Being interpreted: Google killed #reader two years ago. They just waited a few years before telling the world officially.

In the long run, killing Reader is probably a good thing for the public, if not for Google. It is reminding the “power users” not to put all our eggs in one basket. Time to use a wider variety of services for everything. I don’t think this will be enough to make me sign up with facebook or twitter, but I’ll use gmail less, and sign up with an independent photo hosting site rather than use Google Photos for anything other than posting a few pictures to G+ conveniently.

Before this announcement, I was using more and more of the googleplex. Strangely enough, this decision is a true “Don’t Be Evil” move from Google because it is encouraging a more diverse information ecosystem, at the cost of encouraging thought leaders not merely to move to some extent away from the googleplex but also to encourage their followers to do the same.

There is some irony in posting this on G+, but I still prefer G+ to the alternatives; it’s just a reminder that G+ shouldn’t be my online identity. I can include googleplex services when I look for choices for various functionality, I will just be less likely now to default to google merely because it’s easy.

Former Google Reader product manager confirms our suspicions: Its demise is all about Google+

Ingo Molnar March 14, 2013 10:19

“Feedly” seems to be a pretty good replacement.

Eugene Crosser March 14, 2013 10:32

One can (and should!) do almost everything on their own(*) system. Email, jabber, hosting photos/blogs/generic websites.

“Social networks” is an unfortunate exception though: all attempts to build federated systems (statusnet/pump, diaspora, onesocialweb) where unsuccessful so far.

(*) “own” in this context means “generic and easily replaceable” like renting a virtual/dedicated server.

David Megginson March 14, 2013 11:01

Well put, Michael.

Michael K Johnson March 15, 2013 15:09

+Eido INOUE The fact that #Reader preserved such awesome functionality for so long that it continued to be the 800-pound gorilla with so few resources is indeed an awesome testament to those engineers. Also, thanks for working (as I understand) on the data liberation front; it let me import my feeds easily into newsblur and is one of the reasons that I can continue to recommend considering google services in the face of the possibility of shutdowns.

Imported from Google+ — content and formatting may not be reliable