Iranians Upset Over Google Reader (A Bigger Deal Than You Think)

techcrunch.com

2 pointsTomOfTTB3 comments

Beyond the obvious point I submitted this because I think there's an important issue here. Google's way of software development relies heavily on analytics. So they look at how much feature #1 and feature #2 are used and make decisions based on that.

The problem with that is it doesn't tell you how important each feature is to the people using it. So while feature #2 might be used 20 times more than feature #1 it's possible feature #1 is life changingly important while feature #2 isn't something people would miss.

That's an excellent point, and should sometimes be considered in our decisions.

I'm guessing if such a conversation happened at Google, the end would be something like "Can the degree of life changing importance be measured? No? Make the change."

I think there is a misunderstanding here. Reader is not going away and it will still be a feed reader. As for encryption, Reader currently doesn't use SSL, G+ on the other hand does so that's an improvement. The changes if I understood correctly are that Reader will get an interface overhaul and it's social capabilities will be outsources to G+.

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