Who killed Google Reader? Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been
Back when it still existed at all. Google’s feed-reading tool offered a powerful way to curate and read the internet and was beloved by its users. Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge and sprawling web feel small and accessible and helped a generation of news obsessives and super-commenters feel like they weren’t missing anything. It wasn’t Google’s most popular app, not by a long shot, but it was one of its most beloved.
Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it.
To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organising the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.
I loved Google Reader, probably because it got me going with RSS feeds. I have used RSS readers ever since, on a daily basis, to quickly and efficiently retrieve 500+ articles per day to skim and read (and make my blog posts). The irony though is, it is incredibly easy to switch to any other RSS feed reader, and just continue where you left off. So Feedly, InoReader, and many other online services (as well as self-hosted ones) quickly took up the Google Reader users.
But what did strike home for me, was the fact that Google had shut down such an essential service for me, and that woke me up to the fact that Google has very little staying power or any real interest in the products they put out. After Google+ (another service I intensively used), and others have all been shut down, I pay very little interest today in anything that Google is launching. The standing joke for the last few years has always been, so what is the name of the current Google chat/messaging service?
See https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social
#Blog, #GoogleReader, #RSS, #technology
