
Google Reader: A Product vs. A Symbol - 10char
http://clayallsopp.com/posts/google-reader-product-vs-symbol
======
pron
The post misses the role Reader played in the ecosystem. It may have been
intended as a content discovery app, but it actually became a content creation
tool.

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...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/mar/15/google-
reader-killing-mistake)

~~~
xaotikdesigns
THIS! A thousand times this!

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.

~~~
vanderZwan
I completely forgot about how back in the day that Google Reader had sharing
features, I would feel how non-reader users on facebook were days behind on
what my friends had already shared and discussed on Google Reader.

And the discussions had better quality too.

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Sujan
I don't fully agree:

> 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.

~~~
xaotikdesigns
Agreed. I generally dislike most suggestions as they tend to pick the wrong
reasons for suggesting them. I'd rather find my own content via the blogs I
subscribe to, and following the articles that I like to their sources and
going from there.

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joelberman
You may be correct but I like to follow the money. Since it is not a product
that is sold, the value must have been in Google learning what we like to
read. Google did not learn anything new about our interests from Reader and
therefore it had no value.

~~~
VLM
Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly highly intelligent,
and well informed, curious individuals used Reader (and while I'm on a roll,
I'm also extremely handsome LOL) That being said, aside from being an unusual
subset of the population which they may or may not have advertising clients
for, that sub-population also might be non-monetizable people, adblockers. If
I'm an unusual person they can't find advertisers for, and I adblock, GOOG can
learn all they want about me, they'll never make a penny.

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.

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VLM
"I get why Google finally killed Reader. It was essentially free
infrastructure and storage for an ecosystem of apps that generated more value
(both financial and intangible) than the product itself."

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.

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soemarko
> Today, news and blog content is relatively open and parseable because of RSS
> and Google Reader's leverage

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.

~~~
jgroome
> 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.

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.

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hayksaakian
I was under the impression that symbolism was a construct of fiction, used by
the author to make larger overarching points via the use of more tangible
agents.

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.

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adamors
I'm so tired of these blog posts where people completely miss the point of
RSS, Google Reader and what the combination of the two means/meant.

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camus
RSS is like client side Javascript. There may be better solutions but it is
the only one that is truly open and free.

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.

