There has been quite a lot of complaining going on, justifiably so in my view, since Google announced that Google Reader is soon to be discontinued. People want to know what they can do now for their feed updates.
However, in among the complaining there are bloggers voicing the opposite view. Google Reader will be no more? Good riddance, they say. It's a dinosaur. It hasn't changed for years. It hasn't moved with the times. They rail at its lack of social networking features. They abhor its text only interface. Where are the pretty pictures of their newsfeeds. Where is all the bright, flashy moving imagery? How do I share all my amazing feeds with all my friends? Why doesn't it tell me about the gazillions of newsfeeds that I might be interested in but haven't discovered for myself? Where are the bells and whistles?
That's the trouble with technophiles. They can't comprehend that not all of us are the same. They can't understand that some of us don't want all those things. Some of us don't share their passion for bells and whistles. Some of us are simpler souls with simpler needs.
I firmly believe that there are lots of people like me who want a feed aggregator to do one thing and one thing only – aggregate feeds. I have no desire at all to share my feeds with anyone else or have anyone else share their feeds with me. If I wanted to be on social networks I would be. I'm not. Not on Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin or Livejournal or any other kind of social networking site. I don't want them. I don't need them. I don't join them.
I just don't care.
Similarly I don't want to do my computing on the move. I don't own a smart phone* and I don't intend to buy one. I am happy to check my email when I get home from work thanks. It is a matter of utter indifference to me whether there is a version optimized for the i-phone.
I am aware that in many peoples eyes this makes me some kind of Neanderthal that's how it is. And I am certain there are plenty of other people out there who feel the same way.
Google Reader did exactly what I wanted to do and no more. It told me when the sites that interest me had new content so that I could go and look at it. It saved me having to trawl around all the sites that interest me only to find that ninety percent hadn't changed since last time.
And it did it cleanly, efficiently and using words not pictures. I like words.
Perfect.
If others want flashier tools to work with, fine. I have no issue with that. Just let me work on in my Neanderthal way and don't insist on taking away my tools because someone invented different ones.
(*Even so my decidedly non-smart phone has internet connectivity and a camera. I have never used either. It has them because these days its next to impossible to find a phone that doesn't. I use it for making and receiving telephone calls and sometimes sending and receiving text messages. And that's all.)
