Bye Bye Google

And don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out of my life.

The Internet was buzzing yesterday with the news that Google is shutting down Reader on July 1. I predicted this last year. That does not make me particularly smart. When they killed Adsense for RSS Feeds it was obvious. Also, the Reader blog had not been updated in 2 years. Reader had been on life support for a while.

Because I was expecting it, and had already failed once at transitioning away from Google, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I installed Tiny Tiny RSS this AM and had it running here on ODonnellWeb in under an hour. It's not as pretty at GReader, but it works. After one day, I think it's good enough for me.

For email, I had already tagged PolarisMail as a worthy replacement for Gmail. Today I paid for an account and started setting up my email there. I'm not really happy with any of the 5 webmail options they have, so I'm back on Thunderbird, which is fine. I like Thunderbird, and I have the calender syncing with the open source Horde calendar, so I dropped Google Calendar too. If they will enable HTML email support in Horde I think it will work just fine for me. I'll have to ask about that.

Hopefully, the 1000 lb. gorilla of the RSS reader world getting out of the market will spark a bunch of innovate and cool RSS related projects. There is definitely opportunity there.