Category: <span>Blogging</span>

From The Old Reader blog:

“Paid accounts will have some additional features, but the basic free accounts will still be 100% usable. We are not in this game to make money, but we want to give something special back to the people who are going to be supporting us…

“We reworked the plans according to the news today. Creating an API for mobile clients is the number one priority in our roadmap. We would love to collaborate with any developers who were making Google Reader clients. Please, spread the word about this if you can.”

This is the right move, in my opinion, however I do have two bits of unsolicited advice:

1. Please clone the Google Reader API, even if you are going to create your own. By doing this you’d immediately make it possible for app developers to migrate their users from Reader to your service.
2. Re-position your API as a more general service, not just targeted at Mobile. While there are many more mobile apps that depend on the Google Reader API, there are still desktop apps that use it too.

For now their web UI is under quite some strain. It took many seconds to load when I tried it just now (but it did load). They’re adding capacity as I write this, and I bet they’ll get it under control.

(Bonus link – Rob Fishman on BuzzFeed: Google’s Lost Social Network. “How Google accidentally built a truly beloved social network, only to steamroll it with Google+.” Amen, brotha.)

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)