Episode: 1027
Title: HPR1027: Migrating away from Google Reader
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1027/hpr1027.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:38:17

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Manjaro
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Falon and today I want to talk to you about my journey in migrating
away from Google Reader. Google Reader is one of the best applications out there. It's
best definitely one of the best services provided by Google. And what it is essentially is
a way that you can subscribe to a newsfeed if you don't know what that is. It's like a blog
posting or whatever. And rather than having to revisit the site every time something is posted,
what they do is they update the RSS, which really simple syndication, feed, which is nothing
more than an XML file. And your reader, your client, RSS reader goes out and connects to those feeds
and downloads only the new items that have changed. So places like the BBC or CNN or whoever
have these feeds and you can read their news items without actually having to go to their
websites or you can go to the websites by clicking on the link. It's very useful and very
convenient to think. One disadvantage over the traditional applications that you would have
on your Linux PC or your Windows PC or your mobile phone is is the synchronization of what you've
read. So in a typical situation you might work up in the morning, check your news feeds at home,
then go on to the train, check some more feeds there, and then join your lunch break, you might
check some more feeds at work. And what's really convenient about Google Reader is that the feeds that
you've marked as read on one location are marked as read in all the other locations. They
one thing that they concern me a little bit about Google Reader was the fact that
the idea of somebody looking over your shoulder. Now remember everybody when you were younger and
you had lean over your grandpa's shoulder and start reading a newspaper to which he, in my case,
would roll it up and slap you across the head with it in a friendly fashion saying it was rude to
do that. And yet at the same time we're allowing complete strangers to look into what we're reading.
Now it's you know a common thing on the train to identify people's political affiliation by
the newspaper that they subscribe to and then the same way you can determine a lot by somebody's
news feeds that they subscribe to. For example the news feeds that I subscribe to contain a lot of
news sites, BBC for instance, I also subscribe to Dutch sites, Irish news sites and German
news sites. But to get a balanced opinion I also subscribe to Algebra. So what I noticed was once
I expanded my list of feeds that I started subscribing to I noticed that certain things started
changing in my search patterns. And I want to play this speech TED Talk by Ellie Parr Seer
entitled Beware of Online Filter Bowls. It was a TED Talk and it was watched currently over
nearly one and a half million times. So I'll just splice that in here. It's of course released
under the Creative Commons by attribution non-commercials share a like license. So it's TED Talk
and a link will be available in the show notes. Enjoy.
Mark Zuckerberg a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed.
And the journalist was asking him, you know, why is this so important? And Zuckerberg said,
a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interest right now than people
dying in Africa. And I want to talk about what a web based on that idea of relevance might look
like. So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, you know, the internet meant
something very different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that would
connect us all together. And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our
society. But there's this kind of shift in how information is flowing online. And it's invisible.
And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. So I first noticed this in a
place I spend a lot of time, my Facebook page. I'm progressive politically, big surprise. But I've
always, you know, gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking
about. I like seeing what they link to. I like learning a thing or two. And so I was kind of surprised
when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it
turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on. And it was
noticing that actually I was clicking more on my liberal friends links than on my conservative
friends links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.
So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible algorithmic editing of the
web. Google is doing it too. If I search for something and you search for something, even right now,
at the very same time, we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one
engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at. Everything from what kind of computer
you're on, to what kind of browser you're using, to where you're located, that it uses to
personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second. There is no standard Google
anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see you can't see how
different your search results are from anyone else's. But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch
of friends to Google Egypt and send me screenshots of what they got. So here's my friend Scott's
screenshot. And here's my friend Daniel's screenshot. When you put them side by side, you don't even
have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links,
it's really quite remarkable. Daniel didn't get anything about the protest in Egypt at all in his
first page of Google results. Scott's results were full of them. And this was the big story of the
day at that time. That's how different these results are becoming. So it's not just Google and
Facebook either. You know, this is something that's sweeping the web. There are a whole host of
companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo news. The biggest news site on the internet
is now personalized. Different people get different things. Having the post, the Washington post,
New York Times, off flirting with personalization in various ways. And where this moves us very quickly
toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see. But not necessarily
what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt said, it'll be very hard for people to watch or consume something
that has not in some sense been tailored for them. So I do think this is a problem. And
I think if you take all of these filters together, if you take all of these algorithms, you get
what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is kind of your own personal, unique universe
of information that you live in online. And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are
and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. And more
importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out. So one of the problems with the filter
bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. And they were looking at the Netflix cues and
they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some
movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses. They enter the queue, they just zip right
out. So Iron Man zips right out, right? And waiting for Superman can wait for a really long time.
