Dave Winer: Never The Same Ass Twice

Gizmodo on the closure of Google Reader: I won’t miss it. Never used the damn thing. Didn’t trust the idea of a big company like Google’s interests being so aligned with mine that I could trust them to get all my news. And besides, I didn’t think the mailbox approach to news was right. Who cares how many unread items there are. I like the river of news approach and I have a very fine set of rivers that keep me well supplied with news and podcasts. …Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on. Those have a better chance of surviving the bubbles.

Nice quote, you jack ass. You completely miss the fact that Google Reader was more than a reader: it was the RSS backbone for a number of products and projects… maybe if you co-built RSS a little better – and remember, you didn’t do it alone so you can shove that “creator” title out the window – then we wouldn’t need a sync engine and clients could inherently know how many things are unread. Unlike you and your “endless river of news” some of us work for a living and don’t have the time to twittle OPML files or jump between rivers.

As to “please pay a fair price” how exactly should we do that for Google Reader when Google didn’t offer a paid for option? I paid for FeedDemon years ago and now – with Google Reader closing – I will lose some of the key functionality that made the app great. I paid for the app because of the feature and now you’re going to tell me that I should pay for services? Or are you still saying that we should have paid you for defining an XML schema?

You, sir, continue to be a waste of bandwidth and close to a waste of oxygen.


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