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[Ryan Avent makes a salient point regarding the shut-down of Google Reader](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/utilities):

> Yanking away services beloved by early adopters almost guarantees that critical masses can’t be obtained: not, at any rate, without the provision of an incentive or commitment mechanism to protect the would-be users from the risk of losing a vital service.

This, of course, matters when you have a social network — or perhaps if your actual product is the users of your services.

[MG Siegler tackles another side of the debate](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/24/bees/):

> By killing the flower, Google could also kill the bees. That would be bad for all of us, even if we no longer use Reader or have any clue what RSS is.

Siegler’s point is that Reader drives a ton of traffic to sites everyday and without it, what happens if no other service fills the void? Decreased page views? Who does that hurt? Advertisers… aka Google.

It seems like a bit of a stretch, but it’s clear that the possibility is there.

One possible solution, [from Paul Krugman](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/the-economics-of-evil-google/):

> It seems hard at this point to envision search and related functions as public utilities, but that’s arguably where the logic will eventually lead us.

So, Google is the new AT&T?

[Marco Arment](http://www.marco.org/2013/03/21/thursday-sandwich):

>Want to really stick it to them? Stop using Google. All of it. Search, Gmail, Maps, the works. Delete your account and start using Bing. Ready?
>…
>Yeah. That’s the problem. You won’t. I won’t. Nobody will.

After I read that I quipped to Marco (on App.net) that this is factually incorrect — as I have actually quit Google. To my surprise, many of the anti-free-therefore-paid-and-very-nerdy-advocate types on App.net chimed in that they had, or are, fully leaving Google too.

It’s not an easy thing to do, mostly because old habits die hard, but it is actually very possible.

## Search

The easiest thing to do is to switch to Bing. While you can argue about how good the results are, I have been using Bing on iOS for over a year now and never once felt like I wasn’t able to find what I needed. Because there’s a difference between searching for something obscure and what most people use search for everyday. For the latter Bing is just as good (if not better, as the design is better looking on mobile), for the former you can make a case for Google, but it’s a close race.

Basic and intermediate-complexity searches are possible, with slightly less depth for the really deep searches when you need to find that one rant about that thing that no one else should remember.

That’s where my favorite search engine DuckDuckGo comes in. It’s fantastic.

You can easily use it on your Mac in Safari by [changing your hosts file](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/255650) and in Chrome [like so](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216440-chrome). I prefer DuckDuckGo for everything. It’s fast, accurate, and [privacy conscious](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy).

DuckDuckGo is the search engine with truly different results — meaning they’re different from the results at Bing and Google. Sometimes that’s fantastic, sometimes it just doesn’t work: The hardest thing is finding the address of a local business on DuckDuckGo.

There *are* options outside of Google. When was the last time you tried them?

## Mail

I like to run *my* email on *my* server, but it’s a significant undertaking and I don’t recommend *you* do that.

I use iCloud for most personal email, but I have been testing a couple of different solutions to migrate to.

[Hushmail](https://www.hushmail.com) is among the top contenders. They offer a free account that sucks, and then two paid accounts. Their pricing is a little obscure: for a basic 1GB account you pay $34.99, plus $14.99 for IMAP access, on a yearly basis. Not too bad, but I wish the storage was a bit more generous at this price point.

Among some miscellaneous privacy-voodoo for general emailing, Hushmail also offers encrypted email between other Hushmail users. The most important part, for me, is that they seem to take privacy seriously. (Note that Hushmail *will* turn over records to law enforcement when legally compelled to do so. But, being based in Canada means U.S. law enforcement agencies have to request, and Canada has to grant, that legal compulsion.)

Another thing I like is the business email option, where you can use your own domain name. Again, the pricing is very “up-sell-y”, but the service is private and seems stable to me. (It would cost a 5-person company $40-50 a month to use this, which is pricey [I guess, I have few references for that], but not Google.)

My advice: if you don’t care too much about privacy get an iCloud account. Otherwise there are plenty of online options — just be sure to do your research before switching.

## Everything Else

The dust is still settling on the recent Google Reader/RSS debacle, but [Feedbin.me](https://feedbin.me), [Fever](http://feedafever.com), and [NewsBlur](http://newsblur.com) are the top alternatives in my book.

As for online storage: Dropbox, iCloud or SkyDrive are all better than Google Drive, in my opinion.

