While you were busy SXSWing last week, you may have missed out on some of our podcasts. What better time than now to catch up with a relaxing and informative weekend listen?
Hands on with the Galaxy S 4, RIP Google Reader and get better seats at the ballgame
After much fanfare the Pebble smartwatch made the leap from fanciful concept to full-fledged product earlier this year, but now that units have started to ship and people have started to wear them, what’s Pebble’s next step?
Why, enticing developers, of course. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky noted in a backer update video released earlier this morning that an early version of the smartwatch’s watchface SDK would be made available to would-be Pebble developers during the second week of April.
And when I say “early version,” I mean early version. At this stage it’s being looked at as more a proof-of-concept release than anything else, and Migicovsky points out that there’s a “99% chance” that the team will revamp some of the underlying APIs involved. What’s more, anyone expecting the ability to use the SDK preview to tap into the Pebble’s sensors and radios (like the accelerometer for tracking movement) will come away disappointed — the release is geared strictly toward new watchfaces, though Migicovsky says that games are also fair game as they rely mostly on button inputs.
The early SDK has been in testing with “hacker” backers — a group of about 100 people who pledged $235 or more for the privilege of early tinkering rights — for the past few months, and some of the apps they’ve created will be released alongside the SDK. The most notable new app? A low-res (and therefore faithful) reproduction of Snake that hearkens back to Nokia’s feature phone glory days.
Granted, new watchfaces may not seem like the most crucial addition even to Pebble buffs, but the impending release marks a pretty dramatic shift in scope for the Pebble team. What once started as a company whose daily operations were completely dictated by the need to manufacture and ship over $10 million worth of gadgets is now a company gearing up to focus on the next stage of the Pebble’s life cycle: building up the app ecosystem so the value of owning a Pebble extends beyond the wow factor of wearing a tiny e-paper display on your wrist. Migicovsky concedes that Pebble hasn’t “done the best job so far of communicating with developers,” but the team looks very willing to change that — hopefully a full-blown version of the SDK shows up sooner rather than later.
The Twin Cities has experienced the fifth-biggest rise among metro areas nationwide in the number of workers based at least partly at home, according to U.S. Census Bureau commuting surveys. Between 2000 and 2010, the number rose by almost 22,000 people, to about 82,500, according to estimates.
And Minnesota is the only state with two big job centers, Mankato and St. Cloud, among the top 10 metro areas nationally in the share of people working from home.
The article highlights some of the benefits of telecommuting. From the point of view of the workers – it’s nice to work and be around when your kids get home from school. As someone who normally lives that life, I have to second that benefit. Also businesses are seeing increased levels of productivity…
About three-quarters of the 48 eWorkPlace employers [employers who allow telecommuting] reported that productivity increased, while only a smattering sensed a decrease, according to a Humphrey School report.
And they are reducing costs…
“Organizations are trying to cut costs,” Kacher said, “and one way is through real estate. It’s not hard to have people like travel agents work from home: It saves lots of money on real estate, reduces turnover and people have more time. ”
The article recognizes that this news comes in the shadow of businesses such as Yahoo and Best Buy stepping back from telecommuting. Last month, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer pulled the plug on telecommuting in a memo…
“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”
The Huffington Post countered the Yahoo move with more research supporting telecommuting as a practice but also indicating management’s hesitation with it…
– A Stanford study, conveniently released on the same day as Yahoo’s memo, reported that call center employees increased their performance by 13 percent when working from home. They also reported “improved work satisfaction and experienced less turnover,” according to the study.
– A University of Texas at Austin study from late last year found that those people who work from home “add five to seven hours to their workweek compared with those who work exclusively at the office.” Such workhorses, we homeworkers are!
– A Bureau of Labor Statistics study, also from last year, reported that working remotely “seems to boost productivity, decrease absenteeism” — that means missing work — “and increase retention.” It also gives employers more incentive to ask you to work on weekends, the authors say. Boo!!
