Googlereader, schmooglereader

A lot of people are, not surprisingly, getting worked up about Google getting rid of their RSS feed reader. I sympathize. But I'm much more concerned about other services that might be withdrawn. Like iTunes, or Steam, for instance. How many games have you on Steam that you couldn't play if steam were to disappear? Or withdraw their service. Or just withdraw their service to you! The Evil Empire that is EA Games already threatened to cut one of their users off from all his games on Origin if he cancelled his credit-card payment for Sim City.

Of course, I don't think Steam would stoop to such threats, but all the same, I can envisage situations were you can't access your games because of a problem with Steam's service. And I don't mean temporary interruptions of service, such as might happen if a mechanical digger cut through an optical cable or a virus (or a hacker) cleaned all their computers (and databases). Something more permanent. For instance, bankruptcy. Or buy-out. I'm sure a future purchaser of Steam (such as EA Games) could find a way to stop supporting games that it doesn't want to support.