Google Reader

[Scottish Lass]

I only use Hotmail/Outlook as a "junk" account so others may use features that I don't and others may have a different opinion. But it appears to me that the main change is cosmetic. Most (if not all) of the "new" features that have been touted in reviews are things that were added when they upgraded Hotmail a few years ago with the Windows Live roll out.

Yes, it was mostly cosmetic, but Outlook has a pretty bad history of being targeted for viruses and such. I'd rather not dump my address completely since I've used it longer than any other.

 

[Pilgrim]

I only use Hotmail/Outlook as a "junk" account so others may use features that I don't and others may have a different opinion. But it appears to me that the main change is cosmetic. Most (if not all) of the "new" features that have been touted in reviews are things that were added when they upgraded Hotmail a few years ago with the Windows Live roll out.

Yes, it was mostly cosmetic, but Outlook has a pretty bad history of being targeted for viruses and such. I'd rather not dump my address completely since I've used it longer than any other.

Which address? Hotmail accounts are switched to the Outlook (web) interface but the hotmail.com address stays the same. If somebody wants an outlook.com email address one has to sign up for it the same way as it was done with live.com addresses. Outlook.com addresses only became available in the past few months, to my understanding, so there is not much history to be had with regard to spam. I did create at least one outlook.com address but I haven't checked it lately. When Hotmail was upgraded a few years ago, I created a bunch of Hotmail and Live accounts so that I could have specific account names that weren't available in Gmail, most of which I've never ended up using. If many other people were like me, the Microsoft email user stats are skewed even worse than some have imagined.

It looks to me like out of the big 3 Yahoo is the biggest spam target and also the biggest target for hackers. Almost all hacked spam emails I get from contacts are from Yahoo addresses. By contrast I've rarely gotten spam in my Gmail accounts, especially obscene type spam. At most I get a handful a week of that nature, and that's on an account I've had since 2005. Most of the spam is business related that I haven't bothered to unsubscribe from.

 

[Scottish Lass]

Yes, my address will stay the same. I'd switch to gmail if it weren't my oldest address (and therefore on record dozens of places as a contact method).

 

[matt01]

With regard to Google Reader, I don't know what I'll do, if anything. In recent years I've tended to keep up with blogs via FB and Twitter. If it's a Wordpress blog, I follow it with the WP reader. I have a bunch of blogs bookmarked in G Reader, some of which I've probably forgotten about. I probably haven't used it regularly in 3-4 years.

I was considering different options, and then I checked out my stats page in Reader and found that I had read 13,694 items since 4 March 10... quick fix to that; deleted all of the subscriptions, and now I won't worry about the changing of Reader.

 

[jogri17]

I have yet to find an alternative. I think a good solution would be for Google to opensource the website... since it already works well, the source code could be published and maintained by others. There's a petition for that here: https://www.change.org/petitions/goo...-open-source-3

I don't know if that is fruitless though.

According to several tech journalists, this possibility was considered (Google clearly has no problem with open source), the problem is that Reader was apparently integrated with other stuff that could give away some of their other things they guard secretly (i.e. search). Just throwing the code out there would give show too much stuff on how Google works from an inside perspective, and to comb through the code getting rid of those aspects would be too time consuming and not worth it. Realistically blogs are a bit passé and people use twitter as RSS. What may be possible is something like RSS to be integrated into Google +.