
Why I'm quitting Google Reader: Google is sharing me to death - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/internet/102074/why-im-quitting-google-reader
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ugh
I would rather deactivate Buzz completely than letting it spoil the Reader.

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izendejas
I deactivated Buzz. It seems Google's so desperate to enter the social
advertising market that they're inconveniencing their users so much, so I
refuse to use Buzz for this simple reason. Google doesn't know what's best for
me. I do. They need to stop forcing me to use things I don't want. If I want
to use them, I'll turn them on, or request them.

~~~
electromagnetic
I'm content with facebook, that by the time I'd heard about Buzz I'd already
heard about problems (like this one) that would drive me away from using it.
So, currently at least, I've decided to avoid Buzz. If I never experience Buzz
during its existence, so be it. I use Docs, Analytics, Gmail and Reader, I'm a
rather loyal Google user and Buzz just seems to be aimed at screwing all that
up.

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AndrewWarner
Message to Google: Not MORE data. LESS data that's MORE useful.

I don't want more crap buzzing in my inbox. I want you to help me find just
the most important stuff.

I don't want more crap shared to me on Google Reader. I want you to notice
that I'm getting over 100 new articles a day, but only 5 of them have any
relevance to my work.

Just as your search pages showed fewer (but more useful) results than your
competitors and gmail showed less spam, I'd like you to help me get less data
everywhere else online.

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petercooper
Tip: Have a separate Google account for Reader. I don't use any of Google's
social stuff anyway, but my Reader is nice and clean with none of this stuff
going on.

I have an old Gmail and direct @gmail.com account from back in the day, but
use Google Apps For My Domain with its domain specific account for everything
"serious." Being logged in with two accounts at once isn't really a problem as
long as you only use one login per Google service, I've found.

~~~
crc5002
I have a dedicated account for Reader, and I use it from within a Mozilla
Prism appliance. External links open in my regular Firefox instance.

This is a simple setup that works adequately well for me.

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hachiya
A fantastic console newsreader is newsbeuter.

<http://newsbeuter.org/>

Highly configurable, and you can set vi keybindings.

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hkuo
I worked on a project once where this one person always posed the question,
"But what if google just copied us?" I always mentally ignored the question,
because I never considered it an issue. Just cause Google "can" doesn't mean
they will "succeed". Buzz is a perfect case in point, and it's not the only
one in Google's long history.

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verdant
He has to spend 5 to 15 minutes everyday hiding followers? Does he follow that
many new people in buzz everyday (automatically or implicitly) or are they not
staying hidden? That estimate seems large.

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lftl
I don't understand the problem. Why can't you minimize the "People you follow"
pane and just ignore it? Is it that shared items appear in the "All items"
view? An easy solution is to just drop all your subscriptions into a single
folder, and then view it through the subscriptions pane. Same content as all
items except nothing shared.

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Tichy
One of the rare cases where "normal" people would benefit from knowing how to
program? Should be easy to automate the hiding with a Greasemonkey script.

Not suggesting this as a solution to everyone, just saying...

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ajpatel
Yeah I think it must have to do with the number of people you follow. Hiding
has worked fine for me. Though I only follow about 150 people. Surprisingly
not that many people I know use Buzz, even though most use GMail.

Anyways, if you're looking for alternatives, I used Bloglines before I was a
GReader fan. Might want to try that out again, or a desktop app might be up
your alley too.

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gchucky
What about browser plugins? There are a bunch out for Firefox
([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/tags/display/RSS?so...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/tags/display/RSS?sort=weeklydownloads)). I used Sage several years
ago and was relatively happy with it; surely they've improved on it since
then.

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davidedicillo
I use <http://feedafever.com/> and I love it :)

~~~
al3x
I bought a license for Fever, and I hated it. It's a lovely UI and a great
concept, but in practice it ended up requiring a ton of fiddling to
essentially end up with Techmeme (that is, it only floats content to the top
based on inbound links, which is a pretty dim signal of what's going to be
important to you if you read about esoteric topics).

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stein
The author of the article is hiding people's names in the people panel without
actually changing the setting to ignore their shares.

The author needs to go into the sharing settings menu and click 'ignore' on
the users he doesn't want to see content from.

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lbwzt2
So... alternatives?

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latch
a friend recently launched feedingo.com - which is exactly that, a better
google reader.

~~~
bruceboughton
The trouble with that is that Reader is the Twitter of RSS readers. Why do I
say that? Look at iPhone feed readers. Pretty much all of them use your Google
Reader account to synchronize unread/read etc. so you don't have to read just
on your phone. It's the API and data store for synchronized feed reading.

~~~
dasil003
How many devices do you need to read your RSS feed on anyway? For me it's only
my desktop machines and _occasionally_ my phone. That's a pretty low barrier
to entry for a new feed reader.

I'm not buying the huge ecosystem argument at all. The problem with the
direction Google is taking—not to mention Twitter—is that there is a huge fad
fun factor at work here. It's fun to play around with this stuff, but how much
useful information can you get out of it? Sure, Twitter is some people's bread
and butter (pro bloggers...), RSS is much more powerful for domain experts,
for some people all they can really make use of is email.

Personally I think Google Buzz is too late to cash in on the Twitter fad. It's
solving Google's business problem, not users'. It'll probably settle into its
niche like the rest of Google's stuff, but they'll have to fix this heavy-
handed integration stuff.

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smackfu
My favorite thing ever is the Google Reader "next" bookmarklet. It lets me use
a RSS reader without ever needing to actually go to Google Reader.

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dc2k08
tried out netvibes recently. it's designed to be more of a polished igoogle
but you can use it only for feeds and it works well.

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aresant
It is interesting that Google is acting like a start-up company - I give them
credit for pushing this stuff out, but it's easy to see why beasts like
Microsoft stagnated for so long considering the litany of issues you run into
as a mature business with tens-of-millions of users . . .

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u48998
What am I missing? I don't share anything in my Google Reader. So where's the
problem?

~~~
_delirium
If your Google Reader account is linked to a Google Account that's on Buzz,
you get all this sharing whether you want it or not. The solutions seem to be:
1) disable Buzz; or 2) create a separate Google Account specifically to use
with Reader.

~~~
u48998
But what exactly is being shared by me without my knowledge? I don't get it.

I am not sharing the feeds I read in my Google Reader, nor do I click any
individual feed story to share.

~~~
_delirium
I think he's complaining about the other direction--- other people's feeds
being shared with him, polluting the "All Items" view with items shared by his
Buzz contacts, while he'd rather just see his own subscribed feeds there.
Apparently you can't turn that off without disabling Buzz entirely.

~~~
u48998
Okay, thanks. I still find it an odd reason to leave Google Reader. There's
just no better alternative out there.

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Semiapies
Not a problem in my case; everyone I have as a contact in Buzz is someone I
was already following in Reader.

