Corporate hobbies

I’ve signed up for feedbin as my Google Reader replacement. Firstly because it is the choice of Reeder, but also because I think such a service is worth paying for. Hopefully paying for it means that it will not only stick around but actually see improvements.

Also of note is Feed Wrangler. I enjoy David Smith’s podcast, Developing Perspectives and his Check the Weather app. I suspect Feed Wrangler will be a great alternative too.

I don’t really lament the end of Google Reader as I did Google Notebooks or when Google Docs became significantly less useful to me. I think we’re going to end up with more and better options.

But on to the topic of this post, which is inspired by Google Reader but isn’t really about Google Reader specifically: Some people say that Google Reader never made sense for Google. I don’t agree.

Consider musicians. Most musicians have a “day job”. Their day job is how they make money. They may make some money off music but not enough that they can quit their day job. (Sometimes their day job is music related, but that’s neither really here nor there.) Yet nobody would say that making music never made sense for these people.

The same way that it makes sense for people do spend time, energy, and money on activities other than a profitable job; it makes sense for businesses to spend time, energy, and money on activities that aren’t profitable. Because businesses are made up of people.