– According to some recent research published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, bosses are roughly 9 percent more likely to consider you “dependable” and “responsible” if you “put in expected face time” Translation: Being at the office can help you get that raise you so desire.
Colocation cages line a long hallway in the new Equinix SE3 data center in Seattle (Photo: Equinix)
For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week. Enjoy!
Heat Spike in Data Center Caused Hotmail Outage – The Hotmail servers got entirely too hot Tuesday, causing a major outage for Microsoft’s web-based email services. Both Hotmail and Outlook.com were offline for up to 16 hours after a failed software update caused the heat to spike in one part of a data center supporting those services. The outage also affected the Skydrive cloud storage service.
How Sandy Has Altered Data Center Disaster Planning – The scope of Superstorm Sandy has altered disaster planning for many data centers, which now must consider how to manage regional events in which travel may be limited across large areas due to fallen trees and gasoline shortages, restricting the movement of staff and supplies. A panel at DCD also raised tough questions about New York’s ability to improve its power infrastructure, as well as the role of city policies governing the placement of diesel fuel storage tanks and electrical switchgear.
Report: IBM, EMC Among Suitors for SoftLayer– Are we on the brink of another intense flurry of cloud hosting acquisitions? Reuters is reporting that tech titans IBM and EMC are bidding to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, one of the world’s largest hosting and cloud service providers. The news service doesn’t name its sources, but projects that a sale could fetch more than $2 billion.
Virtualization – The next frontier… – We’re way beyond simple server virtualization and are exploring new avenues to make virtualization an even more powerful platform. Let’s take a look at some of these technologies.
Former Parking Deck Now Equinix’s Newest Seattle Facility – A former parking garage in Seattle next to the Westin Building is now the newest Equinix data center. The new facility demonstrates Seattle’s growth as a data center market, and as an important gateway to the Asia-Pacific market.
Does Microsoft (MSFT) even need to launch a new Xbox? Despite Nintendo’s (NTDOY) recent release of its next-generation home video game console, the Xbox 360 racked up its twenty-sixth consecutive month as the top-selling console in the world in February. U.S. sales totalled 302,000 units according to The NPD Group’s February data, placing the Xbox ahead of Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation 4 and both the Wii and Wii U. The Xbox 360 holds an estimated 41% share of the current-generation console market in the U.S.
Talaria is mum about what it does on its current website, but on a cached version from March 9 it says the company is offering developers the use of “easy” programming languages such as Python or Ruby, while making them more efficient, like a compiled language is. The end result is today’s developers can code in the languages they love and use Talaria’s application server to somehow make that language more efficient.
From the cached version of the website:
At Talaria, we’re building a new, dynamic web application server with a JIT-based runtime at its heart. Today, it supports PHP and runs real-world applications like WordPress and Drupal. Talaria’s application server lets you handle more users with fewer boxes, without changing a line of code. Instead of worrying about your server bill, you can get back to building your app.
Facebook has done something that looks similar when it introduced Hip Hop as a way to make its existing PHP code more efficient. HipHop for PHP is a source code transformer that programmatically transforms PHP into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. The social network developed Hip Hop to boost the performance of Facebook applications while also lowering hardware costs.
If Talaria is doing something along these lines, this would help Google in two ways. It would enable Google to deliver a platform for developers that lets developers use their preferred languages, while giving the apps hosted on the Google cloud apps a performance advantage. But it would also help Google by letting it run those apps on fewer machines.
With all sorts of AAA titles out there and so many options to choose from, it might seem almost impossible for a new developer to step into this overcrowded game scene.
The gaming world is not only about AAA titles and some of you might sometimes feel the need to play a game only to relax your mind and relief some of the daily stress.
Dropbox has ambitions to become more than just an online storage & syncing company — it wants to be your online presence and the center for all your apps. And in order to make that vision possible, the San Francisco-based company snapped up Orchestra, the company behind the buzzy Mailbox app.
So how much did Dropbox pay for Mailbox? My sources are putting the number at north of $50 million. At least one source claimed that the final amount was a lot closer to $100 million. My sources say that the company was in talks with Yahoo but it was bested by Facebook, who in turn was beaten to the punch by Dropbox. Dropbox is valued at about $4 billion and has become an active acquirer of small teams and tiny startups.
