Goodbye, Google Reader.

Monday night, I was talking with Adam Jacobi.

12:22 AM Adam: I'm trying to find my first share ever. I'm past 2500 items and just got to October 24, 2010. God help me.

12:23 AM me: oh man. that's like searching for your first-ever tweet

12:24 AM Adam: I think I've been gsharing for longer than I've been on twitter

me: tentative solution: get my yardstick, wedge it between the wall and the N key on my keyboard

12:25 AM Adam: ahaha

And that's just what I did.

In the days since we learned that Google Reader was going to be dry-docked at Monterey and repurposed as an army of clothespin springs, I've heard people describe it as "perfect." It is not. It's plagued by the same internal search problems suffered by the amnesiac Facebook and Twitter, the ones that don't let you conduct a simple search for your years-old debate with your friend over whether to vote Obama.

It is 2011. Our jeans are filled with two legs and a Bic lighter and a wallet and 3,430 Barry Sanders videos, and the Internet and the machines we use to explore it are powerful and graceful to measures that surpass what Star Trek was capable of articulating in a televised daydream. We should have known that we could only cast the future beyond our reach for so long, and now it's here. The telephone shows you what Charleston looks like from space. Your VCR is in California. Google Reader, meanwhile, asks you to hold the "next" key for eight minutes.

It's a problem quite unlike Google, the faceless e-matron that brought us the obsessively-archived and -indexable Gmail. There could have been a button marked "earliest" that would swing us back to our first-ever share. There, uh, wasn't, but the yardstick stuck in place.

1:17 AM me: my first share is a post written by Eamonn Brennan on Mouthpiece Sports Blog, which no longer exists

Adam: about what

me: rick reilly writing some dumb thing

1:18 AM Adam: of course

I wrote at Mouthpiece Sports with Eamonn Brennan and Ryan Corazza, who are now at ESPN, and Will Brinson, who writes at CBS Sports. A few months before it shut down, Tom Ziller shared a post on Reader advertising a job opening at SB Nation. I saw it and sent in my resume. Two years and change later, Tom and I are co-workers, and my livelihood is exactly what I wished it was when I was 11 years old.

For me, a person who works from home, Reader serves as a sort of break room. It's a room populated by Spencer Hall, Jonah Keri, Chris and Jamie Mottram, Holly Anderson, Eric Freeman, Dan Devine, Trey Kerby, Ted Berg, and so many other sports folks I learn from on a daily basis. We share articles with one another. We hold 200-comment debates on sandwiches. My work day would be significantly different, and worse, without them.

My attachment to Reader is even deeper than that. A few years ago, there was an exodus of sorts from the message boards of Progressive Boink, the site I co-founded when I was 20, and the site that led me on the long and meandering path to where I am today. After some haranguing from Pete, I finally started using Reader, and I again found myself in that company of indispensable people. Y'all know who you are.

Reader is the imperfect, but somehow structurally-sound, tree house we saw in every television show growing up, crudely cobbled together from sun-warped planks of wood, with the rope ladder tied together by nobody, and the telescope that usually spies on the squirrels, and sometimes the galaxy. In the future, we'll find means of communication that are better, that we will love more, and that we will regard at least as sentimentally. That might even happen in a few weeks, when we find a way to adapt Google+ for our purposes.

But the thing that made my life different won't be what it was, and I reckon that to be a thing worth acknowledging. Thanks, y'all, for making it great.