What they discovered was that in our Netflix cues, there's kind of this epic struggle going on
between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. You know, we all want
to be someone who has watched Rashomon. But right now, we want to watch Ace Ventura for the
fourth time. So the best editing gives us a bit of both. It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber
and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables. It gives us some
information dessert. And the challenge with these kind of algorithmic filters, these personalized
filters is that because they're mainly looking at what you click on first, you know, it can
throw off that balance. And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by
information junk food. So what this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the
internet wrong. In a broadcast society, you know, this is how the founding mythology goes, right?
In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors. And they controlled the flows of
information. And along came the internet. And it swept them out of the way. And it allowed all of us
to connect together. And it was awesome. But that's not actually what's happening right now.
What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones.
And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the
editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they're going to decide
what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just
keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable
or challenging or important. This is what Ted does, right? Other points of view.
And the thing is we've actually kind of been here before as a society.
In 1915, it's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities.
Then people kind of noticed that they were doing something really important,
that in fact you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of
information. That the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter and that
journalistic ethics developed. It wasn't perfect, but it got us through the last century.
And so now, we're kind of back in 1915 on the web. And we need the new gatekeepers
to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing.
You know, I know there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google, Larry, and Sergey,
who, you know, people who have helped build the web as it is. And I'm grateful for that.
But we really need to you to make sure that these algorithms haven't coded in them a sense of
the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. We need you to make sure that they're transparent
enough that we can see what the rules are, that determine what gets through our filters.
And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't.
Because I think we really need the internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being.
We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people
and different perspectives. And it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a web of one.
Thank you.
Okay, so we've decided that we want to move off Google reader. What do we need to do?
Well, the first thing we need to do is get a list of the feeds and then fairness to Google
to make this very easy to do. They have a team called the data liberation team within Google
and their goal is from the website data liberation.org. Users should be able to control the data,
the store and any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.
So all you need to do is open up reader, go to settings, reader settings, import and export,
and right there you will have an OPML file for you. An OPML is an online processor markup language.
So it's XML format and it basically describes a list of RSS feeds for you. You don't need to worry
too much about that just because I've got a fetish for XML files, you don't need to cut up in that.
So now that we've got our feed, the question is how are we going to use that feed?
Are we just going to simply load it onto our different feed readers and be back into the same
problem that we had before and things that have been synchronized? Well, there is an obvious
solution actually when you think about it of things reading messages in one location and
having them synchronized across the other locations and that of course is the IMAP protocol.
From Wikipedia again, the internet message access protocol IMAP is one of the most prevalent
internet standard protocols for email retrieval. The other being post office protocol pop.
Virtually all modern email clients and service support both protocols as a means of transporting
email messages from a server. So what it does essentially is if you mark a message deleted on one
mailbox, when you check on the other mailbox, it's also deleted. IMAP also supports a cool thing
called offline mailboxes so you can download your messages to an offline store and this is super
convenient. It's based on certain clients and actually offers functionality that Google doesn't
provide. Now on my train trip home, they journey passes. It's at a very busy time and it passes
through the most of the largest business districts and I have a very very poor signal the whole
way home and often I got frustrated waiting for Google redirect work. Now downloading my messages
in IMAP, I can have them already downloaded and stored on my laptop or my mobile device ready to go.
So IMAP is supported by basically everything. Even Microsoft Outlook supports it and Linux,
Thunderbird, Evolution, KML and Clothes all supported. There's Android clients, I phone
clients, Windows mobile clients. There's also if you like the whole concept of web mail,
there's more service providers provide something like Squirrel Mail or something like that to allow
you to access IMAP via a website. So even if you're away from a client and you're at an internet
cafe, you can still connect to your news feeds. And any of these devices, if your marker message
is as read or deleted, then it's read or deleted. And if you want to share it with somebody,
you just press forward and email it on to somebody else. It's kind of cool. So I was faced then with
the, I have my list of feeds and I knew where I wanted to put them. The only thing was how I was
going to get from one to the other. And a quick duck duck go search led me to feed to IMAP,
that's F-E-E-D, the numeral two and IMAP. And the home page is home.gna.org for such feed to IMAP.