Given that the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Orchestra had previously raised $5.3 million (from Charles River Ventures, CrunchFund and others) at a valuation that was somewhere between $15-to-$20 million, the $50 million (or higher) is a hefty return for its investors, considering that the company was a long way from becoming a real legitimate business.
Dropbox’s desire to become a bigger platform have been known for a while, but the company has yet to provide any concrete information about how well it is doing as it tried to become become our online hub.
What if you could custom order furniture for your home while paying Ikea prices for it? That’s the goal of Fabsie, a U.K. startup that wants to take the promise of custom manufacturing enabled by 3D printing, laser cutters and CNC routers and match that with the needs of everyday consumers.
James McBennett, the founder of Fabsie, is hoping to act as an essential bridge between designers of CNC (computer numerical control) manufactured furniture that can be found on sites like Instructables and the average consumer who may want custom furniture but has no means to get it manufactured. CNC furniture is made of plywood on a CNC router, that allows a router to cut computer-designed shapes. The results can be surprisingly high end.
Currently Fabsie has a Kickstarter project that features a plywood rocking stool that can be made with a lot of rock, less rock, and no rock. Eventually, the company wants to do all kinds of furniture and maybe even branch out into household goods.
But McBennett’s hopes are bigger than one stool. He thinks the time is ripe for a company to act as a broker and quality assurance agent of sorts between the maker movement and people who have custom wants, but no desire to make. Fabsie, as he envisions it, would take designs from people and maybe even sites like Instructables, manufacture them, test the resulting physical product, and adapt the design if needed for a mass audience.
At the same time it will also develop a network of manufacturing sites around the world. Today these sites are usually university towns with hacker spaces or labs that have the machines to fabricate and cut plywood, but it’s possible that independent companies might step up to fulfill this niche if ideas like Fabsie and custom manufacturing take off. Currently, many of the facilities with CNC routers only use them a quarter of the time, McBennett said. His business could help put those machines to work full time, and help the maker spaces make money.
The trend toward custom products and the rise of cheaper manufacturing equipment such as home 3D printers and laser cutting machines, as well as the availability of more and more designs are creating new business models for companies like Fabsie, or Nervous Systems, which makes custom 3D printed jewelry that’s sold in the MoMA store.
Similar to how the digitization of content undercut the physical distribution systems of newspapers and print magazines — one of the primary advantages that print newspapers had — the digitization of product design holds similar promise if we can figure out how to package and consume those designs closer to the consumer on an on-demand basis.
But even with digital designs, physical objects have to at some point convert from digital over to the analog world. Pushing that point out closer to the end consumer of the product via fabrication plants closer to the home helps reduce costs associated with shipping and also delays in getting the item. And newer manufacturing makes doing a custom run a bit more economical. McBennett estimates he can produce stools at a cost of £20 (almost $30) apiece, but that prices drops to £10 if a manufacturer is making 10.
Clearly, those economies of scale vanish at the totally custom level, but that design is still stored and could be made again for other customers. With a material like plywood, which has a standard scale that measures the quality of the wood, it’s easy to control the end result. I might pay more for higher-quality plywood, but I will also know exactly what I am going to get.
As we embrace customization in our products, digitization of our designs and the new manufacturing technologies coming online, the distribution of physical goods will change. Fabsie may be one model for how that change will happen while still delivering quality products for consumers.
In January, Cisco announced that Belkin would acquire its Home Networking Business Unit and its leading brand, Linksys. Today, Belkin announced that the Linksys acquisition is complete.
Belkin now possesses Linksys routers and other Smart Wi-Fi products. They will be managed as a separate brand and product portfolio.
Belkin CEO Chet Pipkin had this to say: “Linksys has a rich heritage, a passionate customer base and a wide product line, all of which fueled our decision to acquire the company and our plan to maintain the Linksys brand. The Linksys portfolio will continue to exist and evolve to include even richer user experiences and network management functionality. Smart Wi-Fi is an innovative and easy way for consumers to stay connected to their home network and we look to continue investing in it by adding more features and products.”
