Google. Feh.

Since I don't use Google Reader (at least not often enough for it to constitute a significant part of my online experience), I didn't pay much attention to the announcement that it is going away.

Now it turns out that I do use Google Reader, every day, for important stuff, and its impending death does affect me.

I use a service called NewsSquares, and wouldn't you know, it uses -- or rather used -- Google Reader in the background to bring me a conveniently organized screen full of little squares listing most of the web sites I cover for RRND/FND and letting me know when there's new material to have a look at.

Since Reader is disappearing on July 1st, there's a new version of NewsSquares. And while I'm grateful to Bottle In Rocket for creating a new version instead of just packing it in along Google Reader, the new version is particularly flawed from my point of view, because ...

Those little squares no longer list the number of unread articles at each site. To get that, I have to use the BIG squares, and that means that my list of feeds, which used to fit tidily on one screen, now takes up several, and I have to do a bunch of scrolling back and forth.

I was about to gripe, but then I remembered that 25 years ago I'd have had to spend all day at the public library and/or the bookstore and/or several newsstands to find most of the stuff that NewsSquares has waiting for me right on my desktop every morning ... and that the rest of the stuff wouldn't have existed at all yet.

So thanks, NewsSquares. But pretty please, with sugar on top, see if you can get me the unread article count in the little squares Real Soon Now. Thanks in advance