March 14, 2013

Google Reader and Channel Dependency

If you read this blog via Google Reader (hint - that's more than half of you), then you already know that Google is killing Google Reader (click here).

This means, that in my case, without interaction, I lose about 60% of my readership.  Think about a retail store losing 60% of foot traffic, or an e-commerce brand losing 60% of visitors to a website.  Yeah, it's kind of an important thing.

You have options ... click here to see what some of your options are.  A good choice is to visit my blog (click here), and enter your email address in the Feedblitz box.  You'll get my posts each day at about 10:45pm PDT.

I've been playing with Feedly today (click here) ... it offers a newspaper-style presentation that, honestly, is pretty ... I'll need to have more images in my posts to capitalize on Feedly, and that's a good thing.  FYI, I know many of you are already switching to Feedly, I see the referring URLs popping up this morning, so thank you!

So - please, choose a new RSS reader or subscribe via email.  Gosh, what would happen if you missed my updates?  Think of the ramifications, folks ... think!

Now for the business side of this development.

Never ... ever ... ever ... become overly dependent upon one marketing channel, or source of customers.  Ever.  This is similar to a cataloger depending upon an insolvent USPS to deliver catalogs, an e-commerce brand depending upon Google for SEO, or a retailer depending upon a historically strong anchor store like Sears.

Be very careful trusting free cloud-based services for anything.

Thoughts?

3 comments:

  1. Why limit that to "free" services? Even paid ones get mothballed every now and again...

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're right ... don't use any services anymore, do it all in-house!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Was thinking about the GR demise that didn't think about how I'll handle the loss. Your blog being one of them. Personally, I hate email for updates. Easy inbox clutter

    BTW, some other alternatives to chew on that provide syncing support

    http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/85449/10497

    ReplyDelete

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