“A lot of exciting things are happening in today’s connected lifestyle segment, and we are honored to continue the Linksys brand and enable new connected experiences,” said Pipkin. “Linksys and Belkin are now one team. We are ready to do fantastic things as a team and deliver products that delight consumers and support the increasingly connected, mobile world.”
Customers can expect more Linksys-branded products coming out of the pipeline, and support for existing products will continue through the existing channels.
Etsy had more page views in January that it did in December, which is pretty impressive, considering the December holiday rush.
The company put out its “weather report” for January on Friday (better late than never), revealing that Etsy had 1.67 billion page views on its site in January. That’s compared to 1.53 billion page views in December.
The site also saw $97.6 million worth of goods sold (after refunds and cancellations) during the month, which was 17.1% lower than December’s $117.8 million.
“To most, January is a quiet time,” writes Etsy’s Michelle Traub in a blog post. “The bustle of holiday activity behind us, we hunker down into cozy routines — sleepily caressing fireside toddies and patiently simmering day-long stews. But there’s no rest for the weary when it comes to buying and selling on Etsy!”
“The $97.6 million of goods sold (after refunds and cancellations) represents a 77.8% increase from January 2012′s total,” says Traub. “At the same time, items sold were up 60.3%.”
Etsy saw 4,482,545 items sold in January. 2,699,648 new items were listed during the month (14.2% higher than December’s 2,363,780). 1,128,036 new members joined Etsy (21.8% lower than December’s 1,441,833).
Fan of Google Reader and RSS feeds in general? You’re going to love this. Not only has Google announced the demise of Google Reader, but they’ve also killed the RSS Subscription Chrome extension. It’s no longer in the Chrome Web Store.
TechCrunch reported on this after a few other noticed. The extension appears to still be working for those of us who have already downloaded it, but its landing page in the Store now presents an error message.
So, I guess it’s official. Google is not just ending a product it has no interest in running anymore. It simply doesn’t want us to use RSS. This doesn’t seem in line with Google’s stated mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. They seem to be tossing that out the window a lot lately. Maybe it’s time to change it.
It’s unclear exactly when Google pulled the extension.
Most sites with feeds offer their own subscribe buttons, so the loss of the extension is not a huge blow, but it’s still been a nice thing to have for a quick easy way to subscribe to new sites.
Apps used on tablets like the iPad and various Android slates are expected to generate $8.8 billion in revenue in 2013, accounting for 35% of all app revenue this year, while smartphone apps generate $16.4 billion. According to market research firm ABI, the scales will finally tip by 2018, when tablet app revenue surpasses smartphones. “The dynamic is quite straightforward,” ABI analyst Aapo Markkanen said. “The larger screen makes apps and content look and feel better, so there are more lucrative opportunities. One might think that the bigger installed base of smartphones would compensate for the disparity, but that notion fails to take into account the arrival of low-cost tablets, which hasn’t even started yet at its earnest. The smartphones paved the way for them, but in the end we believe that it’s the tablets that will prove the more transformative device segment of the two.” ABI estimates that tablet and smartphone apps will generate a combined $92 billion in revenue in 2018.
Now that Sony, LG, HTC, and Samsung have all pulled back the curtains on their flagship Android smartphones, the rumor mill can churn with renewed focus on yet another nebulous device — Motorola’s secretive X Phone.
Or rather, X Phones. According to Android And Me’s Taylor Wimberly, X Phone isn’t going to be a product name so much as it is a banner that multiple phones will fly under, and his sources assert that we’ve already seen the first of those devices in wild.
(I think it goes without saying that you should take all this information with a hefty grain of salt.)
The supposed culprit was captured on film earlier this week by the noted team at Tinhte, the Vietnamese site that thrives on getting their hands on unreleased gadgets well before the rest of us do. It was a fairly unassuming device — it bears a mild resemblance to the Galaxy Nexus when viewed dead-on, and sports a cleaner, rounded design that doesn’t quite jibe with many of Motorola’s recent angular design efforts.
