Google reader who is following me

I'm hoping that they, like me, do not realize and are not intentionally following me, but that's the optimistic half of the glass. My pessimistic half is of the abyss, and it is staring back at you with a redolent stink-eye. Oh, yes, I suppose I could opt out of Buzz - which I did when it was introduced, though that apparently has no effect on whether or not I am now using Buzz - but as soon as I did that, all sorts of new people were following me on my Reader!

People I couldn't block, because I am not on Buzz! Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever had and use Bing out of fucking spite.

You have destroyed over ten years of my goodwill and adoration, just so you could try and out-MySpace MySpace. Harriet Jacobs is the nom de plume of the author of Fugitivus. She's a mid-twenties white girl living in the Midwest, working at a non-profit that assists families and deals with a lot of racial politics.

Harriet has had a fucked-up life, and Fugitivus —fugitive—is her space to talk, where the fucked-up people who did the fucked-up things couldn't find her and be creepy. Bad Valentine is our own special take on the beauty—and awkwardness—of geek love. Update : The original blog posting has been updated and made private. If Google went down tomorrow, I'd pretty much have to kill myself.

I use Gmail for my business because it available to me anywhere, and my ability to organize and integrate it with my other data and apps is stunningly useful. And no spam. General Newsletters Got a news tip? Free: Join the VentureBeat Community for access to 3 premium posts and unlimited videos per month. Learn More.

Sign up with your business e-mail to continue with ticket purchase. Image Credit: John Koetsier. Image Credit: Google. And you don't even need to click that much while reading in NewsBlur. Just keep scrolling: articles display one after another for action-free reading. But NewsBlur's most interesting feature is its sophisticated filtering, which can automatically highlight or hide stories based on certain criteria. If you spend some time training your filters, the system will learn your preferences and try to surface the stories that interest you most.

That way, you can subscribe to as many sites as you want—even the ones that publish articles a day—and still only see the content you're interested in. NewsBlur also lets you share your favorite stories, either on social networks or inside of NewsBlur. Within the app, you can add stories that you read and like to your personal "blurblog," or find people with similar interests and follow their blurblogs as well.

Or, you can run NewsBlur on your own server for free. Inoreader Web, iOS, Android. Inoreader is one of the most feature-packed free RSS readers on this list. Without paying a cent, you can follow feeds, and you can even search within your subscriptions. And while most RSS apps only cache content for the short-term, Inoreader doesn't have limited-time archives. Your content—even the stuff you've already read—is stored permanently.

To stay organized, you can group your feeds in folders and use tags to separate out individual articles as you read them.

This makes Inoreader a great tool for power users, but it's very accessible for beginners as well. After signing up, you're guided through a tutorial that shows you how to use the app's major features, making it easy to get up and running even if you have no previous RSS experience.

If you upgrade to one of Inoreader's premium plans, you get even more features. Add feeds for Twitter profiles or Facebook Pages, write advanced rules for sorting your content into folders and tags, and customize your dashboard to see exactly what interests you the most when you log in. Inoreader offers a Zapier integration , meaning you can connect it to thousands of other apps. This lets you do things like automatically save starred articles to Pocket and Instapaper, or compile saved articles in a Google spreadsheet.

The Old Reader Web. If you and your friends all enjoy reading the same types of content, The Old Reader makes it easy to share your recommendations with each other. Just connect your Facebook or Google account, follow friends who also have accounts, and The Old Reader will show you content recommended by your friends. This is a great way to discover new blogs, sites, and channels to follow—as well as share your favorites with your friends. And even if you don't have any friends using The Old Reader to connect with, you can check out the content in its Trending tab to see a list of the pieces that have received the most recent likes from other people who use The Old Reader.

View full-text articles when available, read all posts in reverse chronological order, and subscribe to as many as feeds. But if you want full-text search functionality, need to follow more than feeds, or prefer to use the app without ads, you'll need to upgrade to Premium. Feeder's web app isn't all that different from any of the other apps on this list, outside its more modern aesthetic.

Like all traditional RSS reader apps, it lets you subscribe to sites and view their posts in reverse chronological order. There's support for setting up rules, for paid users, and some collaboration features. What makes Feeder stand out, though, is its browser extension that lets you browse headlines.

Using Feeder's browser extensions for Chrome or Firefox is perhaps the simplest way to read RSS feeds—one that's especially popular with those who want to quickly read the headlines and get on with their day. Just click your RSS icon to see recently published headlines from any page of your browser. The algorithm-powered " Google Discover " and Google News feeds send heaps of traffic to websites based on users' search histories, but what if people could just tell Google what websites they like?

Chrome for Android's "new tab" page has had a Discover feed for a while. Now, when a user presses the "follow" button, a new "Following" tab will appear on the new tab page.