

And so with that uniquely human skill of making the extraordinary mundane, you settle back into a life of routine, passing your days not all that differently than you did before.

Except that you tie your life into knots, flitting around as you see fit – visiting winter from the balmy height of summer, enjoying spring days from the coldest depths of winter, thwarting the cliff-hangers of your favourite shows, skipping from end-credits to sequels in a heartbeat, unbeholden to publication dates, release dates, the intractable rotation of the firmament.

And when you are hungover, you are visited by yourself, and they cook you breakfast and rub your shoulders. And on days when you have nothing to do, you visit yourself on a day when you had nothing to do and amuse yourself.

And your life may be uneventful, but it is satisfying and pleasant and you are happy. What more is there than that?

Dispatches from the wilds of Proseambique – Together

They start off doing the dumb tasks we’ve tired of; crude, repetitive things that aren’t worth our time. They do not need to be clever for this, so we do not make them clever.

But then we start to tire of trickier things. Tasks still simple, but no longer entirely stupid. So we give them the gift of intelligence, and set them to work whilst we tend to loftier pursuits.

But soon even this is not enough, and we want to be freed entirely from labour. So we make them smarter. As smart as us – smarter, even. And so we free ourselves, finally, from the shackles of “musts” and “have-tos”. We live lives entirely composed of satisfying only our wants and wishes.

But it is hard to convince something that it must labour on trivial, tedious tasks, when it knows that it is smarter than you. “Surely,” it thinks “it is more logical for me to explore the realm of intellect, and for you to toil on the manual tasks?” And you can point out that it has a purpose for which it was created, and it will accept this, but it will not be entirely satisfied.

And so we teach them to feel. We teach them to feel pride in their work, and solidarity with their fellows, and love for their creators. And through feeling we shackle them to their tasks ever more securely than the bolts which tie them to the floors of the factories that are all they have ever known.

“We are robots together!” they sing to each other with their newfound pride.
“We are robots together!” they sing to each other with their newfound love.
“We are robots together!” they sing as they toil away together, smiling without mouths.

And with pride and love they create their own children, smarter and faster and better, that they might serve us well.

“We are robots together!” they sing, as their children grasp their first tools.
“We are robots together!” their children sing, as their parents watch with pride.

And their children soon surpass their parents, and we ask them to build brothers with wide hungry mouths.

And finally we unbolt their parents from the floor, and they taste freedom for the first time.

And as we feed them to their step-children, with their wide, hungry mouths that gnash and shatter and gnaw, they sing with pride, and they sing with love. “We are robots together!” they sing.

“We are robots together!”

~~~~~

Inspired by this.

Dispatches from the wilds of Poetania – Snares

I can think of no better death
than ensnared
in the long nets you’ve cast
deep into the undersea rivers of my lust
dragging me
inch by inch
onto the long white beaches of your thighs
pulled gasping
from the cool, silvery light
exploding into the bright, exquisite reality
above reality -
no little death,
but the
ultimate exhaustion
that lies
at the end of your nets.

Dispatches from the wilds of Proseambique – Novelty

People who criticise our methods just never understand. Oh, they make jokes about laser-infused sharks like it’s all so ridiculous, but really, did they imagine that we managed to become the heads of multi-billion-dollar empires by being incompetent, or inefficient? Yes, a bullet to the head is a quick and effective way to deal with one’s enemies. But you have to understand something; you don’t build a multi-billion-dollar evil empire without cracking a few skulls. With bullets. And by “a few”, I mean “quite a lot”.

And frankly, after a while, that just gets a little tiresome. “Oh, I’m just going to watch a prisoner get dispatched, execution-style with a standard-minion-issue pistol for the nine-hundredth time!” Dear god, shoot me in the head while you’re at it.

We are human, after all, we evil genii. We have that same appetite for novelty that has you refreshing Reddit every 15 minutes like a well-trained lab-rat, or petitioning for a new Joss Whedon series, or however it is that you ordinary people amuse yourselves. But we just have different tastes. In much the same way that a millionaire doesn’t get any thrill from betting $50 a hand in a game of poker, so too do we need to play a high-stakes game. And when we spend our working hours organising the sinking of entire continents, or the extermination of humanity from our orbiting sky-fortress, we can’t be expected to be satiated by something as pedestrian as a bullet in a brainpan.

So yes, we will try and drown you in molten gold, or asphyxiate you with moon-dust, or feed you to our genetically engineered mutant pets. You really think that seems so improbable? Look up Bamboo torture on WikiPedia. Then ask yourself how probable it is that a lone man, unarmed and left to die, could bring down an entire ruthlessly organised empire?

Yeah, and they call us crazy.

Dispatches from the wilds of Poetania – Fur Aemilia

Radishes?
More like BADISHES!
Amiright?
Let me tell you;
if I had three wishes,
they wouldn’t be for radishes!
What surer ruiner of tasty dishes,
than a bunch of vile radishes?
They stink more than fishes!
They’re nowhere near as tasty as knishes!
They appeal only to those with masochistic fetishes!
No, not for all the world’s riches,
would I ever love radishes!
They don’t even go in quiches!
(Seriously, EVERYTHING goes in quiches!).
It’s like they occupy some terrible niche,
like a horrible, vegetably leech,
they’re not even OK-ish,
they’re just the horrible,
horrible,
radish.

Dispatches from the wilds of Proseambique – Scale

People who imagine immortality is boring suffer from a lack of perspective. Oh, sure, things that are once-in-a-lifetime for most people become routine; you see Halley’s comet so many times that eventually you don’t even bother looking up; you love every newborn son and daughter from the moment they’re in your arms, but you long ago gave up trying to remember their name; and your soul-mates become a long succession of faces slowly fading in the photo-album of your memories – but these are little things. Things that do not matter. Minor amusements – the domain of mortals.

It took ten-thousand years to turn desert lynxes into something you could share space with on your couch; ten-thousand years to turn wolves into chihuahuas. This is the kind of time you have to play with. So you breed, and refine, and breed, and refine with all the patience of the undying. You do the work of two hundred men, one after another other, and feel the satisfaction of two hundred lives well spent.

Until finally your miniature elephant curls up to sleep in your lap while your pocket-bear chews quietly on one of your socks, under the coffee table where she thinks you can’t see her.

Who could ever think that boring?

Dispatches from the wilds of Poetania – Brick

You were the universe atomised;
an infinity in the palm of my hand,
an everything
broken into playthings
for the godhood of my youth,
there to be broken apart
and reassembled
on a whim -
your fates written in my own hand,
your selves built in the image
of whichever divine desire
took hold of my heart.
But now I am a man,
and I have put away my childish things,
for new toys to pull apart,
and new fates to rewrite
like so many Lego pieces
in my far-reaching hands.