I woke up this morning to find, upon checking my RSS subscriptions that apparently Google is killing off Reader. This was something of the last shred of “clean design” that Google had. It was (is for another three months) a great way to pull your blog and news RSS subscriptions together and read them simply, without the bullshit of Facebook, Twitter, or whatever else getting in your way. Obviously this was way too easy to use in this day and age of hyper-social so it just had to go.

People, are pissed. In this post by pro-hole (still don’t know what that means) San Franciscan and 2011 mayoral write-in candidate, Mat Honan, a commenter left what pretty much summed up everything that has been great about Google Reader:

Here’s my problem with it going away. It seems the “social” aspects are being pushed upon us more and more… G+, FB, etc. That’s fine if I want to leisurely scroll through tons and tons of bullshit posts by friends. I turn to Reader when I need or want only the meat and potatoes. Sure, you could probably have the same thing in G+, but I’m sorry, I’m a geek, and I want RAW material, not the fluff that comes with it!

I checked out of Facebook and LinkedIn for these very reasons. While I’m still on Twitter, I don’t really use it to read things as the fart stream of information on there is too much to handle. I like clean and elegant when reading online as the unread stack of books next to my bed will attest to.

So, you can sign a petition to keep it. I don’t know why as Google has been dry humping the evil shark for a couple of years now, basically since they went public. Me, it appears I’m going to try out Feedly as they’re jumping on this situation to replace Reader. I had tried the service in the past, but only linking it to Twitter which hurt most all of my digestive tract.

Of course, what’s really going to annoy me is that there is no reader tracking at all in Feedly. In Google Reader, I could see how many subscribers there were to a specific site. Now, nothing. It would be great if you somehow added that in, Feedly, nudge nudge.

I guess that’s not supposed to matter though and it’s really all about the metrics of who clicks on each article, or shares it on Facebook, or provides a high-end ROI for advertising. At the risk of sounding like the old timer in the room (as really, at 36, I am) I’m not liking where our web is heading one bit I tell you.

I’ve just put up an article on Medium called, The peasant’s wine. Naturally with this blog, the wine books, the wine blog and various other writery bits out there, one would naturally ask why on earth I would start writing somewhere else.

The intent wasn’t to try and dominate a market or overly spread myself out, but more just to see what they’re doing. The folks behind this are the same ones who came up with Twitter. They’re now taking trying to rebuild writing on the web. A noble pursuit and one not unknown to them as they came up with the original Blogger platform that Google now owns. Of course, thanks to their creating Twitter, the attention span of internet users has gotten even shorter so one has to wonder as to how longer than 140 characters texts will fare.

That aside, the interface is, so far quite lovely. Sleek and simple, it does indeed make writing quite easy and approachable to anyone. You just get in there and go. Curious is the “collection” system which seems to be a way to force people to add what is essentially a category to an article before publishing it. Obviously, this goes a long way towards helping establish meta information prior to publication, but, for those who need it simple (ie the older moms of the world) it forms about the only stumbling block I can find to getting in there and getting an article out. The mobile aspect is also quite nice as the site immediately scales to a phone or tablet without the need for any of that app garbage.

Probably my only question is that as it’s obvious they’re taking great strides to curate their content, I’m curious what they plan to do on that front. Will this be just another place with those already have a name or buzz around them rise to the top as seen in well, pretty much everything to date? Or will they come up with a way to promote the unknown and grow otherwise overlooked authors in the world. Given that I’m quite happy with WordPress for my writing needs, while Medium’s interface is nice, I don’t have too much of a reason to change. But, if they can pull off this latter point, it will keep me around to read what others are writing because no one has ever been able to do this.

Last year, upon releasing our Empordà wine guide in both print and electronic books, a friend of mine here in Barcelona asked if we had any interest in making an “app” for it. Naturally, with Apple’s as well as Google’s App Store success stories it was a relevant question to which I said, “no, not planning on it”.