And from their website, feed to IMAP is an RSS at some feed aggregator. After downloading feeds
over HTTP or HTTPS, it uploads them to a specified folder on an IMAP mail server and copies them
to a local mail doer. The user can then access the feeds using mod evolution, Mozilla Thunderbird
or even a webmail client. The application has been out for a while and it's in all major repositories.
I had it open running in about 10 minutes and the configuration file is kept in a hidden file
in your home directory called dot feed to IMAP or C. And it's a fairly simple configuration file.
It's based on yet another marker plamage if you're into text file marker plamages.
And so a simple feed might be a consistent minimum of three lines possible before. When you can
add more items in there, you can even add the ability to download the feed and modify it in some
way before you process it. If you open up the feed to IMAP or C example, you will see various
different ways to utilize this. So what you require is, first of all, a name. And that's just,
for example, canfellon.com is the name of one of my feeds. The URL is HTTP colonforce-canfellon.com
customer feed to rss. So that's the rss feed itself. Come on from Google reader.
The target then is your IMAP location. So it's IMAP colon, forward slash, forward slash,
and the username colon password, at sign, server, and then wherever you want to put it.
If you've got the at sign, you need to escape it with the percent character and then the ASCII
field. I chose to put my fields, my feeds into inbox.field fields. And then I met subfolders
for every group that I had already defined within Google reader. And the only other options I
set was include dash images to be true. So I wrote actual little parals script to take an
opml file and convert it into a configuration file feed to IMAP RC file. And so I didn't want to
be doing that again. So I wrote that there. And thanks to Tlatu over the new world order,
this episode on gith, March 31, 2010, episode season 7, episode 13. The code is available for
everybody to download at guitarius.org forward slash opml to feed. So once you've done that,
you now have a dot feed to IMAP RC file in your home directory hidden. And the next thing you should
do is go over to your email client and set up the RSS account. I set up a simple throw away account
that I limit it to 100 megabytes or whatever so that if I forget to check my feed for a while,
it won't start encroaching all the users. And actually, when I uploaded this the first time,
I posted the link into the August plan of RSS IRC channel. Sorry, the IRC channel and
C prompt called me aside to say, oh, did you realize that you have your RSS user name
and password in the file? So for your IMAP folder, which when you think about it, actually,
I initially panicked and then I thought, well, you know, here are people I know looking over my
shoulder. So I have nothing to hide in there. The only reason I'm not putting this into this show
or the show notes is that I don't want to use as a means for spanners. But at least there,
I know the people who were in the channel at the time. And of course, I can change the username
and password if you wish. So once you do that, you should be all set all you need to do is run
feed to IMAP. And on your email client, you should start seeing the messages starting to appear.
And if you mark them red on one client, you should see them also been marked as red on the other
clients. I simply used Chrome to schedule the feed to IMAP to run every two hours as 14 minutes past
the hour. And that's pretty much it. I've been using it for about a week now. It works out very,
very well. It's supported by the standard IMAP client on my phone. I've started using
close email client on my, on all my machines, actually, because it supports this really well. And
there's a nice simple straightforward client. I did use it on Thunderbird and I also used an
email. And just to check, I installed it, checked it out on Microsoft Outlook. And it works on all of
them. So, all and all quite a good, you know, a nice success there. And so if you are considering
an alternative to Google for Search, I've also been using duck.go for a while. So that's a good
alternative to that. And if you're looking for an alternative to Google reader, then feed to IMAP
is a nice alternative that you can take the, the whole functioning of your, what you're reading to
keep it a little bit more private, if you wish or not. If you, if you don't, you simply publish your
username or password on a, on a website, disability, sending, of course. So that's it. Thank you very
much for listening. Hope you got something from this. There will be detailed show notes in
the episode for this. And also over on my own website canfoundan.com. If you have considered it,
please consider recording a show here for Acro Public Radio. We really appreciate it. Okay,
thank you. And tune in tomorrow for something completely different.
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