I learned about Google killing Google Reader today and was shocked that yet another fantastic web application in the Google house was being tossed out. I don't know what it is with my taste in good ideas but it seems that every time I find God in an application some profit-premise market analysis rules that it isn't sustainable and it goes away.
Now like so many other hardcore RSS aggregators I am forced to decide on an alternative solution and the web consensus seems to be that this is a service called Feedly. It seems to match all of Google Reader's features but does the one thing I abhore of any web application which is that it tries to do too much. I like a smart index and the ability to build my own lists around a solid "systems" data view. But Feedly it seems wants to turn all my RSS input into a flippin' magazine which is really, really, annoying. It's like e-mail services that insist on insist on insist on doing crap with my e-mail before I ever get a chance to see it ("priority inboxes", "starring", spam control anyone? - screw that - btw, folks, if you want to say goodbye to spam learn about Spam Arrest and kick goofy "algorithms" goodbye). I suppose if I can't configure my way out of Feedly's default behavior I'll go back to using something on the desktop. There still have to be good client-side RSS readers around. It's not like e-mail clients dried up, right.
On the plus side a colleague and I were musing over the lack of simple note-taking applications on the web Friday, including Google Notes which was killed to similar analysis that GR was. So it was a little odd that along with today's bad news came interestingly timed good news that Google is probably bringing back its web based note application, and is probably calling it Google Keep. Of course there is and has always been Evernote but the real grist of our conservation was how a great idea like a fast-loading note application in the cloud took a wayward trek to another service outside Google Docs or whatever your operating ecology happened to be, to use it.
