Here's Why Google Reader Really Got the Axe

MONOLITH VIEW, Silicone Valley, Thursday (NTN) — We’re in a new world of computing. You need “personal”, “social” and “on the go”. So “search” will “join the social” on Google Plus.

We know Search has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too. There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Plus^W^WSearch has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better — and more sociable — user experience.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had this rate of change — it probably hasn’t happened since the birth of social media in July 2011, with our superior social media platform, Google Plus. So today we’re officially folding a number of other products into Google Plus:

* YouTube will become Google Plus Video. Your YouTube will be just the same, you’ll just need a username you have government ID for. Don’t worry — you can trust us with it.

* Google Maps API will become Google Plus Maps. You’ll need to add your house, your workplace, your favourite retail experiences and your credit card number to your “circles”, then you can look up any place you want. You can opt out to Apple Maps any time you like.

* Google Docs got absorbed by Google Drive, which will become Google SUM(). Imagine the “social” of your spreadsheets being rated by all your friends! Once again, users who opt out are free to revel in the joys of Office 365.

* Google Voice App for BlackBerry will be discontinued once we’ve found both remaining BlackBerry users and notified them.

* Orkut, of course, is being kept.

We know you’ll be delighted with the Google Plus experience, with hundreds of millions of people every month delighted to be using Google Plus! Or products that require a profile on it. It’s like Facebook without all the annoying people on it. Or any people. But the people on it love it with huge enthusiasm, just like the ones who loved Google Buzz before we shot that through the head too. Come onto Plus, or Vic will cry. You don’t want to see Vic crying, do you? Asshole. You probably hurt puppies, too.

To ensure a smooth transition, we’re providing a three-month sunset period so you have sufficient time to find an alternate web-searching solution. Good luck on that one. Because, and you know it in your heart, Google Plus as a search engine still sucks less than Bing.

http://newstechnica.com/2013/03/14/spring-clean-google-searc...

> “Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.”

This is precisely why Google Reader is a valuable tool. I subscribe to the belief that if an article is not worth reading 2 weeks later, it's not worth reading at all.

Facebook, Twitter, HN and Reddit require checking multiple times per day to make sure you don't miss good posts. Google Reader lets me review blog posts once a week, and prioritise reading by the source, not freshness of the content.

What utter trash. Who says that Google Reader was about news, anyway? I use RSS to follow websites so that I don't miss content from them, and don't have to keep checking them manually. The updates aren't all 'news' and don't have to be instant or even timely. It just lets me gather everything in one place so that I can read it when I want to.

"Google Now‘s approach is to leverage artificial intelligence techniques to learn your tastes and habits so it can deliver headline news you’ll want to read, when you want to read it. "

Google, Facebook et. al spend so much energy using artificial intelligence to infer what we want, and yet when they have a service that actually allows us to tell them what we want, they shut it down.

We know what we want better than you, so just allow us to tell you what we want!

How is Reader passive versus Twitter and G+? It's completely active because you have to sift through hundreds of items and you have to decide what's important and interesting enough to share. That's a lot of work by the user. Passive news consumption is not Reader, but Twitter-like services where "interesting" articles are pushed to you. Twitter also doesn't have an unread count, so you only see what's shared recently. You completelt miss out on articles shared a few tweets ago because who scrolls back that far?

No. Otherwise google would be axed currents too. Google isn't trying to make you abandon feeds, they're just trying to consolidate into fewer platforms, ones that give premium positioning to their own non-standard protocols. Their new notes and messaging apps reflect this. Currents is more of the same.

This "all new all different" way of "actively consuming news" makes me very nervous. It really sounds like loosing too much control over content.

So it was because they wanted people to move to Google+, like everybody has been saying since day 1.

I have 4X the RSS subscribers to my Twitter subscribers, my programming blog handles both. RSS readers make consuming an article much faster than reading links from twitter.

I think there are two types of users in this case - "consumers" and "researchers". Social news are good for "consumers" with their usage pattern "Read-Like-Forget". They consume to feed their hunger and nothing more. "Researchers" carefully select trustful sources and follow them, they need a tool that allows to keep track and never miss important info. "Researcher" pattern is impossible in the "social" noisy flood of news.

I thought there would be some real information there when I saw the title and the web site. But what the heck is this

Maybe one day machine learning will be able to better source me content better than I can curate for myself - but it sure as shinola doesn't even come close now.

In the meantime I'll spend my time with those tools that allow me to more effectively entertain and inform myself. And right now I do that with feedly... following blogs and news sources and gradually adding new ones over time as I discover them.

No one has solved content discovery - and won't for a while yet. So I'll do it the old fashioned way. Read stuff I like, follow the links that people I trust post, and occasionally find some gold through google search myself.

P.S. FEEDLY is AWESOME!

It really boils down to that the costs outweighed the benefits so they are shutting it down. I'm sure it's also about political power structure within the organization. Google+ is the current favorite group so if they feel like reader is competing with them they can successfully advocate to get it shutdown. I think the same thing is going on with chrome vs android. That's why there's no chrome store or extensions available in chrome for android.

It's just lame when corporate political decisions are presented in the guise of " people's usage habits are changing" or "it's technically difficult..."

If google really wants me to move to google+, now, or current, where is the big shiny button that says 'load feeds into x'? Incompetence seems to be playing as big a role as strategy.

What a bunch of bullshit. Wired republished that?

I thought the article would be about ads not showing up on the RSS reader, that's a better reason to shut it down IMO.

RSS peaked in 2006 and has been dying since. I suspect it was from the rise of social networks. Though not a replacement feature-wise, social networks have been competing for time and attention from users since day 1, and RSS readers lost. Google Reader was too late to a declining trend, and it was just a matter of time before it was going to get killed off anyway.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=rss#q=rss&cmpt=q