The Wire is to The Sopranos as a feed reader is to ______

rumproarious.com

2 pointsvoidfiles3 comments

A tweet.

Mostly because this title will garner more debate about The Wire v. The Sopranos than feed readers.

Feed readers aren't being killed off because they lack usefulness. They are being killed off because its tougher to drive traffic to your particular ecosystem if people can pre-screen why they want to visit in the first place.

Facebook and Twitter continue to lead the charge on locking out their data in the post 'Web 2.0' world and Google is simply following the trend.

RSS is useful and pragmatic. RSS is not a currency printing machine for the sites that have to provide feeds ergo it goes.

Sad, really.

Content owners don't make feed readers. If they didn't want people to pre-screen content they could just get rid of their RSS feeds altogether. They haven't done that. They clearly find some value to users being able to find their content through RSS, so I don't think this is why feed readers have failed to breakout.

If Google cannot monetize Reader in its current form and Google effectively loses money because those same pages have Google ads on them that aren't being viewed; then Google has no incentive to keep running Google Reader.

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