The World is Ending

Right before bedtime last night, I got horrible news. Google has decided to get rid of its Reader, effective July 1st 2013. At first, this was my reaction:

It has to be a mistake!

This is like finding out that your favorite running shoe is getting discontinued, but times 100. I checked multiple sources and it wasn't a cruel urban legend, they really are getting rid of the Reader because they say social media is making RSS feeds obsolete. How can someone go to bed and peacefully sleep after news like that?

If you think I'm overreacting, then you probably don't use Google Reader. It's literally the best thing on the internet. Why? Let me list some of the reasons:

It lets you organize all the ways you waste time on the internet. You can categorize your blogs and put them in folders and then have separate folders for your actual news because you don't want to confuse someone's groundbreaking nut butter creation with a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

"Mark all as read" Are you behind blog reading and feel guilty about it? All you have to do is click that button and BAM the guilt is gone!

Quickly skim through posts. With the push of a key ("J" for forward and "K" for back) you can skim through posts until you get to one that looks interesting. I'm entirely too lazy to actually scroll through shit.

Notification of new posts. I'm not going to actually GO to a blog and see if there is a new post. Chances are that I've missed your tweet about a new post and the only way I'm going to notice if you updated your blog is because Google Reader bolds your blog name and adds a (1) next to it. Without that notification, I assume the blog author has died or fled the country and never updates their blog anymore.

Hate reading. Don't try to pretend that you're above this. We all have some blogs we read where we don't actually like the author. It can range from wanting to read about their daily lives to just occasionally checking in to see if that bitch is getting fat yet. The thing about hate reading is that you don't want to actually GO to the blog and give them pageviews (and money), so Google Reader was how we could hate read freely.

You know you think this when you read some blogs

I don't even know how to read blogs without Google Reader. I hate change and I also really doubt that there is another service that is as good as Reader. That's like someone trying to tell me that Bing is a better search engine than Google. No one believes your stupid commercials BING, stop peddling your lies.

I have until July 1st to find something halfway as awesome as Google Reader. I use Pulse on my Kindle and I like that for my news feeds, but I haven't tried it for my blog reading. It would probably work better for someone who reads fewer blogs, but I read a ton of blogs. I only comment on a fraction of the blogs I have on my reader, as many of them are there because I like to skim them or I used to like them and I'm waiting for them to get good again (or I really hate them, see above hate reading rationale).

Maybe this will be a good thing and I'll streamline my blog reading and have more free time! This will force me to really focus on the blogs that I actually like and force me to stop reading fast food review blogs. These are the lies I'm telling myself.

Are you a Google Reader user? Is your world ending too?