In the “Cons” column six months ago were: how does this generate revenue from our guides, how does it not give away our content for free, and how does it generally boost the presence of the brand and not simply boost Apple and Google’s offer? Then of course there was the issue of the cost in building two separate Apps (if you’re not doing iOS and Android, then go home now), porting over a web version of our content to feed the App, and then paying for hosting App content. And what could we have charged for this? Most likely it would have had to be free in order to gain any traction and not be an embarrassment.

A lot of this was based on the experience of friends at Taste of Croatia. They have offered Apps for the content on their site. The Apps are free and they work quite well. But, despite being downloaded a few thousand times, they get nothing out of this but expense. Expenses I already have in generating thousands of pages in original content that are then released in electronic as well as print versions.

In short, instead of releasing an App for Vinologue we’ve been focusing more on making two products: epubs that are essentially self-contained websites/App-ish to some degree and printed books for the 21st century that take advantage of technologies that merge digital and analog such as QR Codes and GPS coordinates instead of street addresses (wineries around the world rarely have definitive addresses).

Although it was not due to any “genius” foresight on my part, I feel vindicated for making this decision last year as just this week the DO Empordà office has released an App. About 2/3 of the wineries in our Empordà guide fall within that regulatory body and thus it covers a good degree of the content we would have provided in whatever App we might have released. It is essentially a summary of what’s on their website, although oddly items that were out of date on the main site remain out of date. Also, some things such as GPS are a bit off and other minor aspects. These can all be corrected with time though and the App functions well overall. It’s also free on both the Apple & Google stores.

And this is a big problem in trying to innovate in Europe in general, but in Spain especially. Where in the US someone sees a need and fills it, there is so much institutional money floating around in Europe that they fill needs whether they exist or not. I may or may not have been better able to “App-up” that content, but now that I’d be competing with one that’s offered for free with the backing on institution (who would have no interest in promoting my App) there is no way in hell that I’d go there.

This is the problem with Apps. Apple started this craze five years ago and the Apps that originally came out fell in to two camps: those released by big companies and those released by private hackers who were just dicking around and came up with something cool. Now, with some half a million Apps on the Apple store and 700,000 on the Google Play store, you’d be nuts to release one as an unknown private individual unless you came up with something so unique that it marketed itself and this does not happen now.

The time to have Apped-it was at least three years ago and if government institutions are jumping on this now and spending who knows how much to make it happen isn’t proof that Apps have jumped the shark, then maybe you should find an App to let you know that. Oh, wait, there already is one.

Something amazing happened the other day. No, I did not cure cancer, nor world hunger, or even find my mobile phone without having to call it from the home phone. What happened was even more earth shattering than if you were to take all of those things, mash them together and wrap them in bacon for what I accomplished was this: I managed to delete a book from Apple’s iBookstore.

For those unaccustomed to what it takes to get materials up for sale on Apple’s digital literary distribution network, here’s how you officially “remove” a book from the inventory:

How do I remove a book from the iBookstore?
There are several options to remove a book from one or more territories.

Admin or Technical iTunes Connect users can:

• Redeliver the same book via iTunes Producer. Open the iTunes Store Package with the book, go to Territory Rights, and uncheck the Cleared For Sale checkbox for the desired country.
• Or, locate your book in Manage Your Books and click Edit Rights & Pricing. Then, click Edit for the territory you want to change, and select No in the Cleared For Sale field.

You may look at that and ask, “But wherefore do I actually delete the book?” and the answer is, you can’t and it just sits there, thumbing its spine at you until it appears you write in and specifically ask them remove it from the system completely. After requesting this twice, they might, as it happened to me.

Of course if not being able to delete something you uploaded to a website (a rather banal feature) was the only glaring issue, I might be able to overlook it as while I’m not an Apple fanboy, I do admire the novelty of their products. But no, there are other issues with their system that have been driving me batshit for the last year and a half.

All Must Use Apple The other ebook publishers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and hell, even Google Play allow people to upload their files through a web interface. It is after all, 13 years in to the 21st century and we’ve had the technology to do this for some time. But Apple, no, you have to use iTunes Producer. While I hate using dumb software, I’ll stoop to it if needbe and in this case, the need does indeed be. Oh, but it only runs on OS X, so thus, you must buy an Apple machine if you want to sell on iBookstore. Reasoning that my sales wouldn’t be great enough to warrant the purchase of a fancy new MacBook, I opted for the cheapest Mac Mini I could find and use it to watch movies on my TV as well.

