Month: <span>March 2013</span>

Dave Winer: Google Reader’s demise, part 2

“I don’t doubt that people will be well-served by a newly revitalized market for RSS products, now that the dominant product, the 800-pound gorilla, is withdrawing.”

Om Malik: Google Reader lived on borrowed time: creator Chris Wetherell reflects

“[It] was Google Crawler that gave the system ability to make lightning-fast connections and bring up recommendations. It is one of the main reasons it cannot be open sourced. The systems are too intertwined with Google’s search and other infrastructure to be sold as well.”

Marc Canter: Do they expect us to just stop using RSS?

“Here’s another thing – they’re saying we’re supposed to utilize Takeout to export our subscriptions. Well when I went to do that – the archive being built included all my YouTube videos – which are like 50G.” (I agree – Takeout pretty much sucks.)

Laura Hazard Owen: Google Reader, please don’t go – I need you to do my job

“… Flipboard is a lean-back kind of service. I use it when I want to curl up and read. In the mornings when I’m looking for stories, I don’t want to tap through a pretty magazine-like interface on my iPad. I just want to scan headlines and text fast, and I want to do it on my laptop.”

Quora: Why is Google killing Google Reader? (via Dare Obasanjo on Twitter)

Brian Shih, Former Google Reader Product Manager wrote, “I suspect that it survived for some time after being put into maintenance because they believed it could still be a useful source of content into G+.”

Todd Bishop on GeekWire: Bye, Google Reader: Don’t let the door hit you in the RSS (pretty terrible pun, IMHO)

“This is the third time Google has axed one of my favorite services or apps. But whatever. I’m already over it.”

Mat Honan on Wired: RIP: Google Reader Meets Its Inevitable End

“Google Reader was notable not only for its features, but for the active community it fostered for which Reader wasn’t just another tool.”

Feedly is building a Reader API clone: Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly

“We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end.”

Google Reader has been a quite popular, if geek-centered service, with a social bent…

With the announcement that the service will shut down on July 1st, and all the millions of dollars, hours spent, and investment in competing with Twitter and Facebook, I find myself wondering:

If Google had invested more in Reader as a social networking platform, would they have done better than they did with Orkut, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Wave, Buzz and Google+?

(Time: A Brief History of Google’s Social Networking Flops)