petition google to save google reader: please sign and share widely

A while back, I expressed my frustration with the current massive emphasis on mobile apps, and with organizations that use Facebook pages instead of web pages: the walled-off internet, or why facebook and mobile apps are good for them and bad for us.

For a more complete view of this sad fact, you might want to read this 2010 article from Wired: The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff. It's old in internet terms, but more relevant than ever:

If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.

Now Google plans to take a huge step in this same wrong direction, with their plans to discontinue Reader. Whether or not you personally use Google Reader, its impending demise should bother you. Impudent Strumpet explains why.

Here is a petition to save Google Reader. Please sign and share.