A day later and I'm still dumfounded by Google's idiotic removal of shared items from Google Reader. I have been a patron of Google Reader for years: keeping thousands of blog feeds, and sharing anything and everything I think might be useful to me in the future. Reader's ability to search the shared items made it easy to find curated information on any topic I was working on, and I showed off its functionality to students, co-workers and everyone else.
More so, I have been a Google guy for awhile: gmail, google docs, tried buzz, trying +, tried android and, heck, I even built a crappy site using Google sites. Looking back at that list, I'm starting to wonder why I'm such a big supporter of them.
Google Reader's move isn't just a dumb upgrade move, it is a dumb marketing move. The best way to grow a brand is to support your core advocates so they spread your brand through word of mouth. Unsexy as it is, word of mouth is king and will always be king for a brand.
Back to the current problem, Google allows you to export your shared items through a json file. What is a json file? I don't know. Should I? Maybe. Should an everyday user? Hell no. I'm left hoping for someone more tech savvy than me to come up with a solution, and that I'll find the solution by Googling.
There in lies the point. I will never stop using Google as a search engine because it is simply better, and Google has confused that with brand love. It is not. Usage does not equal advocacy. Bank of America can tell you that. Shell can tell you that. Company Google does not want.
In the meantime, I've found a link that allows you to access your shared items so I will manually go through to star each one of the thousands of shared items. Star'ng isn't a solution though because I don't know what would stop Google from removing that some day. It may be time to switch to Evernote.
If you are in the same boat, there is a petition going around. Here's the link, or you can Google it...
