Google announced its latest round of spring cleaning.  The most troubling part of the news announcement is the loss of Google Reader.  I've been using Reader since 2005 when it first started. I had tried a variety of one-off RSS readers prior to it and Google Reader was perfect for me because it was "in the cloud" before that was even in-vogue. Fast forward eight years and I'm still maintaining the same list of feeds, though now I consume it through native app clients on the Mac, iPhone and iPad. I haven't used the actual web site for it in a long time.

A lot of people are worried about what will happen when Reader shuts it's doors. There is even a big online petition going to ask Google to keep the service. Some have predicted that this will be the end of RSS as we know. Quite frankly I'm not too worried about losing Google Reader.  My list of feeds has thinned out over time as I've begun using services like Twitter more.  Where I once subscribed to feeds for news and sports I am now following various outlets on twitter. Most of my friends who still blog tweet when they post to, and quite often I am clicking over to an article because I saw it on a tweet first. That being said RSS still has it's place in my mind. Not everyone does the twitter thing and they shouldn't have to. The best part of RSS is still that it's an open and parsable standard.  It's friend OPML is great and also pretty portable.  These are two things Twitter won't give you.

So what am I going to do?  Mostly wait.  I've been using Reeder for consuming Google Reader data for a long time now and the developer of that fantastic app says it's not going away just because Google Reader is.  This gives me hope that Marco Arment might be right and that this is an opportunity for guys to build new replacement service.