What other free hosted service provider deserves your "trust" that it will never, ever go away, and which provides facilities for exporting all your data in a nice way (a feature which will likely be accessible long into the future)?
I'm just as irritated as you are, but given that they've provided notice and good backup/takeout options, I don't see a betrayal of trust anywhere.
I didn't use Google Reader because it was free, I used it because it was 1) good and 2) the back-end to essentially every other RSS-based service I used. So they're not competing with "free", they're competing with everything.
I learned this lesson when I made the mistake of Google Voice (which was free for some aspects).
I concur with this sentiment. It is good enough to pay for in my point of view. Google simply made the choice of wanting to monetize on their current user group. It makes me wonder if they'll open source it so that others can self-host it.
What other free hosted service provider deserves your "trust" that it will never, ever go away, and which provides facilities for exporting all your data in a nice way (a feature which will likely be accessible long into the future)?
I'm just as irritated as you are, but given that they've provided notice and good backup/takeout options, I don't see a betrayal of trust anywhere.