The downside of trusting Google

I’ve men­tioned my RSS reader issues that have come with the advent of sync­ing with Google Reader before. It remains a night­mare, and not just performance-wise.

Over the hol­i­day, Net­NewsWire on the Mac decided to go hay­wire when sync­ing and cre­ated hun­dreds of bogus feeds. I can’t delete them. Now my sub­scrip­tions are messed up on my Mac, my PC and in Google Reader. Attempts to fix this have proven time-consuming and frus­trat­ing. Some­times Google Reader will read the OPML file of my sub­scrip­tions, some­times it won’t. If it man­ages to read it, it makes errors and doesn’t bother men­tion­ing it.

But most Google apps are like that, they fail in mys­te­ri­ous ways and you don’t know it’s hap­pen­ing until you real­ize some of your data is miss­ing. I can see why there is reluc­tance to just dump your data into “the cloud”. It may be cheaper but that’s because you’re los­ing so much secu­rity and data integrity. There’s a rea­son so many Google apps have “beta” in the title.

Google the com­pany obvi­ously has a mind­set of a soft­ware devel­oper. Soft­ware is fun to cre­ate but annoy­ing to make work cor­rectly. Fix­ing bugs is bor­ing, so soft­ware devel­op­ers avoid doing that. Google would rather come out with some­thing new than fix what’s bro­ken in the stuff they’ve already released.

What both­ers me about all of this is that my Droid phone is so depen­dent upon Google. My Treo was directly synced and while data issues cropped up due to my use of a Mac and a PC, it was never so bad it was unusable.

So I man­aged to get Google Reader (only) set up cor­rectly, but none of my desk­top read­ers is quite right. I’m going to sur­ren­der to the obvi­ous. Sync­ing RSS with Google Reader just doesn’t work, on any plat­form, and the soft­ware devel­op­ers aren’t going to get it right because they can’t.

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