Finale for now on Google's Self-Inflicted Trust Problem - James Fallows. Let's hope this is a rough patch rather than the beginning of a trend. Early yesterday I mentioned that while Google's new Keep application, a nascent all-purpose notetaker, looked very interesting, I wasn't going to waste time getting used to it. That is because of the company's now-established track record of killing off products that prove to have niche rather than sufficiently mass appeal.
This could be a sane business strategy for Google -- network TV, for instance, is also in the mass rather than niche business. But since my own software tastes often lead in the early-adopter niche direction, I've decided I should stick with companies whose business model is aimed at users like me. When it comes to TV, this means that I watch a lot more things on cable than on the main networks (except sports). I raise the point again because, since the time I wrote that item (and after I spent all day today in transit), I have seen a quite surprising critical mass of comments in a similar vein.
What If The Google Reader Readers Just Don’t Come Back? If judged by my Twitter stream last week, the shutdown of Google Reader is the biggest story ever in the history of news. Of course, the reality is that Google is likely shutting down the product for a good reason: relatively few people used it, with less using it over time. More wood, fewer arrows, and all that. But that doesn’t mean this move isn’t a mistake for a couple reasons. The first is that Reader’s users, while again, relatively small in number, are hugely influential in the spread of news around the web.
In a sense, Reader is the flower that allows the news bees to pollinate the social web. You know all those links you click on and re-share on Twitter and Facebook? By killing the flower, Google could also kill the bees. But the second reason worries me even more because it’s more quantifiable. On my own site, I’ve always been surprised to see Reader constantly in the top five of traffic referrers day in and day out. To me, this shows Reader’s importance to smaller publishers.
Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry. Google Reader was born in October 2005. Within two weeks of its soft launch, it had hundreds of thousands of users. I know those details because the team responsible for developing Google Reader blogged about their progress regularly beginning with that first “Hello, Internet” post more than seven years ago. The most recent post on The Official Google Reader Blog came earlier this month, when the company announced it was “Powering Down Google Reader.”
The stated reason? According to Google’s Alan Green, “usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company, we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products.” It wasn’t always that way, though. It’s not unlike the widely criticized model that Microsoft pursued in its pre-Millennium days as a monopolist: Embrace, extend, extinguish. Image credit: Classical Iconoclast Most of the commentary I've read so far has been about the loss of Google Reader as a client. Google Reader came out of beta in September 2007. Fool me once... The Evolution Of Google Reader Started With A Crash. Editor’s note: Jason Shellen is a former Googler and founding product manager of Google Reader. He is now co-founder at Boxer and advisor at Tapedeck.
Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @shellen. As part of Google’s recent announcement that it is shutting down Google Reader in July, I thought looking back at the history of how our beloved, but beleaguered, feed reader came to be, why we’ll miss it and what we really want in the future. Back in the days on the Blogger team, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to get people blogging after they had signed up.
However, when Blogger achieved critical mass, the need to model good blogging seemed less important since great writers, musicians, photographers and journalists were gravitating towards the form and showing the rest of us what made good blog content. The questions we began to hear from users changed from “How and what do I blog?” To “Where do I find the good ones?” However, Chris wanted to show me something else. Good Riddance, Google Reader. Google Reader turned into a zombie a long time ago and it’s good that Google finally killed it. For years, Google Reader has been sitting on Google’s servers without any appreciable updates.
Sure, it got a bit of a facelift in 2011, but it only lost functionality since Google decided to rip out its social features in an effort to drive people to Google+. Its core features hadn’t changed for years, its overall design wasn’t really up to snuff anymore and even after eight years on the market, it would still often take hours before some feeds finally updated. I can’t help but think that a lot of the current outpouring of support for Google Reader is more about nostalgia than anything else. Google – especially under the leadership of Larry Page – simply decided that going after small markets wasn’t in its best interest, so Reader was left to die. And that’s okay. When Google launched Reader, it essentially killed the market for RSS readers. Why the death of Google Reader doesn’t bother me that much — social news has won. God Damn It, Google. An error occurred with this part of the page, sorry for the inconvenience.
