Comment by Trufa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Trufa | Hacker News Reader

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Seriously, I can understand that losing a service like google reader might be very impractical or disappointing but the amount of melodrama that is being shed is amazing, and to be quite frank some people are being quite whiny and entitled.

Is the closing of Reader ideal? NO! But you have to know something like that might happen, plus they're giving enough time for people to migrate to other services and exporting your data couldn't be easier.

My question is what are you going to do? Go to other services for everything, never use a google product again in case it closes down? I'd argue that there is even a better chance of any other small dedicated startup to fall apart than google closing down their one of their product, if you wan't to be really sure something is "forever", self host, but don't lie to yourself, that's not even close to a perfect solution.

> and to be quite frank some people are being quite whiny and entitled.

The mistake here is thinking that google's 'free' services are free. I am letting you spy on me (gather metrics on what I read, what I've marked as important, what I've shared with others) in exchange for the use of your product.

That type of data should be worth 10x more to an advertising company than the 5 or 10 dollars a month than I would pay for each service.

It's the loss of historical feed data that bothers me most. Sure, I can export the links to the feeds I have subscribed to, but that's the data I could have reconstructed myself.

What exactly are you referring to? If my understanding is correct you're able to export starred content as well.

Google Reader tracked a lot of data about your feed reading habits, including but not limited to:

- Average items/day published by subscriptions - Number and percentage of items that you actually read - Number of items you actually clicked, per-subscription - Time of day items are posted / items are read - What subscriptions haven't updated in a long time?

You are right about it exporting starred content, by the way. None of this other data, however, is available for export.

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