Marco on Our Digital Lockdown

— 1 minute read

Marco Arment writes a great call to arms for developers and nerds alike in the wake of Google Reader's shutdown:

We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership.

It's exciting times but the march towards silo'd platforms like Facebook, Google+, etc. doesn't bode well for the future. It's not enough for Google & Facebook to offer a data export tool - Google has a pretty good one in Takeout - but the interoperability of web apps is what keeps things interesting.

Flickr allows you to share your photos elsewhere - admittedly still keeping a link back to Flickr. But you don't see a Share button on Facebook that will send your video you upload there to YouTube or Vimeo.