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Exactly. I get that, supposedly, it wasn’t shut down to make room for other social network features. But whatever the intent was, they shut down a very effecti
by D13Fd 2y ago
Exactly. I get that, supposedly, it wasn’t shut down to make room for other social network features.
But whatever the intent was, they shut down a very effective, useful and popular social network feature and didn’t replace it with any workable equivalent. They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason. It was pretty boneheaded.
- O1111OOO 2y ago> They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason. I always felt that RSS cost Google long-term ad revenue and that was the reason for the closure. It cost websites actual live visitors and these interactions became increasingly important as surveillance capitalism became more nuanced. That is: how much time you spent on a page, where you hovered your mouse, etc.. It was more important to upsell the benefits of Google Analytics - what it could do, what it could track. To get sites excited about SEO (ie, Google Ads and Google itself) than to cater to the wishes of the end-user (who ultimately does not want to become a product). When you're building an ad network, you want to get everyone involved. You need active, participating partners so that the network grows and builds on itself. This growth is what brings in larger, long-term ad money. RSS was the opposite of that.
- jve 2y agoUmm, put ads on Reader? Umm, feed their targeting system with valuable info like what kind of articles person X is interested in with a great confidence?
- D13Fd 2y agoI run a corporate blog. I would love it if Google still ran Reader and offered analytics on RSS use. If they were still running Reader, they would be the only company able to provide good analytics on RSS use. Plus they could essentially run ads on other people’s sites by running ads on Reader. This was just throwing away traffic. As it stands now, the analytics situation for RSS sucks. You can basically track your server logs and hope the RSS bots for Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader etc are kind enough to tell you how many subscribers you have. But that says nothing of what posts are actually pulling people in.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoDoes the article even makes it clear ? I would expect that Google would have known the consequences of letting a codebase rot, so one could still imagine how it was done deliberately in order to eventually be replaced by Google+/Wave...
- D13Fd 2y agoThat’s a good point.
- PeterStuer 2y ago"it wasn’t shut down to make room for other social network features" The deciding "feature" was that the social networks that were going to replace the RSS/Reader ecosystem would force all users to only publish on the operator's site, wereas with RSS you could get content from any site.