What’s more, its modest spec sheet prompted many (myself included) to dismiss its odds of being the fabled X Phone. To wit: it sports one of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro systems-on-a-chip, 2GB of RAM, a 4.65-inch display, and a 2,200 mAh battery. In fairness, that’s not a shabby device at all. That’s essentially what the Nexus 4 is working with, but it just didn’t seem flashy enough to be what Motorola and Google have been working on all this time.
But if this new report holds true, that lack of next-gen horsepower could be because Google intends to sell this particular X Phone dirt cheap sans contract — $199 or so.
Curiously, the original video of the device was yanked from YouTube, and the original post on Tinhte seems to have disappeared as well. That’s far from a confirmation that Tinhte has ruffled some major feathers, but it’s something to consider.
Now to call this whole thing a little kooky would be putting it very mildly, but such an approach wouldn’t exactly come out of left field. One could look at the Nexus 4′s launch as a grand experiment of sorts, meant to see if the consuming public would be open to purchasing unsubsidized hardware directly from the people making it. The answer, clearly, is yes. The Nexus 4 isn’t exactly a mass-market success but demand for the device and its reasonably low price tag led to some notable woes for people trying to purchase the thing early on.
Moreover, the more limited launch of a high-end device like the Nexus 4 could help Google gauge their ability to fulfill device demand in markets across the globe. Now that Google has more or less figured out what needs to happen to keep a global device rollout from going immediately south, it’s arguably better prepared to push out a solid phone at a crazy low price point. Only time will tell whether or not Google and Motorola truly plan to inundate the world with a horde of cheap X Phones, but with I/O on the horizon I imagine it won’t be long before the next chapter of the X Phone saga begins to unfold.
A look at the racks inside a SoftLayer Technologies data center in Dallas (Photo: SoftLayer Technologies)
Are we on the brink of another intense flurry of cloud hosting acquisitions? Reuters is reporting that tech titans IBM and EMC are bidding to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, one of the world’s largest hosting and cloud service providers. The news service doesn’t name its sources, but projects that a sale could fetch more than $2 billion. According to Reuters, SoftLayer has hired Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse to run the sale process, which reportedly was kicked off with an offer from AT&T.
SoftLayer has often been mentioned as one of the industry players positioning for either a sale or an IPO. The company is owned by private equity firm GI Partners, which combined it with The Planet in a 2010 merger that vaulted it into the top tier of global players in the hosting business. The company provides dedicated servers and cloud hosting to more than 25,000 customers.
That huge customer base makes SoftLayer an attractive acquisition target for companies hoping to quickly boost their presence in retail hosting and cloud services. SoftLayer has a huge global infrastructure platform, managing more than 100,000 servers in 13 data centers Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Seattle, northern Virginia, Singapore and Amsterdam. It also has a built-in revenue ramp up within its customer base, which includes a mix of tech-savvy startups and traditional dedicated server customers.
The company has capitalized on that opportunity to build momentum for hybrid cloud installations featuring Flex Images, a service which allows customers to copy and store an image of a cloud or dedicated server, and then redeploy the image on either type of computing environment.
It remains to be seen whether a deal materializes. But if the Reuters report is accurate, it suggests that three of the world’s largest technology companies feel the need to accelerate their cloud businesses with a major acquisition. Should one manage to close a deal for SoftLayer, the other contenders may feel even greater pressure to line up a deal. That was the pattern in early 2011, when we saw three deals in short order – Verizon bought Terremark for $.14 billion, after which Navisite was acquired by Time Warner Cable, and CenturyLink snapped up Savvis for $2.5 billion.
So here I am back to work. Immediately, I’ve already been using Google Reader like all day. The truth is, I was already using it every day while I wasn’t working as well. That’s because it’s one of the things on the Internet that I use the most. So, you can imagine, I’m not incredibly happy about the news. I mean, I don’t agree with Hitler on many things, but I think he has this one spot on.
