Google Reader is shutting down.
Hey Google, We Still Love Reader
I'm in shock.
This blog is about barefoot running and healthy, paleo-style diets. These two topics have utterly changed my and my family's life in the past five years.
I learned about the barefoot running movement, like most of us, from Chris McDougall's Born to Run.
I've gotten to know Chris, and Barefoot Ted, ran a race with Caballo Blanco, toured Dan Lieberman's lab, helped design some shoes, and helped some folks fix their diets and change their lives.
I learned about Born to Run from an ad at the bottom of an item in Google Reader.
I clicked the link, watched the video, and at the end Chris put on a pair of Vibram Fivefinger Sprints. In the three years I'd had my Sprints, this was the only time I'd seen another human being who had a pair. I immediately bought the book. Thank God.
Through that book, I learned about the paleo diet from Justin Owings, who sent me a link to this post at Stephan Guyenet's Whole Health Source. The fact that diet could control dental development (my dental development was seriously impaired growing up) blew my mind, and I started following that blog in Google Reader. Six months later, I fixed my diet and changed my life.
I had a stroke at 38, a colon resection after coming close to dying from a perforated colon at 40, and I strongly suspect I was getting osteoporosis. I don't know where I'd be today. Those problems are gone thanks to what I found by dumb luck through Google Reader.
As I said, I'm in shock. This is a big step back for the Internet Revolution.
Clicking through from Google Reader...
ReplyDeleteI don't remember how I found Born to Run, but I've had Google Reader open in one form or another for a very long time. This shutdown is going to profoundly affect how I learn about the day-to-day world. Having met you through a different Google product, I figured we had a pretty similar set of feeds.
However, the web is very different than it was a few years ago. Fewer people seem to be contributing much outside of Twitter and Facebook, and what's there is rarely as deep or insightful as my golden-tinged memories of an earlier web. in recent years Reader just hasn't seemed as rich as it once did.
But still, I'm looking for replacements...
I look at Twitter (ADD, anyone?) and Facebook (cat pictures) when I'm done with Reader.
ReplyDeleteYou can't convey useful information through twitter, and Facebook is a vanity site.
Sigh.
I'm hoping the functionality will get rolled into Google + in a useful way. When they closed Wave the best parts of the functionality went into Google docs.
ReplyDelete"Google +" and "useful" aren't things that go together in my mind...
ReplyDelete"Google +" and "useful" aren't things that go together in my mind...
ReplyDelete