[BRIEF NOTE] On the impending death of Google Reader

[rfmcdonald]

Last night on Facebook, I learned from Simon Bisson that I'd have to switch from the RSS reader I've used for the past few years, Google Reader, because Google is closing Google Reader down. I've set up an account on Feedly, which promises to become wholly separate from Google Reader after that service closes down on the 1st of July. Wired's Mat Honan argued this was inevitable, notwithstanding Google Reader's popularity with its users.

While RSS has maybe seen its heyday come and go, Google Reader was notable not only for its features, but for the active community it fostered for which Reader wasn’t just another tool. Sure it was revolutionary in terms of function, but moreover it was beloved.

Reader grew out of Blogger. In the summer of 2004, Jason Shellen — who had come to Google with the Blogger acquisition — was working on Google’s Atom specification. He asked a Blogger engineer Chris Wetherell if it would be possible to build an in-browser XML-parser to make sense of all these feeds. This little tool became Google Reader. Shellen liked the product, but couldn’t get the go-ahead from Google to launch it under its social program, so he took it to Marissa Mayer, who was running Google’s consumer web services. Mayer gave Reader the green-light–provided the team would strip out its social features.

It debuted as a formal Google Labs product in 2005. It developed a number of novel features, like the ability to detect what you had read on a per-item basis. And by 2007, it outgrew Labs and emerged as its own product (via a post from its marketing manager Kevin Systrom, who would go on to found Instagram). And yet slowly, social crept back in.

Reader gave users the ability to friend, follow and share stories with others. It let readers share stories with each other, and comment on them too. It became a place not just to read new stories, but to share and discuss them with friends. It was a discovery tool and a salon all in one.

However, Google removed the ability to natively share and replaced it with a Google + sharing option in 2011. That was effectively the end of the Reader community, many members of which publicly lamented the loss.

And now, the entire product is going away for good. This wasn’t exactly unforeseen. Reader had long been basically ignored, its updates were few and far between. Last month, when many users started reporting problems, Google simply ignored the issue for several days before even commenting on it. The end of Reader has been in plain sight for some time.

Techcrunch's Drew Olanoff, meanwhile, seems to think that RSS was bound to fall as better technologies like Twitter and Facebook developed.

The idea of RSS was one that never quite gripped with normal Internet users. Sure, for us geeks who absolutely love consuming as much information as possible, RSS is a wonderland. When Google launched Reader in 2005, I can remember surfing to all of my favorite sites and looking for that little RSS logo, clicking on it and subscribing to the feed. So easy, so awesome to “us,” and so not easy or awesome to anyone else on the planet.

[. . .]

In essence, Twitter is a big RSS reader, allowing you to “follow” the people sharing content that you’d like to consume. That simple concept of following gripped, but subscribing to feeds simply did not, at least how Google Reader and other popular readers let you do it.

[. . .]

There is a pretty sizable pocket of people like us who are upset at Reader’s demise, but since none of us could ever explain what RSS was – why someone should use Google Reader and how to advance a boringly old technology – it’s dying. Nobody cares that Google Reader is dying, because nobody cared enough to keep it alive. The funny thing about technology is that apps and sites pick up traction after early adopters get to it first. It’s these geeks that brought apps like Instagram to the masses, calling it fantastic and amazing.

Nobody ever did that for RSS or Google Reader, so this is what happens. The sad day for Google Reader came a long time ago, such as the fact that I haven’t logged into it for three years. The only reason why I logged in today was to grab these screenshots.

Thanks to Twitter, Flipboard and Facebook, I have more content than I can shake a stick at. I don’t want to read every single thing that WIRED writes, I want to read the things that people I know think are awesome. Google Reader never did that for me, so it must go.

I disagree. I like to read a lot of things that other people on my Facebook and Twitter feeds don't like to read. Here's hoping Feedly lasts; I like a diversity of news sources.