Google Reader: A Product vs. A Symbol(clayallsopp.com) |
Google Reader: A Product vs. A Symbol(clayallsopp.com) |
When I was a journalist, Reader was my main research tool. I didn't care about what was trending. I wanted to find things before they became trends. I subscribed to lots of obscure blogs and publications, and Reader allowed me to skim them very quickly for items of possible importance. I was also able to go back and search all of my feeds for interesting material.
I think this article sums it best: Killing Google Reader is like killing the bees - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/mar/15/google...
By the time it hits facebook and twitter, it's already old news. I have hundreds of feeds subscribed in Reader so I can find it before everybody else.
And the discussions had better quality too.
> Then came Flipboard, Prismatic, and all the other content discovery platforms that became smarter than just Google Reader in lipstick.
Lots of people don't want content discovery or anything smart. They just want a list of articles from feeds.
> Google Reader, the product, seems to be a textbook example of how an incumbent failed to head where the puck was going.
Reader didn't join the party on all the new-and-social stuff, and just stayed a usable product in the form it promised when it started. For me, personally, that was not a failure, but a great thing.
There's a market for such a thing, certainly, but it's not the same thing as an RSS reader, and if you need the latter, the former isn't going to do the job.
I would add that now content discovery is very boring, I don't remember receiving previously unknown recommendations in a field that I know.
Sometimes my mythtv commercial auto-skipper will miss or whatever and I'll be stuck watching TV commercials, and I'm occasionally all WTF I'm not part of this culture anymore. I mean I still live here, but advertising just gets weird if you avoid it for awhile and then jump in the deep end. Ditto if I'm stuck on a computer without adblocking. You guys in my former culture which I'm no longer part of, are just weird.
That's not what I see at all.
From day 1 when I switched from "feedonfeeds" which is basically a self hosted simple web based reader to using Reader many years ago, I always thought the purpose of Reader was for the mighty GOOG to associate my gmail address and web search history and all that stuff with a list of sites I follow so as to sell better advertising. And better spamming of other people with similar interests. So someone reading aaronsons quantum physics blog might get ammo spam because I (and probably many others) read both aaronsons and esr's blog.
The true meaning of the abandonment of RSS by GOOG is they're shrinking their "big data" source collection, not growing it, maybe for the first time ever. They've grown their data gathering for so many years, weird stuff like streetview vans gathering wifi SSIDs, over 100 spam emails per day for me even when I no longer use email as a major communications tool, etc. But now they're in a pruning mode, gathering less data not more. That inflection point is the "REAL" story. Maybe eventually they'll inevitably roll back to just spidering the net for search. Or they'll give up on all the "big data" stuff and pivot 100% into phones. Could happen?
Another interpretation is reader was for infovores or whatever I am. People who think learning about the world is watching Laverne and Shirly reruns on old fashioned broadcast TV are very profitable to advertise to, but they don't/didn't use Reader. And people like me use adblock. So I'm not very profitable for GOOG. For example, people who won't see our ads, do read both aaronsons blog and esrs blog which is kinda interesting, but who cares, they adblock anyway so no way to spam them. Its more profitable to track and spam the old fashioned TV watchers.
Isn't the other way around? The way I remembered it, having a blog was the hottest thing, and RSS is the solution that bring the blogs to the customer. Desktop clients are spawning everywhere (like Twitter clients a couple of years ago). It was a big when Firefox added support for RSS, and then my favorite email client back then, Thunderbird also had RSS reader built-in.
IMHO, it was the rise of _Web 2.0_ (oh boy, that term sounds so corny now) and uncontested Google domination of the web that made Google Reader the RSS client.
The article is right about one thing though, it's Flipboard and other "smart" reader apps killed Google Reader. Had there not been so much innovation on the reading side of things, Google could have (and probably would have) revitalised Reader like they did Gmail.
This is true. I could use Reader on my desktop, then use my Google account to sync other RSS readers on other devices. Now that I think about it, Google Reader might be the first time I consciously delegated a service to Google for use by other apps.
It's confusing when writers apply this concept to the real world; it seems like they push the notion that there's some great narrative in the real world.
All these twitter facebook whatever are not based on open protocols to share information freely and anonymously.
Twitter or facebook can kill any app that relies on its API. and Yet some people keep cheering at the death of RSS , these people deserve the distopyan future that's coming.