Alessio Parma

There's no better way to start off the afternoon than coming to terms with your mortality, which you'll need to do if you want to take advantage of Google's new Inactive Account Manager. Google launched the service on its account settings page to give users options with their account should it remain inactive for an extended period of time.

It's simple to set up: choose a timeout period—three, six, nine, or twelve months of inactivity—and from there you can direct Google on what to do with your Gmail messages, Blogger posts, Contacts, Google+ account, Google Voice, and YouTube accounts. (Basically, any Google services you've used in the past.) After that time period of inactivity, Google will send out a text message and e-mail the secondary address you provide. If you don't respond, it will assume... well, the worst. "We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife," Google concluded in the blog post.

If you have intentions of allowing a friend or family member to have access to that data, you can set up the service to notify up to 10 people that your account has been inactive for the time you've specified. Google will then ask for verification details for the listed people, like a phone number and e-mail address. When you're ready, you can send out an e-mail to those people you've entrusted with your data should anything happen to you.

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AeroFS has left its invite-only beta. AeroFS

If you want access to the best features of Dropbox or one of its many competitors—automated file syncing between computers, a way to automatically keep old versions of your synced files, etc.—but you don't want to keep your stuff in someone else's cloud, AeroFS is a promising service. It can provide file syncing for many clients using your own local server (or, for businesses, Amazon S3 storage that you have more direct control over). When we last wrote about the service, it was still in an invite-only beta, but a message that went out to users last night declared that this beta is over and that the service is now open to anyone.

Now that the service is out of beta, though, it will start to cost money for larger groups of users. The "free" tier can support up to three "team members" (members who can be given full access to every synced folder in your AeroFS setup) and one "external collaborator" (an external user who can only view and edit the contents of a single user) per folder. Starting at four team members and going up to 50, the service costs $10 per member per month, and this also buys you unlimited access for your external collaborators. Finally, for teams larger than 50 members and teams that need integration with existing Active Directory or LDAP setups, you need to call AeroFS to get pricing, which will likely vary based on the size of your organization.

Existing beta users will be grandfathered in without being asked to pay for anything, but adding additional team members or external collaborators to your folders will be subject to the same pricing options outlined above.

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Digg revealed details about a forthcoming RSS reader in a blog post today. The service will perform much like Google Reader in that it will aggregate content from various feeds, but Digg said it also hopes to “add value to the sources of information” by integrating services like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, reddit, and LinkedIn. The ultimate goal is to make all of these items easier to peruse and organize in an online reader. “We likely won’t get everything we want into [version one], but we believe it’s worth exploring,” wrote Digg.

The post also outlined how the company had long planned to build something like Reader, but it didn't actively pursue the idea until Google told the world about Reader's “imminent shutdown." Digg softly announced its own RSS intentions in a blog post last week, and an overwhelming number of responses encouraged the company's decision to push forward with the plan.

Digg said that although the project will be a huge undertaking for its small team, it’s confident it can ship a veritable replacement for Reader. Digg will work with its users to ensure that the product is up to their standards, and it invited those who are interested to join a mailing list as development begins. The company is also explicitly seeking developers who “want to lend a hand.”

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Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS.

If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides.

Lots of apps on the various app stores use RSS in at least some way. They just don’t tell you — because why should they?

RSS is used for mundane things too, like Mac app updates (for non-App-Store apps) and Xcode documentation.

And those people you follow on Twitter who post interesting links? They often get those links from their RSS reader.

One way or another, directly or indirectly, you use RSS. Without RSS all we’d have is pictures of cats and breakfast.

Boring

RSS is plumbing. It’s used all over the place but you don’t notice it. Which is cool.

But here’s why it’s great plumbing:

• There are many millions of feeds, from the smallest blog to the many feeds at the New York Times. Just about everything that gets published on the web is available via RSS. (Outside of Twitter and Facebook.)

• There are no user caps. No company can tell your favorite app how many users it can have. (Twitter does this.)

• Nobody can tell you how to display an article from an RSS feed. (Twitter does this with tweets.)

• The formats are stable. Code I wrote five years ago to parse feeds would work today and will work in five years. (The formats are simple, too.) Other services have APIs that change and break existing apps.

• RSS can’t be shut down. Any number of companies can go out of business, but nobody can stop anybody from publishing and reading RSS feeds.

• Nobody can force ads on you. A given RSS reader could add ads, but you can switch — because another RSS reader can read the same feeds. A given publisher could put ads in their own feeds, but you can unsubscribe. There is no company that can force ads on everyone, as Twitter and Facebook are working on for their systems.

• Nobody can force you to be tracked. If you’re not using a syncing system, then nobody knows what you subscribe to and what you read.

• You don’t need to register anywhere to write an RSS app. (You do need to register to write Facebook and Twitter apps.)

