And that’s a good thing.

I get all my news through RSS feeds, whether that means newspapers or favorite blogs. American TV is not a source of news any more than is The Wall Street Journal. I suspect many readers here do likewise, especially as I refuse to provide links to Twitter (for those with negligible attention spans) or Facebook (for those yet to hit puberty). As I prefer quality readers to click volumes, that policy will not change. The Twitter and Facebook mindsets are simply not consonant with my goals and I really prefer not to have fans of those noise and theft machines visiting here or publicizing my work.

Now the thieving Google, that adept reseller of your privacy, has announced that Google Reader will be closed June 30, 2013. Their goal is simple. They wish to force you over to Google+, their version Facebook larceny where your private data can be sold without your approval or knowledge. Google’s abandonment of Reader is a good thing as it forces those using Reader as a back-end to their favorite RSS apps to find something else. Excellent apps like NetNewsWire use Google Reader for data sources and the reason they exist is that the Google Reader interface, like every interface for Google products, is atrocious.

So knowing that Reader’s demise is imminent, I searched around among the bevy of alternatives and settled on Feedly. Feedly is a web browser-based RSS reader, meaning that you activate it through a browser on your computer (I use Safari on my Hacks and Macs) or through a downloadable app on an iPad, iPhone or Android phone. All free. If you download Feedly before July 1, 2013 you will be able to also download your existing RSS feeds from Google Reader, a painless and speedy process. Thereafter you will never be accessing Google Reader again.

The apps for the iPhone and iPad work equally well and the whole user experience is a pleasure, not least for the knowledge that one other Google theft conduit has been sidestepped.

So if you are using Google Reader on any one of a number of apps which front for Reader to read this or any other blog, now is the time to start planning for a change. Feedly is one elegant alternative.