Once, I envisioned Google’s destiny as a rich tapestry, obscure services hooking in through engines and tools to a vastness of data, and, at the other end of the telescope, a single point of ... Netflix requests the help of cloud gaming specialists in its recent job listing posts, a possible hint at what’s to come for its ongoing gaming venture. As noted by Protocol, the company is o... “You want to get your $7,500, then build this industry.” Apple is introducing a handful of new ways to support U.S. National Parks. EV acceleration hit a new and interesting phase at the Monterey Car Week event that wrapped Sunday.
Elon Musk’s legal team has subpoenaed former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, marking the latest development in the legal battle over Musk’s attempt to break his $44 billion acquisition agreeme... New Carta data is a mishmash of sorts, with the numbers not pointing cleanly in one direction. Why Google killed off Google Reader: It was self-defense. It’s not a huge surprise that Google is dropping Google Reader, the blog reader it operated since 2005. After all, they’d let it go for some time now (not that I’m complaining – it was after all, a free service, a fine product, and a boon for the overall ecosystem of blogging, podcasts and RSS). The reality, though, is that Google operates at vast scale, and a niche consumer product like Reader just doesn’t move the needle. As crazy as it may sound, today even a billion-dollar business is simply a distraction to Google (unless, of course, it’s well on the way to becoming a five-billion-dollar business).
So all those who are signing petitions to Google (and even one to The White House!) Are missing the bigger point: that this is a victim of the company’s DNA, one that’s accelerated under Larry Page’s management. Some companies specialize in keeping the status quo, others specialize in moving forward. Google is the latter. Open standards just a means to an end. Another Reason Google Reader Died: Increased Concern About Privacy and Compliance - Liz Gannes. Google has warned that it will shut down its Google Reader news aggregator July 1.
Many people (myself very much included) are mourning a beloved and useful product, but the company cited declining usage. Under CEO Larry Page, Google has made a practice of “spring cleaning” throughout all the seasons so it can narrow its focus. Reader was just a another bullet point on the latest closure list. But the shutdown wasn’t just a matter of company culture and bigger priorities, sources said. Google is also trying to better orient itself so that it stops getting into trouble with repeated missteps around compliance issues, particularly privacy. That means every team needs to have people dedicated to dealing with these compliance and privacy issues — lawyers, policy experts, etc. But at the same time, Google Reader was too deeply integrated into Google Apps to spin it off and sell it, like the company did last year with its SketchUp 3-D modeling software.
Google Reader's forced euthanasia - TechSwamp. Like many others, I was pretty badly struck in the face by the announcement of the Google reader shutdown. Since I’m a techie, but not really a developer, a lot of the other Google properties being shut down hadn’t impacted me as much. However, a majority of my Internet content consumption is driven by Reader, which is why it was utterly baffling that the reasoning given was ”usage of Google Reader has declined”, especially given some of the rough userbase data that have popped up. I wonder where Google gets their data from. Embrace, extend, extinguish RSS is a great content consumption protocol that is fully open and interoperable. But having done this, Reader then essentially crowded out the entire market for RSS readers by just existing as a Google gorilla.
But now, it appears to me that the real reason for pulling the rug out form underneath the many millions of users was the second one they mentioned, saying “as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products”. Google is about to learn a tough lesson. The iPhone and Google Reader hegemony. March 14th, 2013 at 11:31 pm by Dr.
Drang A lot has been written in the past 24 hours about Google’s announcement that it’s shutting down Reader in a few months. The optimistic view, best expressed by Marco Arment, is that this will usher in a sort of RSS Renaissance. In this view, Google’s dominance over the area in the past several years had stifled innovation; when it’s shadow no longer looms over the landscape, a thousand flowers will bloom. What’s missing from the articles I’ve seen, though, is an explanation of how Google Reader got to be the 800 pound gorilla of RSS. Cast your memory back to 2005, when Reader debuted. If you had more than one computer, “new” didn’t always mean “content I haven’t read.”
When Google Reader came out, many of the digital cognescenti went gaga over it. At first, I used the Bloglines mobile site in Safari, but that sucked. Then came apps, like Reeder, that used the Google Reader API for syncing. Would this have happened without the iPhone? Why RSS still matters. Google's bombshell last night that it would be shutting down the Google Reader RSS client hit the web, well, like a bomb. Just as with any major tech event, it spurred a raft of reactions on what is currently our best real-time conversation broadcasting network, Twitter. Reactions ranged from outrage to sadness to smugness — the latter epitomized by the camp who say that RSS was already a confusing mess that needed to be shot down completely and besides, it had been replaced by Twitter itself anyway.