Web Interface I don’t even know why Apple bothers having a web interface for this stuff as it’s built so incredibly badly it looks like someone spent about one weekend tossing it together and not realizing that if you hit Back in the browser you get the “Reload the Page?” window which, for a website built after 1998 should never ever be happening. Maybe it works better in Safari, but I hate that browser so much, I haven’t bothered to check. My guess is no.

Pending Sale For new books uploaded, it takes several weeks for them to be approved for sale. Thankfully updates to the book file are a bit faster, but Amazon typically take at most, two days. Okay, Apple wants to check everything and make sure it’s of high, “Apple” quality, fine. Then there’s the weirdness with adding new countries. I added the 18 new countries to sell in that became available at the end of October 2012. Three months later, I’m still waiting for approval. This I don’t get as the books are already approved for sale in 32 base countries that existed. It should be automatic. Update: Others as equally frustrated as me pointed out that you needed to agree to a new contract, although Apple doesn’t mention this to you anywhere. You just need to know because, it’s Apple and well, what do you mean you don’t know?

Down Time Thankfully I’ve never needed to make a fast change at an odd time as there are so many outages for iBookstore, it’s mindblowing, such as the entire week of Christmas to New Year’s. I mean naturally, who would want to make a change to a title when people are most likely to buy said titles? It’s this last one that makes me think Apple has two guys working on this system with one server sitting between their desks in a basement. It has all the reliability of several old shitty websites I helped build nearly a decade and a half ago in that someone always needs to be around to restart something that fails often and without warning.

Naturally, given all my bitching, one might ask, “Why do you keep using it?” I use it simply for the reason of wanting more sales (ie money, money) but more because I don’t want Amazon to become the dominant way to get digital books. That terrifies the bejesus out of me because honestly, they admittedly have one of the best systems to get your books out there.

So I keep uploading and dealing with Apple’s crappiness. I even deal with Barnes & Noble despite the fact that I sell next to nothing there, which is a shame given that they have one of the better interfaces. I even deal with Google whose “Play” system is also quite bad. The only epub company I couldn’t do was Kobo. They have (or maybe had) this weird FTP system that was super primitive with uploading via an Excel spreadsheet. That was even too much for me to deal with above and beyond Apple’s un-approach to epub distribution.

Rarely is it bragged that you have Twitter followers with handles such as TiwuobuD, shamiurrahman1, des813w, or holly11schanama. Instead, someone with followers such as these would rather point to their overall number of 50,000+ followers and not to the “individuals” that make it up. Of course, what does that mean? As shown with the twitter account for which I’m citing these facts, it means very little.

For a recent post about garage wineries in a village in the Priorat, we had three times the clickthrus from Twitter than this user had for an article on their blog with a much larger interest. It’s but one example (there are many others I’ve noticed over time) and it shows that despite our Twitter only having about 1,500 followers, they are of a much higher quality. That’s good news considering the amount of time it takes to amass that many, legitimately.

There is of course the “fakin’ it” issue when it comes to social media. For some time, Facebook has allowed you to buy all the Likes you wish for a page. This is harder on Twitter as they don’t allow this to anyone but those who wish to pay big bucks to be “promoted”. But, if numbers are all you care about, then you can find 3rd party providers to get them for you as shown by Newt Gingrich’s fraudulent following.

Am I implying that this Twitter handle with 50,000+ followers picked them up through ill-gotten means? Not completely, but it’s impossible to really know as their response rate to tweets is abysmal for someone with such a theoretically large net. More than likely they picked them up by attending conferences and having been active on Twitter for years now. Over time, many of their followers became inactive while their numbers kept growing due to some momentum and spambots started following them because of this. But, like I said, you never know and it would be very easy for anyone who wanted to grow a brand to pay a bit to boost their numbers. Thus the ills of social media and why anyone who tries to use it for promotion needs to monitor the metrics extremely closely and call out all potential bullshit because it most likely is just that.