Google announced today that Reader is shutting down in July. I actually said “no” out loud at my screen.
I have written before about how RSS is my secret weapon and how Google Reader is where my whole morning routine lives. Every blog, every competitor, every source I follow, all in one place. It is not exciting software. It is just the thing I have quietly depended on every single day for years. And now it is going away because Google decided it does not make them enough money.
The gut punch
The annoying part is that Reader is not broken. People are not leaving it. Google is closing it because it does not fit their plans, and the people who use it every day get no say. That is the deal with free tools from a giant company. You do not own the ground you are standing on, and they can pull it out from under you whenever they want.
I keep telling clients to build things they control, to not put their whole business on land they rent. And here I am, having done exactly the thing I warn against with my own daily workflow.
What I am doing about it
First, I am not panicking, because I have a few months. I am testing the alternatives right now, moving my feeds around, seeing which reader I can actually live in. It is annoying but survivable.
Second, and bigger, I am rethinking where else I am too dependent on a free thing I do not control. My email list, my own site, my own content: those are mine. Nobody can shut those down on a whim. The more of my work that sits on ground I own, the less a single announcement like today can hurt me.
The lesson
Free is wonderful until the day it is not there. Reader gave me years of value and I am grateful for it. But it is also a clear, expensive reminder to build on things I control and treat everything borrowed as temporary. Losing a favorite tool stings. Losing something you actually depend on and cannot replace would be a lot worse.
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