That leaves calendars and productivity apps. To be honest I have no good solutions to replace the Google offerings, but then again, I never used Google’s offerings on that front.

Office 365 is pretty nice if you’re a Windows user but utterly pointless if you’re on a Mac. I don’t trust web apps for office-like tasks and much prefer native apps like Excel, Pages, Numbers, etc.

## Money, Money, Money

Switching your search engine is easy, and free. But as you can see switching anything else is likely to cost you — usually a monthly fee.

And that seems to be the crux of people’s “ditching Google” hang up: Google makes a killing because people are willing to give up their privacy before handing over cash.

I’m fine with people using Google, and even loving Google, so long as they understand the trade-off. (Apparently I take that trade-off more seriously than most, so I choose to find privacy-conscious services, most of which happen to cost money.) I find that people either don’t believe there is a tradeoff or, more likely, don’t believe it’s as big of a deal as I think they should.

[Google](http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1210386):

>The Blocked Sites feature is no longer available. To block particular sites from your search results, we recommend the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension from Google. You may also download your existing blocked sites list as a text file.

Totally not related to Google’s ability to sell ads. *Totally* different.

See also: [Massive botnet costs advertisers millions, but hackers may not be to blame.](http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4123720/massive-botnet-defrauds-advertisers-millions-shady-origins)

[Kevin Fanning, writing about failure and passion](http://kfan.tumblr.com/post/45910246222/ok-by-now-youve-seen-this-article-in-the-onion):

>Maybe the self-obsessed celebrity artist culture isn’t that helpful or useful. Maybe eventually we get to a place where we see that books and music and art are created by us, people who have school and day jobs and other shit we care about.

I encourage you to read this post, especially if you are feeling like you have failed to find your calling. Fanning is spot on.

I work a lot, more so now than ever in life. I’ve never thought, or felt particularly successful in a general sense — more often I feel like am failing or close to failing in some aspect of my life…

Being in an industry that is entrenched in Windows based software means that I am constantly looking for a solution that is both robust and not terrible looking. We chose Yardi’s Genesis software for our property management needs because it was the only offering that offered everything we needed and did so without cutting corners.

Unfortunately Yardi is stuck in the dark ages of local servers and Windows 95 — seriously — and makes Excel look like cutting edge UI design.

This means that I routinely search around the web to see if other software offerings have caught up, or surpassed what we use. Usually I end the day having tried a few other pieces of software and finding nothing remotely close.

Today I needed some work-order software that was web-based, and I ran into something I see often: “request a demo” links.

Could there be anything more hostile towards new users than refusing to give pricing, screenshots, videos, or access to a demo site?

I came up with a new rule today: If your site won’t give me pricing and a view of your product without me having to give you my contact info — in other words if you are saying “fuck you” to me — then, well, fuck you too.

*I’m wrong a lot.

Uncharacteristically, I didn’t order an iPad mini when it came out. Truthfully, as I’ve said many times, I really didn’t want a device without a retina display. For most of the last year I have primarily used my iPad for reading and writing — not much else.

For most of 2013 I’ve been toting my iPad everywhere with me and using it for a ton of things, including handwriting notes, looking up building plans, and so on. This small shift has become immensely annoying because I find the iPad only useful if I carry it in my hand, so that it’s available immediately when I need to use it. But hand-carrying the iPad is very frustrating at times, because:

1. The iPad is too heavy to carry around for a few hours in your hand everyday.
2. It requires an entire hand and arm to carry, making other tasks difficult. (Fumble for keys, shake hands while holding a coffee, take a piss, etc.)
3. It’s very difficult to use an iPad while standing unless you have something to rest the iPad on. Writing in Mail, or writing by hand in Notability is doable without support, but not fun, or realistic for more than a minute or two.

About the twentieth time I precariously balanced my iPad on a ledge while I fumbled for some keys I realized that I should consider an iPad mini. Luckily, Stephen Hackett was selling his (and it was setup how I would buy one), only less expensive than a new one. So I picked up Stephen’s iPad mini and have now been using it long enough to draw some conclusions.

## The Mini

The iPad mini, like the first iPad and the first iPhone before it, is one of those devices that feels almost impossible. It’s *too* snappy, its battery life lasts *too* long, and does *too much* to be *this small*. It seems to defy logic.

