As one of the dozens of talented people who made Google Reader a reality over the years, I would like to extend my gratitude to you, the millions of users who made it part of your routine and your lives.
Looking on the bright side, closing down a site with an active user base gives us all the opportunity to celebrate the product’s 7.5 year run in a much richer way than the far more common last one here please turn off the lights
kind of demise. In the last three months there has been a renaissance of activity in the RSS/newsreader world. Products that had long been idling renewed development, products that relied on Google Reader for their back-end have successfully shifted to their own infrastructure, and major Web players rushed to create their own readers to fill the imminent gap.
Am I melancholy? Of course. Do I wish that Google wasn’t shutting down Reader? Duh. Yet in the midst of my mourning I’m excited by how many flowers are blooming in Reader’s wake. It’s really unprecedented. A testament both to the ever-lowering barrier to entry for website and mobile app creators, and the global demand for managing constantly growing streams of information (hardly just news sites), this is a cottage industry that is being reborn with vigour right before our eyes. I’m certain that in the coming years we’ll see a new breed of product, borne on the backs of ‘news’ and social
that both owes its invention to those aggregators that came before, and makes them look primitive in retrospect — via redwolf.newsvine.com
RSS – Posts