Friday Reading: RIP Google Reader
Google announced it will shutdown the popular Google Reader service on July 1. According to another Google service FeedBurner, 60% of the regular readers of this blog use Google Reader, 30% subscribe by email, 10% by other means. I use Google Reader to read other blogs myself.
It’s sad to see a good service go away. I of course would like you to stay as a regular reader. If you are using Google Reader now, you can switch to subscribing by email. That way you won’t have to worry about another aggregation service being discontinued due to lack of revenue. If you don’t like email subscription, you can try other services suggested by this article on Lifehacker: Google Reader Is Shutting Down; Here Are the Best Alternatives.
Now, some money and investment related articles I read this week, in Google Reader:
Compound Interest and Wealth Accumulation: It’s Not As Easy as You Think by Wade Pfau at Retirement Researcher Blog
Professor Pfau suggests using 2% inflation adjusted return for planning purposes.
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Will a relationship neutral tax code save traditional marriage? by Kay Bell at Don’t Mess With Taxes
Taxing each person as an individual won’t devalue marriage in any way. Just ask Canada and the vast majority of other countries.
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Will The New 3.8% Medicare Surtax Reinvigorate Non-Deductible IRA Contributions? by Michael Kitces at Nerd’s Eye View
No, because $5,500 per person (or $6,500 over age 50) isn’t going to be that meaningful to people affected by the 3.8% Medicare surtax. They should be doing backdoor Roth already anyway.
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How to boost your expected returns by Larry Swedroe at CBS MoneyWatch
The answer is increasing your allocation to international stocks. Read why.
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3 Reasons Saving For Retirement Should Be Legally Mandatory by Kyle at Amateur Asset Allocator
I agree. Australia mandates 9% of pay, increasing to 12% by 2020.
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Do Internet Banks Offer Enough Advantages? by Ken Tumin at DepositAccounts.com
Definitely for a savings account that doesn’t have that many transactions in and out. Less so for a checking account unless the online bank offers ATM fee rebates (Ally Bank, USAA) or free deposit-taking ATMs (Alliant Credit Union).
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Investing principles for an uncertain world by Tim Buckley at Vanguard Blog
Article by Vanguard’s new CIO. Clear goals, suitable allocation, diversification, low cost — the rest will depend on how the market performs. If only we get another 1990s we will be all set. If the market doesn’t cooperate, the best plan will still deliver poor results.
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How to Fix America’s Wealth Inequality: Teach Americans to Be Cheap by Noah Smith at The Atlantic
I heard there is a propaganda video going around the Internet. This assistant professor of finance says "In the short run, wealth equality is closely tied to income equality. But in the long run, it’s all about thrift, frugality, and saving — in other words, cheapness." Do you agree?
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Who Works for Minimum Wage? by Michael at Financial Ramblings
I worked for minimum wage. Nobody forced me to take that job. I quit after I acquired skills other employers want. The fastest way to get out of a minimum wage job is to acquire skills. Then it doesn’t matter what the minimum wage is.
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Software picked, likely related posts:
Comments
11 Comments on Friday Reading: RIP Google Reader
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MSRP on March 15, 2013
The link “3 Reasons Saving For Retirement Should Be Legally Mandatory” have “thefinancebuff.com” as prefix and does not work.
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Harry on March 15, 2013
Thank you . Fixed that one and a few others.
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Money Beagle on March 15, 2013
I’m confused and disappointed by this announcement. I can understand if they wanted to stop new development, but if they have that many people using it, to me they could keep it active with minimal cost. The bottom line is that every Reader user is touching a Google page and spending time on a Google page, and that will go away. They might not have been able to monetize Reader like they had hoped, but I would think that having people spend time away from Google and instead somewhere else has a ‘cost’ as well.
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Harry Sit on March 15, 2013
The service is good enough as-is. No new development is necessary. You’d think just hosting it won’t cost that much, but maybe they see it as more of a distraction from their next big thing. Even iGoogle is going away. Maybe they want people to set their home page to My Yahoo!
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Bucky on March 15, 2013
Wow, 60% of your traffic comes from RSS. I’m sure that holds true for many other blogs and websites too.
Websites would be foolish to abandon rss/aggregation in favor of vertical silos. They may think that they will lose traffic because people will just go to their RSS reader rather than their website. But the opposite is true. Without aggregation, people will visit far less sites. Anyways, if you have valuable content, people will click on the RSS links for the full article and visit your site.
Unfortunately, Google’s move indicates that online RSS reader is not profitable. I’ve looked around, and the other alternatives are using freemium models (free for crippled usage, pay for realistic usage). I think the long term solution is to use a desktop client.
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uclalien on March 16, 2013
I just started using Feedly as a replacement for Google Reader. They have made the transition as simple as entering your gmail address and password.
On a related note, I also just started using Netvibes as a replacement for my iGoogle homepage.
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Bucky on March 16, 2013
“They have made the transition as simple as entering your gmail address and password.”
Yikes, giving a third party my gmail username and password. That’s a red flag for me. They (or hackers that access their database) would have the potential to access my google email, calendar, docs, etc.
I still don’t understand why they are a browser plugin rather than a website.
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uclalien on March 16, 2013
As I understand it, You aren’t giving them your login and password. You are simply logging into your gmail account and they are syncing with google reader.
I suspect that having it as a plugin makes it more secure. That way, the information is kept on your local device, rather than on a server somewhere. But if you have doubts, I suggest you do more research before making the jump.
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David C on March 16, 2013
Regarding Google Reader, it sounds like feedly is beefing up since “More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined feedly over the last 48 hours. Welcome on board.”
As for the “mandate saving” discussion, at a high/abstract level I like with it but making it legal could be problematic. Australia’s Superannuation was challenged in court, but ruled consitutional in 2011 because it essentially acts as a tax with the proceeds deposited into the Consolidated Revenue Fund. It seems likely something similar would have to happen here (i.e. contributions are sent directly to the US Treasury and not something like the TSP) which is something I’d rather not do.
There there is also the decision of whether you require the employer or the worker to fund the contribution… if you make the employer contribute (which is how Australia’s Superannuation works) then you can run into problems related to classifying a worker as an independent contractor (employer does not pay) vs. an employee (employer pays). Probably better to make the worker pay although as KyleAAA mentions that probably will require tax credits for the poorest workers.
The idea is nice but the devil is in the details…
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RDT2 on March 20, 2013
I’m a bit confused. I clicked on your link to subscribe via email and it points to a Google service FeedBurner, which according to Wikipedia was “killed” this past December. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner
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Harry on March 20, 2013
RDT2 – Google hasn’t killed FeedBurner yet, although many users had a scare when FeedBurner had an outage last year. Wikipedia says Google shut down AdSense for Feeds in December 2012. That’s the advertising service delivered by FeedBurner. FeedBurner proper is still alive. If one day Google kills it I will have to find another email subscription provider.
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