A little over a month ago, Google Reader users were experiencing some usability issues with the product, and Google didn’t seem to care much about fixing it quickly. Little did we know at the time that this was a foreshadowing of what was to come.
On Wednesday, Google broke the news to the world. They did so in one of their regular “spring cleaning” announcements. By now, I’m used to these announcements. Usually, they’re about products that I’ve used little or not at all. Occasionally, they included something I used but could live without (like Picnik). Never before have the announcements involved something that I relied upon on a day to day basis.
We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.
Was it only 2005? I can hardly remember living without Google Reader.
There was a separate post on the Google Reader blog. This was the first post to the blog since October 2011, which announced some Google+ integration. Perhaps that should have been taken as another clue. On the blog, Google software engineer Alan Green wrote:
We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.
There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.
Usage is declining. I guess that’s not entirely unexpected, given the rise of social media. For the average person, I can see where it wouldn’t be incredibly hard to get by without Google Reader, even if they are accustomed to using it on a regular basis. For people who write for the web, however (which is still a pretty large number of people), there really isn’t another tool out there that does the job as well as Google Reader. At least not yet. Others see the situation as it is, and are working on alternatives, and or promoting their existing alternatives.
The Twitterverse (one of many possible places Google will be pushing users with the killing of Reader) is full of complaints. Twitter, by the way, probably has a lot more to gain from this move than Google+, and many believe that Google’s move is really about Google+. It’s no secret that Google has been pushing to get people using its social network to consume and share content, and clearly, this is where Google’s efforts on this front are focused.
This week, former Google Reader product manager Brian Shih spoke about Google’s move on Quora. Here’s a snippet of what he had to say about it:
It turns out they decided to kill it anyway in 2010, even though most of the engineers opted against joining G+. Ironically, I think the reason Google always wanted to pull the Reader team off to build these other social products was that the Reader team actually understood social (and tried a lot of experiments over the years that informed the larger social features at the company)[1]. Reader’s social features also evolved very organically in response to users, instead of being designed top-down like some of Google’s other efforts[2].
I suspect that it survived for some time after being put into maintenance because they believed it could still be a useful source of content into G+. Reader users were always voracious consumers of content, and many of them filtered and shared a great deal of it.
But after switching the sharing features over to G+ (the so called “share-pocalypse”) along with the redesigned UI, my guess is that usage just started to fall – particularly around sharing. I know that my sharing basically stopped completely once the redesign happened [3]. Though Google did ultimately fix a lot of the UI issues, the sharing (and therefore content going into G+) would never recover.
So with dwindling usefulness to G+, (likely) dwindling or flattening usage due to being in maintenance, and Google’s big drive to focus in the last couple of years, what choice was there but to kill the product?
So, if you want to get your data out of Reader from Google Takeout, you can do so here. You have until July 1. In the meantime, us Google Reader die hards will have to hope Google takes note of these petitions and reconsiders (which is probably unlikely, if we’re being honest), and/or start exploring the alternatives. Lots of people have already compiled lists, including tools like: Feedly, Netvibes, The Old Reader, Bloglovin’, NewsBlur, FlipBoard, Pulse (which LinkedIn is apparently buying), Zite. Oh yeah, and then there’s Google Currents (at least for now), and of course, there’s not even a web version.
Nothing I’ve used so far has been able to match Google Reader in functionality entirely, for my personal purposes. Some are better than others, and I won’t promote any one tool here, mostly because I’ve not settled on one myself. You can be sure that we’ll see more players enter the market in the time leading up to July 1, so the best alternative might not even exist yet. One intriguing possibility is an offering for Digg, who has already come out and said it’s working on one that will mimic Google Reader. That sounds promising. I’d love to see an identical clone, even if it has Digg’s logo instead of Google. This could be Digg’s ticket back to Internet relevance.
