I am in a full-on state of denial about the approaching deadline to move my news-reading off Google Reader, Google’s industry-leading RSS reader. I don’t want it to happen, although I know I am powerless to stop it.
Google Reader is how I begin my workday. It is the first web application I open, and one I turn to multiple times throughout the day. My list of feeds is longer than the Amazon. It traverses breaking news, tech updates, press releases, cultural phenomena, science and space updates and even byzantine patents. It’s a perfect reflection of my interests and world view.
Now, every time I open it, Google reminds me of its impending fate.
On July 1, Google will put a bullet in the brain of Google Reader. Not because it’s old, addled, hurt, redundant, superfluous or incongruous with modern times. No, Google is killing Reader because, as Google explained in a March 13 blog post, "usage had declined." Although the search giant characterizes Google Reader’s fate as “retirement,” I’m pretty certain I won’t find Reader wearing bad golf pants and sipping a Mai Tai while lounging beside a Boca Raton pool.
Google said it created Reader to help people keep tabs on their favorite websites. It did that and so much more. Every update, press release, minor post and more that I cared about made its way through Google Reader. A website is typically a percolating cauldron of content: multiple posts, headlines, images, ads. Google Reader broke everything down into its primary parts. In the compressed feed, I could scan much more than a few posts from one site. “All Items” gives me a never-ending list of sources, headlines, times, dates and the briefest portions of content. Even that brief bit of information was still usually enough for me to decide if I wanted to expand any post and read it fully within Reader or move on.
And read inside Reader I did. As a result, I grew accustomed to its largely unadorned, yet endearing face. Honestly, Google Reader is the ugly step sister of all Google apps. Visually, there’s nothing to recommend it. Google rarely updated Reader but always made sure it simply worked.
Its Parent
Without RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simply Syndication), Google Reader is nothing. Over the years, pundits have predicted the demise of RSS.
In 2004, I professed my love for RSS push technology and a couple of young RSS Readers: Feed Demon and the eponymous RSSReader. It would be a few years before I adopted Reader, but I soon fell in love with its far simpler interface. I also lived in constant fear that sites would, one-by-one, turn off the RSS feed spigot, and one day I would open an empty Google Reader.
RSS, however, has outlived its most popular platform. It’s also about to witness the rise of a whole new collection of readers, including ones from AOL and Digg. In an interview with Mashable's senior tech analyst Christina Warren, the Digg Reader developers said Google Reader and its success blotted out the sun for other RSS reader developers, most of whom had given up.
The Google Reader vacuum, however, is marking the rebirth of a little cottage industry for RSS readers, which seems to contradict Google’s Reader shutdown reasoning. The company said usage numbers were declining. So why would anyone else want to build a similar tool?
Tastemakers
Google Reader was never intended for consumers. Google seems to think it was, but I’ve never met an average consumer who uses a single RSS reader. Not Google Reader, not FeedDemon, not the suddenly super-popular Feedly.
For the average consumer, a reader is Flipboard. It's an attractive, highly visual mobile app that sucks in all your favorite content from sites and people you follow, and presents it in something most consumers instantly recognize: a digital magazine format.
List-style presentations favored by most readers, including my beloved Google Reader, are not for average consumers. They’re for nerds, geeks, tech enthusiasts, digital tastemakers and reporters. Those are the people who have been using Google Reader for years and the ones who, like me, are crying the loudest about its demise.
That’s also why the death of Google Reader seems like a bigger deal than it really is. People like me are writing about it not to inform the larger world of what’s happening, but to lick our wounds. If we all do this enough, perhaps Google will get confused and think the rest of the world cares about readers.
No, nobody fooled Google. But, as I mentioned, AOL and Digg are certainly caught up in it. Digg, I guess, can be excused, because its roots are in nerd culture. AOL? I’m not sure for whom they’re building a reader.
Things got downright loony last week when everyone predicted Facebook was about to introduce a reader of its own: Facebook, a service with more than 1 billion users, many of whom have no interest in technology or managing a news feed. They like content, visual stuff, funny stuff, emotional stuff, and the most they can deal with is the News Feed Facebook already provides. When Facebook changes it, they cry out in horror, not glee.
People soon came to their senses and started to realize that a Flipboard-like “reader” from Facebook was most likely in the offing. That makes sense and no one will confuse it with a successor to Google Reader.
Dealing With It
Google does not have to kill Google Reader. It could simply acknowledge, as Twitter has with TweetDeck, that there are pro-level users. People who, by dint of their roles in the Internet universe, consume content differently — maybe even at a higher level. Twitter maintains TweetDeck for people like me. Google, which seems to treat virtually all products like experiments, looks upon things like Google Reader dispassionately. When it’s done with something, it’s simply done. I can cry in my digital milk all I want. Google will not do anything about it.
I know there is nothing, short of presidential order, that will stop Google from killing Reader. I will mourn its loss and curse Google for taking away my favorite news reader and then, like everyone else I know, move on.
Share your best memories of Google Reader in the comments below.
