Saturday, October 22, 2011

#savethesharebros #OccupyGoogle

Reposting what @husbro wrote on the Reader help forum. <3

Dear Google Humans,

I respect and admire all of you folks who have constructed/maintained/
improved GReader over the years that I have used it. That said I am saddened by the unwillingness to leave a functional beloved service alone, in favor of lumping its functions in with G+.

I will illustrate the depth of my sadness with an anecdote. I have been married to a beautiful and wickedly intelligent woman for slightly less than a year. In a month I will be a father. I had the pleasure of first interacting with this amazing woman through your Google Reader service. I had moved away from my home state to attend graduate school at UT in Austin, about this same time my now wife moved to town. Even though we knew all the same people in Fayetteville, AR, we had never met. Cut to several years later, one degree heavier, and looking for a new place to live and another degree. I had been enamored of a young woman's 'shares' and comments, had avidly followed her posts and wistfully daydreamed about her from afar. We first met at a #sharebro event, scheduled and organized solely through reader might I add, which I attended over a holiday spent in NWA.

This woman is perfect, smart, beautiful, well-read, has amazing taste, amongst many other virtues. I might never have met her, we might never have had crushes on each other had there been no GReader social connections.

GReader is the only social media platform that I have ever liked. I joined friendster sometime in 2001, I think. I joined myspace a couple months later. I joined FB (hiss!) while it was still limited to college students. I had a LiveJournal, numerous blogs on social blogging sites, and have probably had profiles on a host of other sites that I do not now remember. So, I don't advance this opinion lightly. I love GReader, I'm married because of Greader, I have friends that I keep up with who live all over the US and in several places abroad because of GReader.

Right now I just have a shadow of that on G+, I hate the fact that G+ is primarily social and not content-based. I don't care if I know someone or not, I follow people based on similar interests (measured by what they share), similar outlooks (based on what they share), and/or expertise above and beyond mine in any number of areas (also measured by what they share). The only thing I see in G+ is another fucking FB, myspace, friendster, LJ, Beebo, Twitter that I fucking ignore.

I am 100% certain that even if someone at Google cares or commiserates with me that nothing will change. The priorities are kill all services to force all social interaction to occur on G+, which is sad because G+ is not successful or liked by anyone that I know, apart from people who just switched their status update site to G+ from facebook, and these are the exact people that I try so assiduously to avoid by using GReader. In fact, I hide/unfollow anyone who only shares notes that are self-referential.

Basically, this is a panegyric. An elegy. A final funeral oration. A fuck you to those who want to kill something that works and try to build a Frankenstein's Monster that will probably choke to death on its own blood. Reader works as is, this move is just a sad attempt to jump-start an already failed Buzz 2.0.

That's it, I'm done. If anyone cares I'm going to be trying to imagine how to delete G+.

Best,
Ramey