Some services, which relied heavily upon Google Reader are just shutting down – namely FeedDemon. Founder Nick Bradbury wrote about the end of the service in a blog post, which he says was hard for him to write. He says:
FeedDemon relies on Google Reader for synchronization, and there’s no decent alternative (and even if there were, it’s doubtful I’d have time to integrate with it, at least not without trading time away from my family – which I won’t do).
That was the nail in the coffin for me. I hate to say goodbye to FeedDemon after a decade of working on it, but it’s time to say goodbye. When Google Reader shuts down on July 1, FeedDemon will also disappear.
Some see the whole thing as a good opportunity for Google rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo to step up to the plate, and fill a void that Google is leaving behind.
Some (including Hitler) have wondered what has happened to Google’s old stance about the open web – something that Google Reader and RSS both cater to. Google has historically been all about this, but doing away with Reader and pushing toward Google+ doesn’t seem to be a move in the same direction. That may or may not make sense from a corporate standpoint, but it’s certainly worth noting. As TechEye points out, Google’s move should make Internet censorship-heavy Iran happy, as many Iranians apparently use reader to get around some of the censorship.
What About Your Web Traffic?
Okay, I think the point has been made about how much this whole thing sucks for users. But there is another side of the coin, for which the outlook isn’t all that rosy either. As RSS feeds are still the primary way a lot of people get their news, that means Google’s move away from Reader has the potential to impact traffic to the sites to which users are subscribed.
Hard core Google Reader users have racked up numerous feeds over the years. You have to wonder how many of the users, regardless of what alternative they transition to, will take all of their feed subscriptions with them. How many sites will lose subscribers over the whole thing. Some users will no doubt elect to just use social media instead of RSS. Will these people bother to subscribe to the Twitter, Facebook or Google+ feeds for all of the sites they were subscribed to? And even if they do, will these sites be pushing out every article to these channels the way they do through RSS?
That brings up another interesting point. Will this move clutter up social media feeds, and lead to a lot more content being pushed from publications through social media channels? A site that only pushed a few articles per day to its Facebook followers may find itself posting every article. Then, of course, there’s another layer to that issue: how many Facebook users are looking at all of the posts from the pages they follow?
Luckily, Facebook is in the process of rolling out changes that at least let users see all of the posts from the pages they follow if they choose to do so. Before, they were filtering that, so there was no guarantee all of a page’s followers even had the opportunity to see a post. Even still, the Facebook functionality is hardly an RSS clone.
According to BuzzFeed, Google Reader is a much larger source of web traffic than Google+ to the network of sites it tracked. Here’s what their chart looks like:
Death Of RSS?
The question of whether or not RSS is dead or dying has been around for years. Naturally, it has resurfaced in light of Google’s news. Is it dead? Clearly not, given the amount of outcry we’re seeing over the death of Google Reader, and the rush for alternatives from other companies. There is demand. It may not be a huge percentage of Internet users, but those that demand it are serious about it and loyal to the format. It’s become as fundamental to the web experience as search and email for some of us. It’s not dead.
Is it dying? That’s not as easy of a question to answer. I want to say no, but Google turning its back on it is not a good sign. Part of me wonders, as I’m exploring alternative means for consuming RSS feeds, if it’s just a lost cause, and I should really be exploring different strategies for news consumption altogether (and don’t get me wrong, RSS is not my only news consumption habit). I don’t think I’m willing to accept the demise of RSS just yet though. If we all do that, then we truly are killing it. To my knowledge, there really isn’t a means of consuming news that is as comprehensive as RSS anyway – at least not one that meets my needs.
Obviously I’ve made no attempt to hide how I feel about Google Reader’s demise, but there are some out there who think it might actually be a good thing. Some journalists have already abandoned RSS. Tech blogger Robert Scoble, once a faithful user, wrote about why he stopped using Google Reader all the way back in 2009. He had some valid points about flaws with Reader back then that still hold true today, but I don’t think many of us would say that Reader is flawless. Sure, there are things that Google could have improved upon, and you can’t rely solely on Reader if you don’t want to miss anything. For many of us, however, it’s just a major piece of the puzzle.