In my week-plus with the iPad mini, here’s what I’ve found (in no particular order):

– I like the size a lot, but not for typing — the full-size iPad on-screen keyboard is still a much better keyboard for writing.
– But you can actually use the device without having to rest it. It’s easy for me to palm the iPad and draw with a Cosmonaut, or use my thumbs to tap out a quick email reply.
– I really, really, miss the retina display. I’m not bothered under most tasks, but Notability looks much worse when you are writing, as does any activity where you might want to read for long periods. This is a shame, because the iPad mini truly is ideal for reading.
– The one thing that really drives me nuts though: the passcode unlock on the iPad mini. It’s scaled down, like everything else, to accommodate the smaller footprint, but it really shouldn’t be. There is no reason for that display to be smaller, when the full-size passcode screen from the iPad would fit. I’m not sure the true reasoning behind this, but it’s not a user friendly thing on the mini.
– I’ve yet to get used to the smaller bezel along the sides. Which has led to many accidental page turns in iBooks.

## Overall

The iPad mini, as many have been saying for months, is truly a fantastic iPad. I can see, that for the majority of people, it *is* the ideal iPad size. The only things I wanted a larger display for were games and writing. Everything else is better done on the iPad mini. If you toss in a retina display, then I can’t think of a reason to buy a full-size iPad at all.

Using an iPad mini was like switching from a 17″ MacBook Pro to an 11″ MacBook Air — all of a sudden you can use the device in far more places than you ever thought possible and still do almost everything you wanted to do on it. I can fumble for keys and easily find a safe place to tuck the mini — often in my jacket pocket or jeans back pocket — or do countless other things that would have me stumbling over the size of the iPad.

The utility of this size iPad is damned hard to dispute. I think the computer setup I have right now is very close to ideal:

– 15″ retina MacBook Pro at work, only travels between my home and office.
– iPad 3 for traveling.
– iPad mini for roaming about during the day (which I do a lot of).
– iPhone 5 as my go-everywhere device.

The iPad mini isn’t like the iPod mini, it’s more like the 11″ MacBook Air to the 13″ MacBook Air. Both are equally useable, but the size of the smaller version is often all you need, and more often a better fit.

### Quick Note About the Smart Cover

Since the iPad mini is smaller, the smart cover can’t quite roll completely into a triangle for use. It still does make a little triangle stand, but it’s not as good of a stand as on the full-sized iPad. A minor point, but one I hadn’t considered before using it.

[Jean-Louis Gassée](http://www.mondaynote.com/2013/03/17/apple-is-losing-the-war-of-words/):

> Why were Samsung’s mean-spirited ads seen as fun and creative, while Schiller’s slight misstep is called “defensive”?

And:

> Because of its position at the top, Apple should have the grace to not trash its competitors, especially when the digs are humorless and further weakened by error.

Gassee’s article is getting a lot of mentions today. When I read it, I stopped after I saw those two stupid statements one after another. ((I finished reading it before posting about it here though.)) Gassee’s off the mark.

The Samsung ads aren’t “fun and creative” and to state that they are shows how far out of his mind he is, but the second remark is just plain stupid. Why exactly should Apple have more grace? How exactly is Apple to compete with any other company if they must play by a different, more limiting, set of rules?

“I’m sorry, Mr. President, only the challenging politicians are allowed to use attack ads. You’ll have to exercise more grace.”

Of all the things I love about Dropbox—incredibly seamless integration with OS X and Windows; automated back up and revision history; access to my files on multiple devices, wherever I am; sharing photos with my parents through the free account I set up for them—there is one I value the most: that every year Dropbox charges me $99 to use their service.

When Gmail launched in 2004, it [invited 1,000 people][1] they felt were influencers. They allowed these influencers to invite a limited number of their friends and family to the service, and continued to increase the invitation limit until eventually a market that had had enough time to build to the point where invitations were being sold for $100 each [collapsed][2].

While Google was slowly scaling its product, it continued to improve one of its key offerings: [an unheard of storage limit][5]. Initially 25× their competitors’ storage capacities, the number continued to increase until it had decupled.

Today, few people worry about sending the photos they shot on their DSLR to their grandparents. One email can contain multiple Photoshop documents, rather than multiple emails containing single Photoshop documents. Documents can be retrieved years after they were received.

