Google Reader going away is a wake up call.

Google reader is how I have come to rely on reading web pages on the Internet.  It was my single portal page to the entire web.  I stopped "browsing the web" years ago because I could just add a bunch of news and tech sites to Google reader and then easily keep up to date on everything that was happening.  There is only three ways I get to an article on the Internet, primarily through google reader, secondly through google search and once I am on a page I might follow a link from that page. 

Do I need to worry that Google search is going to be dropped?  That Google Mail is going to return to sender?  That Google drive will just cruise on down the turnpike?  Maybe instead of just replacing Google Reader, that this is a wake up call that we need to replace Google.  Maybe this is going to motivate a large group of people to actually get something done.

The open source community needs to step up and create something that is a game changer.  Imagine a single app that brings in all your web pages, social media feeds, email, event logs on servers, essentially anything that can generate a stream of messages or events, and then filters that fire hose of information down to a manageable level, getting rid of everything you don't care to read about.  Let what you do care about the most to be easily shareable, not just on the reader service itself, but back out to all the social media sites and to groups you have created in email as well.

Configure it so that it can use many different feed readers, or just use a built in P2P model to share feeds, so that we don't have to depend on something like Google feeds again.   Store the data locally so that it is yours all the time.  I can only imagine all the plugins that people could write to do amazing things.

 I know that I am planning on working this summer on a small web app and back end RSS aggregator  that will run on my local machine to at least bring me back up to where Reader was at without the sharing part.   I'll share the progress I make on it here with you all.