Well, no. RSS matters. Let's start out with some distinctions and, yes, some education — because even though RSS is over a decade old, it never really caught on with regular web users. It stands for "Real Simple Syndication," and on a high level it means you can get a list all of the recent "new stuff" that a site or a user or a channel (or whatever) has published. You can read RSS in any number of apps on your phone or computer or tablet, of which Google Reader became the most popular. Why We Mourn Google Reader - And Why It Matters. Websites get shut down all the time. Sometimes, nobody notices. Other times, what remains of the service's community lets out one last collective cry of disapproval and then moves on with their collective lives.
Last night, a certain segment of the Web's population went into a hysterical fit of rage as Google announced it was shuttering Reader, its eight-year old RSS feed reading service. I have to admit, I was pretty upset as well, even though I knew this day was coming since Google started lopping off the otherwise-neglected Reader's most-useful functionality in 2011. (See also: Sudden Site Shutdowns And The Perils Of Living Our Lives Online.) Reader may not have been a billion-dollar business for Google, but for the dedicated community of users addictively affixed to it everyday, Google Reader was a mainstay in our browser tabs.
Ouch, Google. Google Reader felt very personal to its users. That's why, when faced with the prospect of such a service going away, people freak out. Why I love RSS and You Do Too. Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS. If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides. Lots of apps on the various app stores use RSS in at least some way. They just don’t tell you — because why should they? RSS is used for mundane things too, like Mac app updates (for non-App-Store apps) and Xcode documentation. And those people you follow on Twitter who post interesting links? One way or another, directly or indirectly, you use RSS. Boring RSS is plumbing. But here’s why it’s great plumbing: There are many millions of feeds, from the smallest blog to the many feeds at the New York Times. This is elegance. Lots of things work like this. Capitalism A naive reading of the above makes it sound like RSS is anti-business.
Instead, it’s anti-monopolist. This means that competition and innovation are permitted to thrive. But it’s not a guarantee. Prague 1948 Forever Well. Google Reader may very well rise again… as part of Google+ A collective wail went out Thursday morning as millions of Google Reader users awoke to find that Google had announced plans to shut down the service by July 1. Barely half a day has gone by since the announcement, and a petition to prevent the closure has already garnered 50,000 signatures. Reader users will not go gentle into that good night—there are a lot of them, and they were happy with how things were.
Why would Google kill such a successful product? We’ve heard plenty of arguments against RSS—mainly that the format is shriveling or dying or being slowly replaced by Twitter and Facebook feeds. Google, being a creature of the Internet, can’t be blind to this trend. Due to the sheer size of the outcry against Reader’s discontinuation, though, it’s clear RSS is still in heavy use. After all the initial excitement about the social network, Google+ has limped along as sort of a vestigial supplement to the Google experience. As an avid Google Reader user, I’ll be sad to see it go. Google Reader Still Drives Far More Traffic Than Google+ Google Reader, please don’t go — I need you to do my job. When I learned Wednesday night that Google Reader is shutting down, I literally broke into a sweat. Like many journalists, I’ve come to rely on the 242 RSS subscriptions I manage through Google Reader.
It’s the first thing I check every morning — second only to making a cup of coffee — and, along with Twitter and email, one of the top three resources I use to do my job. And honestly, if I had to get rid of one of those, it would be the email. Instead, Google’s making the choice for me: As of July 1, Google Reader will be no more. “While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined,” the company wrote on its blog. I’d bet that journalists are among the most loyal followers of all, and this morning we are a very unhappy bunch. “Google Reader” is the number-one trending topic on Twitter right now. Haven't heard that many people swear in our office in a long time.— Janko Roettgers (@jank0) March 14, 2013 Twitter isn’t a substitute for RSS… …and neither is Flipboard. Google, destroyer of ecosystems. Former Google Reader product manager confirms our suspicions: Its demise is all about Google+
Google Reader shutting down July 1. Google Reader lived on borrowed time: creator Chris Wetherell reflects. RIP Google Reader – I’d have paid for you. The Google Reader Shutdown Is Yet Another Nail In Feedburner’s Coffin. Google Reader’s Death Is Proof That RSS Always Suffered From Lack Of Consumer Appeal. Hitler finds out Google Reader is shutting down.