The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).
Google resisted this trend admirably for a long time and was very geek- and standards-friendly, but not since Facebook got huge enough to effectively redefine the internet and refocus Google’s plans to be all-Google+, all the time.4 The escalating three-way war between Google, Facebook, and Twitter — by far the three most important web players today — is accumulating new casualties every day at our expense.
Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything.Marco.org
Lockdown
Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)
Is Zuck the devil?
To solve this problem (feed aggregator) for myself I installed Tiny-Tiny-RSS (Linux, Unix) on a server (local network). If you have a domain name you can broadcast it out to the internet so it's available wherever you go.
ReplyDeleteWorks like a charm, but it's not for everybody, takes some tech chops or at least perseverance.
Digg has released a free solution that replaces Google Reader for the most part and looks a lot like it.
I realize this is not the intent of the post put up by Tom (It is implied through the article itself however) but thought it may be helpful to some.
We have to resist these efforts to lock down the internet for profit.
A couple of hours ago aggregated 14 MNE tags related to EU and EZ into a single feed, using Harvard's TagTeam.
ReplyDeleteYou can see resulting feed here:
http://tagteam.harvard.edu/remix/europe-mne/items.rss
Quite usable, free service (open source software).
Intro to TagTeam
ReplyDeleteIt looks like TagTeam is similar to Tiny-tiny-RSS, at least some of the functionality is similar.
ReplyDeleteBoth are open-source (free) and the code is available through GitHub.
Both can be run as stand-alone aggregators and taggers and both can utilize already-existing feed services (Feedly, Digg, etc.) or hosted on your own local server or through a cloud-based server company.
http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki
Unfortunately, even if I was able to construct aggregated MNE feed using TagTeam, I'm unable to use it.
ReplyDeleteThere is some weird bug (feature?) of MNE, preventing standart tag feeds url addressing.
Try to subscribe in any feed reader http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Europe
or http://www.mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Europe
Even if it allows subscription and displays the content of posts, redirects to original MNE post page doesn't work. Instead it redirects to comments feed subscription page for that post.
I checked robots.txt - looks OK, standard for blogspot sites.
I consider this a problem.