Google changed the way email works in the world. I no longer approach email the same way I did seven years ago. But, I’m uncomfortable. I don’t pay for Gmail. And while—unlike [some products][6] as of late—I do not fear it will be shut down any time soon, I do not like who holds the power in this relationship. I agreed to Gmail’s Terms of Service, and like everyone else I am sure, I did not like what I read.¹

My point is, Google has all of the control. Should they decide their product would benefit its customers by providing, say, more personal information gleaned from my daily correspondences, that is what they will do. I, too, receive benefit from this relationship. But I do not have control over what the cost of that benefit will be.

[Mailbox][3] is interesting. No, [I’m not using it][4], but I sure get why people are. The approach it takes is so human. I can imagine my brother and sister, two prototypical computer users, getting a lot of benefit from using Mailbox.

Today, Mailbox holds little appeal to me. This is because I don’t need a new front-end for my email. I need a new back-end.

To me, the most interesting element of Mailbox’s current offering is its server. Sure, right now it is simply facilitating the sorting of email, but imagine if it became smart. If it could read my email and perform actions based on its understanding of my behaviours, turning the way I naturally approach my email into my very own digital secretary. If it interfaced with other services I use, preventing me from missing that email regarding a task I have in my task management tool, or forwarding the address to a party I was invited to on Facebook to my Google Maps iPhone app.

And that’s before Dropbox enters the equation; with the ability to store all of my photo attachments in my Photos folder, backed up on Dropbox’s servers and available in gallery form to anyone I share them with. Or referencing a document saved in Dropbox rather than adding a file attachment, tracking its changes and backing up each revision. Or sharing a file larger than any other email service could pass through its servers.

Dropbox gives its users 2 GB of free storage. That is certainly more than most email users today need to archive all of their email attachments. Combining that 2 GB of file storage capacity with a full-fledged cloud-based email service would attract a lot of casual users. Dropbox has established its own referral/invitation strategy, which benefits all three parties involved in the transaction. Implementing the same strategy to a product as compelling as *ad-free email* could surely drive their growth over the next few years, if not longer.

And then, of course, we come to the most exciting part. Dropbox would charge for it. In my mind, it would make sense to simply add the email service to their existing pricing tiers in an effort to improve their overall product. Adding lower tiers, more consumer-friendly tiers, could convert many free-mail users into paying email customers.

I could see my parents paying for it.

And I would be comfortable, knowing that Dropbox—a company I pay money to host, sync, and back up my files *and* emails—would not want to fuck up and lose me as a customer.

1. Of course I didn’t actually read it. Come on, now. ↩

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Extended_beta_phase
[2]: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/06/63786
[3]: http://www.mailboxapp.com
[4]: https://brooksreview.net/2013/02/emails-broke-yo/
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail#Storage
[6]: https://brooksreview.net/2013/03/billlllllllions/

[Peter Matthaei has penned a response to](http://mobivangelist.com/post/45363132528/why-ben-brooks-is-totally-wrong-about-the-reader) [my post](https://brooksreview.net/2013/03/billlllllllions/) about the Reader shut down. I wanted to dissect his argument a bit, because it is very much on the exact opposite side of the spectrum from my argument.

Matthaei:

> The truth is, user-RSS is slowly dying. While I, and many of my friends, are true info-addicts who love the river-of-information approach of cross-device synchronised RSS feeds, news consumption is shifting to apps like Flipboard and Zite, and powered and filtered by social sharing.

I’d ask for the proof here. Where are the numbers, the graph, that shows that RSS is dwindling? *[Daring Fireball](http://daringfireball.net)* boasts “over 400,000” RSS readers — and that’s a number that hasn’t changed in a while, but also a number that has *never* decreased. This site’s non-paid RSS readership still *grows* every month.

Is RSS a nerd tool? Yes.

Does that mean that its growth is stagnant by default? No.

Let’s get some proof to back up the claim that RSS usage is almost dead.

> It’s not about free versus paid, and how that fits or doesn’t fit with Google’s business model. It’s about the reality that even if (or especially if) a company has tens of thousands of employees, it needs to focus on where the puck is going.

I agree, but that’s not the whole picture.

> The reason Google is shutting Reader down is the same reason Apple is slowly but surely sunsetting the Mac Pro range. (And Mac Pros are priced, if I may remind Ben, at the extreme opposite of free.)

What the fuck? We are now going to make the leap from RSS to desktop computing? We have concrete proof that desktop computing is a decreasing business from a multitude of sources. Further, you simply cannot equate one with the other. You buy a Mac Pro because you need one for work, you use RSS because you *want* to keep up with sites you like.

