From the Desk of Nettio Designs Issue No. 10

Hello hello and welcome to From The Desk of Nettio Designs Issue No. 10! Woohoo, double-digits, baby!

This week I wanted to talk about something that’s been on the mind of a lot of bloggers and blog-readers this week: the demise of Google Reader.

If you hang out anywhere in digi-land, odds are you’ve heard by now that Google announced last week that as of July 1st, it will be discontinuing it’s free RSS feed-reader service, Google Reader. While I had switched away from Google Reader as my main feed reader a year ago, the announcement was still a bit of a surprise to me. Considering the media frenzy that ensued in the online tech world afterwards, I’d say I wasn’t the only one.

A lot of blog posts I’ve seen lately have focused on alternatives to Google Reader which is awesome. If you’re a highly visual person or subscribe to a lot of visual blogs, I highly recommend Feedly. It has the Nettio stamp of approval.

But I think the even bigger lesson for us tech-lovin’ memory keepers is this: We need to be smart about what companies and services we trust our priceless memories and photos with, especially when those services are cloud-based and/or free.

There are a lot of amazing free services that can help us creatively capture our life adventures: journaling sites like 750words, Facebook, Instagram, Evernote.

But as with any service that exists primarily in the cloud (as opposed to an app downloaded to your desktop or smart phone), there is always a certain amount of risk that one day that service could disappear and just like with Google Reader, you may not have any say in it.

Which is why before investing a lot of time and energy into any new platform or service, it pays to do a little homework and ask yourself some questions like:

• How long has this company/service been around? Do they have a successful track record for maintaing products and services? What is the fan-base like?
• If it’s free, how are the costs for the product or service paid for? Is there a premium level available? Is it ad-based? Do they take donations?
• Is there an exit strategy? If you need to remove your content from their platform is there an easy way to do that in a non-prioprietary readable/editable format?

And of course, as with any technology, always make sure you backup anything that’s important to you. Save copies of your WordPress blog posts, download your Instagram photos to your computer or screenshot your favorite Facebook status updates.

No matter what we do in this fast-paced tech-lovin’ world of ours, we’ll never completely mitigate the risk that our beloved app or service won’t one day go the way of the dodo. If anything I always say the more I love something, the more likely it is to disappear, haha. But with a little due-diligence and proper backups, we can be that much more prepared should the unthinkable happen.

So goodbye, Google Reader, it’s been fun. Thank you for keeping me up to date on all my favorite blogs all these years. I hope you enjoy the rest of your days in that cloud-based code-heaven in the sky.

And with that I’m bringing this edition of From The Desk of Nettio Designs to an end. As always if you have thoughts to share, feel free to leave a comment below. I love hearing from ya.

This post is Issue No. 10 of my From The Desk of Nettio Designs weekly email series. Want to get in on the action? Sign up for Nettio Designs emails here.

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