Google Reader was my Personal Big Data Analytics and BI System

Google Reader will be closing down soon, and I feel like someone took away my most powerful tool.

Time for the whiny post about Google Reader. Everyone else is doing it, so why not me?

Google decided to close Google Reader. I have less than 3 months to find an alternative for it.

I’ve been using it for several years now. Tried other solutions along the years, but nothing came close. For me, Google Reader is the way to learn new subjects and to interact.

The way I use it?

• Everything and anything I want to follow gets into my Google Reader. It is over 500 feeds
• I use it to flick fast through what’s there and deciding what to read. I usually go over 300 posts a day with it, and I have it open in a dedicated tab of its own in my browser at all times
• It is available everywhere for me: on my 3 computers, tablet, phone and any other machine I have in front of me
• The best thing? It is searchable. I search through it when I need to, and that happens almost daily. Its search is better for me than Google search for a lot of things – because it is customized for my needs

I treated Google Reader as my personal analytics platform – I know I used it that way quite a lot.

Don’t sell me on Google+ for all this – I use that as well, but for now, it is more of an ADHD activity, taking up more bandwidth than it should for garbage than for anything useful.

Dave has a great post about Google Reader and the implications on Cloud services. The best part there?

Google may be too big to fail, but Google Reader is not.

I hope WebRTC won’t end up in the same ditch on the roadside.

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If you are getting to here by using Google Reader, and you are fine with reading the stuff I write on email, you can always  subscribe by email instead (I’ll probaby be switching there from Google Feedburner to something else soon, but that’s a different story).

If you are not, then wait a few weeks – I might end up writing here what I decided to use instead of Google Reader – if that is of interest to you.