> I always wonder why they aren't as popular now.
1) Google makes really quite good RSS reader (Google Reader)
2) Everybody switches to it, competition atrophies
3) Google shuts it down
1) Google makes really quite good RSS reader (Google Reader)
2) Everybody switches to it, competition atrophies
3) Google shuts it down
They shut it down back in March of 2013. If you look at the trends graph[1] for RSS it was dying out for years.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Here's the one for javascript:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascri...
Clearly javascript has been slowly dying out. But wait, that can't be right.
They're also a poor proxy for usage because the existing user base with feeds already set up doesn't have to do a search query to continue using it, so if a large number of them lose access at once, it's barely a blip because they wouldn't be doing searches for it either way.
If a metric is sufficiently decorrelated with the thing we want to measure, it should be ignored altogether, regardless of whether we have anything better.