• In the general case there are no security issues with feed reading. (Unless you’re using a sync service or reading authenticated feeds.)

This is elegance. It derives from the design of the internet and the web and its many open standards — designed so that no entity can control it, so that it survives stupidity and greed when it appears.

Lots of things work like this. Not just RSS.

Capitalism

A naive reading of the above makes it sound like RSS is anti-business. That’s not true at all. (I did well with my RSS business.)

Instead, it’s anti-monopolist. By design it creates a level playing field. Anybody can write RSS apps, and anybody can use RSS however they want to.

This means that competition and innovation are permitted to thrive.

But it’s not a guarantee. In the past several years it seems to have slowed way down.

Prague 1948 Forever

When Eastern Europe opened up, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Prague looked like it had been sealed up in a bubble since 1948.

Google Reader isn’t communist Russia, obviously, duh — but it’s a similar pattern. There was one gigantic player and a bunch of satellites, and RSS readers more-or-less looked like it was still 2006.

Not that there wasn’t any innovation — there was some — but it’s been pretty quiet, especially compared to the several years before 2006.

RSS the format has remained as useful and cool as ever, but RSS readers haven’t done so well.

My hope — my expectation, even — is that a few things will turn this around:

• The end of Google Reader takes away that one dominant player. The market for RSS readers is no longer frozen — and it will interest more developers than it has in recent years.

• Over-reach by Twitter and its diminishing user experience makes people interested in other ways of finding good stuff to read.

• The lower costs of server-side development and deployment brings creating RSS services within reach of smaller companies.

The challenge — as ever, with everything — is to make useful and delightful apps that people love.

But now, if I’m right, we’ll have more people working on that challenge.

In the meantime, the loss of Google Reader syncing is going to be tough. That’s a big hurdle. Marco proposes some baby steps. I don’t like Google Reader’s (undocumented) API, but I like the pragmatic approach.

Well

At any rate — these are interesting times! I know that’s a curse, but I take it as a blessing, because it’s way more fun that way.

Hello everyone!

This morning I have mixed feelings: I am happy that we have the possibility to bring our beloved The Old Reader to a new level, and I am sad that Google Reader soon will be completely over. It was a large part of my daily internet life. We even started making The Old Reader because no one could stand my whining anymore.

News came unexpected (mind you, we are living in GMT, so it was literally the middle of the night), but we are doing out best. We tripled our user base (and still counting), and our servers are not amused so far. We will be deploying more capacity shortly, so things should get better by the end of the day. Please, be patient with us.

(The Old Reader’s team before March 13, photo by repor.to/shuvayev)

This is overwhelming. When we started this as something for us and our friends to use, we never expected so many of you to join us in our journey. Thank you very much for your kind words and support, we appreciate this.

Seeing Google Reader go, many of you are asking whether The Old Reader is going to stick around. Also, quite a lot of people would like to donate to keep our project running. We have been discussing this quite a lot recently, and we decided that paid accounts (the freemium model) are the way to go. We want to keep making a great product for our users, not cater it for advertisers’ needs.

We are going to be honest, we have not even started coding this yet. However, we would like to get this news out as soon as possible for everyone to know the way we will be going. Paid accounts will have some additional features, but the basic free accounts will still be 100% usable. We are not in this game to make money, but we want to give something special back to the people who are going to be supporting us.

We have our daily jobs, so we can’t promise that new features will be ready tomorrow or next week. We have no investors or fancy business plans, but we are open about everything we do, and we want to do it the right way.

We reworked the plans according to the news today. Creating an API for mobile clients is the number one priority in our roadmap. We would love to collaborate with any developers who were making Google Reader clients. Please, spread the word about this if you can.

For those of you who are posting feedback and creating new feature requests - please, double-check for existing items in Uservoice. We hate answering the same questions multiple times and removing duplicate requests.

Most asked questions are:
- “When will OPML import be working again?” As soon as we launch more capacity to handle this. Hopefully, later today.
- “Why are you asking for access to my Google contacts when I log in via Google account?” We don’t anymore.
- “When will you make an iOS app? How about Android?” We will start with API as soon as we can and see how it goes.
- “Why is there no way to login without Google or Facebook accounts?” We cover that one in our knowledge base, but we plan to implement own login code. The demand is high.
- “How do I rename a feed?”. Just browse the Tour page, please? 
- “Shut up and take my money!”. Will work on that, stay tuned.

We have lots of things to do, and it will probably take us several days to reply to all emails and tickets. Also, Twitter keeps reminding us about daily tweet limits, so there might be delays as well.

Some other news: last week our developer (on the left) turned 21, and we have implemented PubSubHubbub support. Many of you asked us to make feed updates faster, and PubSubHubbub makes compatible feeds refresh almost instantly. Yay!

Thank you very much for your support. We will do our best during next three months to prepare for the day Google Reader will no longer be around.