> Killing reader was a terrible idea. That cut my daily google usage in half and was obviously a key social and relevance asset.
It sucks for our niche, but ultimately Google Reader was a product that didn't have any appeal beyond said tiny niche. The original goal was to make RSS more accessible beyond technologists, but it failed to reach any kind of mass appeal. Some of this was more to do with RSS/Atom feeds having some ergonomic issues that weren't solved before the social media frenzy took hold.
Failure is when results don't meet expectations, which is what happened to Reader. I don't fault them for closing it, despite it being inconvenient for me to switch. What does a for-profit company have to gain by dumping time and resources into a failure whose window of opportunity has passed? Some goodwill from a tiny, miniscule subset of their userbase?
It sucks for our niche, but ultimately Google Reader was a product that didn't have any appeal beyond said tiny niche. The original goal was to make RSS more accessible beyond technologists, but it failed to reach any kind of mass appeal. Some of this was more to do with RSS/Atom feeds having some ergonomic issues that weren't solved before the social media frenzy took hold.
Failure is when results don't meet expectations, which is what happened to Reader. I don't fault them for closing it, despite it being inconvenient for me to switch. What does a for-profit company have to gain by dumping time and resources into a failure whose window of opportunity has passed? Some goodwill from a tiny, miniscule subset of their userbase?