Yesterday, July 1, 2013, the Google Reader servers were turned off forever. It's been eight years since I wrote on this very blog about my migration to this tool, and its death hurts more than any other software's. Google says "usage has declined," but all of us in the loop know the truth: Reader didn't fit into their social strategy to force us to use Google+.

It's over. I've exported my OPML file with over 300 subscriptions (programming blogs, webcomics, tech news) and migrated to a service called Feedly that honestly isn't going to replace it. But beyond the user trauma, the murder of Reader marks a technical and philosophical turning point in how we consume the internet.

The beauty of the RSS protocol

For developers, the technology behind Reader was a poem to the open web: the RSS protocol (and its brother Atom). It's simply a standardized XML file that any website can publish to list its latest updates.

There's no dark algorithm deciding what you should see. It's a deterministic subscription. Coding a basic RSS reader in Python is so insultingly easy that it's the typical weekend project for learning to program:

import urllib2
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# Descargamos el XML del feed de un blog de tecnología
url = 'http://ejemplo.com/rss.xml'
respuesta = urllib2.urlopen(url)
contenido_xml = respuesta.read()

# Parseamos el árbol XML
arbol = ET.fromstring(contenido_xml)

# Iteramos sobre los elementos 'item' (las entradas del blog)
for item in arbol.findall('.//item'):
    titulo = item.find('title').text
    enlace = item.find('link').text

    # Imprimimos el título y su URL. Sin publicidad, sin algoritmos.
    print "-> " + titulo
    print "   " + enlace

Google Reader was exceptional because it used technologies like WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub) to avoid constant polling of the XMLs. The servers pushed the news to Reader almost in real time. They had the perfect infrastructure for indexing the open web. And they destroyed it.

Reflection: Walls and closed silos

The death of Google Reader is not just the end of a brilliant web application. It's a symptom that internet giants have declared war on open standards.

Twitter closed its API to third-party clients last year. Facebook traps you in its feed. They no longer want you to consume the web in your own chronological reader; they want you to log into their closed platforms so a "machine learning" algorithm can show you content specifically designed to maximize your "engagement" and inject ads.

We lose control over what we read. The decentralized web of blogs and RSS is being devoured by corporate silos. Google Reader was the last bastion keeping the dream alive of an internet where you were the absolute master of your information diet. Rest in peace, Reader. We will miss you so much.