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> The mistake was killing Reader to make Plus a success. Google’s judo move would’ve been to embrace the open web as a social network. Not their network but our

> The mistake was killing Reader to make Plus a success. Google’s judo move would’ve been to embrace the open web as a social network. Not their network but our network. > They provide the tools – Reader, Blogger, Search — we provide the personal websites. The open, accessible, indexable web as The Next Great Social Network. I think this confuses the chronology. It's not that Google drove people away from a decentralized social web by killing Reader. It's that users had already abandoned the web in favor of walled gardens like Facebook. I think that Google should have kept Reader around largely for PR and goodwill reasons, but it was niche product being used by a small and dwindling (but fervent!) set of users. RSS was not a meaningful "social network" for any significant fraction of humanity. I would bet money that for every person who has ever written a blog post, there are 10,000+ people who have posted on Facebook or Instagram. Google could have kept the lights on with Reader but it would have been a well-lit but empty room.

wwweston 4y ago
You're right about the basic dynamic -- convenient platforms with network effects are always going to have the bigger draw, probably by orders of magnitude. At the same time, though, the value proposition of a social networks & media isn't linear with user volume. There's always a floor beneath which the value isn't there, but once you meet that bar there's different kinds of value available depending on who is participating, what kind of effort they're putting into contributions, and maybe even value presented by limitations/exclusivity. The Reader / Blogger infra could have been an effort to focus on high value networks vs high volume networks. Which, you could argue, is exactly what the value proposition of Google's core product (search) was in the first place. Blogs still aren't an empty room, so I think the floor would have always been there.
- gen220 4y ago
  The value vs volume is such an important insight. Facebook and Instagram know a lot about which cat memes my friends and I send back and forth to each other. In contrast, my RSS feed knows a lot about what content I think is valuable to consume in my spare cycles. I would never get in ad in Instagram for anything software-related, but that's at least 1/2 of my RSS feed, and something I'm more likely to spend money for than whatever cat toy they think will cause me to pry open my wallet. I think if somebody could choose the highest-signal metadata to get to know me well, they should choose my browser/search history, my RSS reader, my e-reader, and iMessage or the corporate Slack instance. Anything else is tangential at best. I have no idea why they shut down Google Reader, it's clearly the best signal:noise product outside of Maps and Search. Maybe with the prevalence of google analytics and device/id fingerprinting, they thought it was redundant data.
cxr 4y ago
> RSS was not a meaningful "social network" for any significant fraction of humanity Everyone who says this says it as if we've reached an agreement that when we're talking about RSS we're specifically excluding podcasts. I don't know why we're doing that. The podcasting ecosystem comprises a hugely successful social network (despite the shortcomings of the podcast syndication format—which could be alleviated by more pressure to transition to something more modern, like Atom, which already includes features that would make it possible to unlock even more of the types of things expected nowadays from social networks).

wwweston 4y ago

You're right about the basic dynamic -- convenient platforms with network effects are always going to have the bigger draw, probably by orders of magnitude. At the same time, though, the value proposition of a social networks & media isn't linear with user volume. There's always a floor beneath which the value isn't there, but once you meet that bar there's different kinds of value available depending on who is participating, what kind of effort they're putting into contributions, and maybe even value presented by limitations/exclusivity. The Reader / Blogger infra could have been an effort to focus on high value networks vs high volume networks. Which, you could argue, is exactly what the value proposition of Google's core product (search) was in the first place. Blogs still aren't an empty room, so I think the floor would have always been there.

gen220 4y ago
The value vs volume is such an important insight. Facebook and Instagram know a lot about which cat memes my friends and I send back and forth to each other. In contrast, my RSS feed knows a lot about what content I think is valuable to consume in my spare cycles. I would never get in ad in Instagram for anything software-related, but that's at least 1/2 of my RSS feed, and something I'm more likely to spend money for than whatever cat toy they think will cause me to pry open my wallet. I think if somebody could choose the highest-signal metadata to get to know me well, they should choose my browser/search history, my RSS reader, my e-reader, and iMessage or the corporate Slack instance. Anything else is tangential at best. I have no idea why they shut down Google Reader, it's clearly the best signal:noise product outside of Maps and Search. Maybe with the prevalence of google analytics and device/id fingerprinting, they thought it was redundant data.

cxr 4y ago

> RSS was not a meaningful "social network" for any significant fraction of humanity Everyone who says this says it as if we've reached an agreement that when we're talking about RSS we're specifically excluding podcasts. I don't know why we're doing that. The podcasting ecosystem comprises a hugely successful social network (despite the shortcomings of the podcast syndication format—which could be alleviated by more pressure to transition to something more modern, like Atom, which already includes features that would make it possible to unlock even more of the types of things expected nowadays from social networks).