Fragile Tools

Not as much fun as Fraggle Rock.

I'm currently dependent on the following fragile tools:

  1. Twitter
  2. Google Reader
  3. To a lesser extent, Firefox and Chrome

What do I mean by "fragile tools"? Consider Twitter: It started as a fun ecosystem for development, where anyone could whip up an interesting alternative way to interact with the service. Now? Not so much. Remember "track"? Yeah.

And Google Reader seems to have only one developer -- just babysitting it. The API is not documented and can change at any moment, without notice. Plus, Google has been sunsetting services left and right. Having killed off virtually all competitors, when will Google shut down Reader?

Firefox and Chrome are both moving to narrow their feature sets. Both seem incredulous that I might want to enter the URL of an XML file and view that file in my browser window. On the plus side, both are light-years ahead of Internet Explorer or Safari in usability and reliability.

Any of these tools could very quickly stop offering key features or go away entirely. The precariousness of my position as a user of those tools leaves me in a constant state of anxiety.

P.S. This post primarily is intended to test a one of the plugins I'm using. So, it's really just a bunch of conclusory statements without any references or argument.

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