A few weeks ago, Google announced that they were shutting down Google Reader on July 1st, saying that “usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products.” I like many others rely on Google Reader to filter, sort and keep tabs on the world’s news, especially for sites that updates once or twice a week, rather than 50 or 60 times a day. There was a huge uproar at first, and people were going on about how Google could turn off any service and that we needed to pay for services to keep them going.

I’ve thought about it a lot, and realized how wrong this sentiment is. Paying for a service is not the only thing that will keep it afloat. Enough people have to invest time and money to keep a developer interested and working on a service; the market can’t change too significantly; the legal landscape can’t change too suddenly. The only way to make sure a service survives is to own a license to host the service yourself, and run it in-house. This is impractical for many services, especially ones that rely on extended network effects – a locally hosted Facebook with a dozen accounts isn’t interesting.

So everyone: stop bashing Google for this. It’s true of every other company that offers online services of any kind. Go ahead and use the services you like. If they are supported via payments, make sure you pay and don’t freeload/pirate. If they are ad supported, click an add now and again. It’s how the developers pay the bills. If the service closes, pack your bags and move to a new one. Hopefully all services allow data export the way Google does, and selection criteria for new services should keep that in mind.