All of this aside, by shutting down Reader, Google is driving people out of its universe, by driving them to alternatives. I find this move baffling, as in many cases, it will no doubt drive users to Google’s competitors. Considering all of the moves Google has made to keep users on Google properties, keeping Google Reader around seems like a no-brainer. Some of us spend a whole lot of time on that Google property. Possibly even more than any other Google property.
While Google Reader may live to July 1, the app is already gone from the Google Play store.
Is Google wise to kill off Reader? Will you miss it? What will you use instead? Is this the beginning of the end of RSS? Share your thoughts in the comments.
President Obama called for stronger action on climate change and support of clean energy research during his State of the Union speech, and now he’s showing his cards for how he might carry that out. On Friday Obama is expected to propose funneling $2 billion worth of federal leases for oil and gas companies into research and deployment of cleaner vehicles, reports the New York Times. At the same time, Bloomberg reports that Obama could also use a law from the Nixon-era to tell federal agencies that they need to consider climate change impacts before approving infrastructure projects like oil pipelines.
The moves show how Obama is getting creative at a time when Congress isn’t likely to approve budget increases for clean energy support, or other policies like a cap and trade program or carbon tax. The stimulus package, which injected some $90 billion into clean energy projects and incentives, has largely been spent or the funds expired, so clean energy companies and projects are facing a steep drop in federal support in 2013.
Yet, many will note that the moves are piece meal and not as aggressive as Obama originally proposed when he first ran for office. And some of Obama’s concessions to the natural gas and oil industry will likely anger environmentalists and some clean energy advocates. The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration plans to rewrite its proposal to regulate greenhouse emissions using the Environmental Protection Agency, making the proposal weaker and potentially delaying regulations.
The proposal for using $2 billion in federal leases will emerge over the coming weeks. Obama brought up this plan in the State of the Union speech, calling it an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good. Obama said “If a non-partisan coalition of CEOs and retired generals and admirals can get behind this idea, then so can we.”
The use of the infrastructure law is a new idea, and will no doubt prove controversial. A manufacturing association told Bloomberg that the notion had them “freaked out.” The law originally was used to protect water, air and soil from infrastructure projects that could have negative environmental effects.
Two questions I hear a lot in the broadband world: How can public and private work together? How can we encourage non-adopters to subscribe to broadband? I think the following story answers both…
There were 28 PCs for People refurbished computers available at no charge to these families along with a paid 10 month subscription for Internet service for 24 families through Paul Bunyan Communications. The families qualified for free and reduced price lunch. The project ended December 31, 2012.
As of January, 2013 the households picked up the cost of the Internet at the regular rate from Paul Bunyan Communications. To date in March only 4 households have dropped their Internet service from Paul Bunyan Communications….an 84% retention rate.
KOOTASCA helped to facilitate the project between PCs for People (a nonprofit), the school and the local provider. We’ve had stories of similar projects in Thief River Falls and other areas – but it seems like the kind of straightforward plan that bears repeating.
The company behind the original “Goophone,” a Chinese iPhone 5 knockoff powered by Android, has beaten Apple (AAPL) to the punch by launching an updated “i5S” version of its smartphone. The handset uses a design that is nearly identical to Apple’s iPhone 5 and it runs a highly customized version of Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean that has been modified to look and act like iOS. The handset features a 4-inch “oneglass” screen with 854 x 480-pixel resolution, a 1GHz dual-core MediaTek processor, 512MB of RAM and a 5-megapixel camera, and it costs just $150 in China. A hands-on video of the Goophone i5S follows below.
There is definitely no shortage of Windows applications created especially for the purpose of cleaning the operating system of clutter and thus claim more free space.
BleachBit is also part of this category, but a tad different from the popular programs you might be accustomed to. This is mostly because of its minimalist interface, but the fact that it is straight… (read more)
With all sorts of AAA titles out there and so many options to choose from, it might seem almost impossible for a new developer to step into this overcrowded game scene. 
There is definitely no shortage of Windows applications created especially for the purpose of cleaning the operating system of clutter and thus claim more free space.