Apple is ignoring the Mac Pro (which is still sold, mind you) because despite charging for it, the profit potential isn’t there. Google is shutting down Reader instead of even trying to charge for it — maybe it would break even, or make some money if they stopped ignoring it — who knows.

> Contrary to Ben’s argument, Google isn’t just willy-nilly dabbling in Maps and keeping it alive for free because it can do so because of a formidable user base. Google maintains and grows Maps because it directly and tightly fits into Google’s re-invigorated mission of improving people’s lives through relevant information.

My point wasn’t that Google Maps just has a large user base, but that it is a strategic tool that also, wait for it, shows you ads. Huh, they make money off of Maps from Ads and aren’t considering shutting it down — imagine that.

> So if Glass is Google’s unified vision of the future, there really isn’t a place for an antiquated service like an RSS reader in Google’s ecosystem. […]
> And as anybody who has worked at a company with more than a hundred employees can attest: it’s not about how many developers you can spare working on cool but ultimately doomed side-projects but how well the entire company is pulling towards one concrete vision of the future.

Not true. As anybody who has ever run a company can attest it’s not about what you do, but how much money you make doing it. Let’s not forget that Google is publicly traded and has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make money. Giving away Reader for free didn’t work, vision or no vision and instead of trying to make it a profit center Google shit-canned it.

If Reader made money, or just broke even, then there’d be no reason to get rid of Reader — again, vision or no vision.

> Srsly ppl, the whole cynical “Google cares about nothing but serving you ads” meme amongst sections of the tech elite is starting to wear thin.

The sad fact is that the evidence points to the fact that showing Ads is what Google cares about, the proof to the contrary simply isn’t compelling and is sparse.

[Two years ago I wrote](https://brooksreview.net/2011/03/fragility-free/):

> Sticking with Gmail for another example, imagine if Google decided that Gmail was a money loser and that it was to be shut down. Doesn’t matter what you offer to pay, in a week it’s gone.

> This happens with free software and services, sometimes with paid services (but that is far less likely). Sometimes the funding for free just runs out — perhaps it was just someones hobby, a hobby that you depended on — doesn’t matter because it is gone now.

I received tons of email telling me there was no way that Twitter or Gmail would *ever* shut down. I still stand behind what I said, I didn’t need the news today of Google Reader being shut down to know that my long and expensive move to pay for everything I use is, was, and will be the right decision.

Free is fickle, free is fragile, and now tons of users and developers are paying the price for relying on a free service.

***

The more interesting part about this move from Google is not that they prove my theory, but that they’ve now shown their hand to all of us. Google can no longer afford, or is no longer willing, to give shit away for free with no monetization in sight.

What does that mean for:

– Third party access to Gmail?
– Google Maps
– Android
– Chrome
– Chrome OS
– Google Translate
– And on and on.

Google has built a cult-like following around the idea that you can use what they provide for *free*. Now Google is telling us that if the following isn’t great enough, or the project not lucrative enough, they’ll abandon it and consider it a favor to you if they give you a three month heads up.

*Nice*.

To think that this was Google’s only option though is shortsighted. It wouldn’t have been hard for Google to make the API to access Reader a paid service, where developers paid X percent of their sales for access to the API, and Google makes the API an officially supported part of Reader. That would have been easy for Google, but Google chose to shut down the service instead.

Why?

I think the why is self-evident. The why is that Google doesn’t want to make anyone spend cash for their services (there are exceptions to this). So if faced with charging for Reader or shutting down Reader, shutting down Reader fits the Google mantra better than the former.

That’s scary to think about.

How much does Google make off of Gmail? Is it enough to support the ever growing service? Because if the past is any indication of the future, Google would rather shut down Gmail than let you give them your money to use it.

[Alan Green announcing the “sun setting” of Google Reader](http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html):

> There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

That’s a crock of shit. The real problem is that you can’t monetize Google Reader when no one actually goes to the web interface.

I personally use [Fever](http://feedafever.com/) and highly recommend it if you have your own web server.

If you don’t, [NewsBlur](http://newsblur.com/) is probably your best option.

If you are a developer who makes a living off of selling an app that re-packages Google Reader, this is a huge blow, but you had to see it coming. Reeder for iPhone syncs with Fever, and I have to believe that is not a coincidence.