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"over the years usage has declined" That's because there was almost ZERO innovation done on this product. Very few (mostly visual) improvements, and very few n

"over the years usage has declined" That's because there was almost ZERO innovation done on this product. Very few (mostly visual) improvements, and very few new features. The latest posts on Google Reader blog are from 2011 http://googlereader.blogspot.com/ http://googlereader.blogspot.com/

mgkimsal 14y ago
Was thinking the same thing - usage has declined in part because Google doesn't promote it. Google shapes the way many people discover, use and keep information (google search, maps, news, finance, gmail, etc). To let Reader languish then kill it because "usage has declined" is rather self-fulfilling. I bet if they didn't update their satellite images and road data, Maps usage would decline as well. They could have been working with the community to define new standards - tags, markup, etc - to allow richer interaction between rss readers and sites (thinking geoloc micro format work, and other semantic markup work in recent years). Making 'reader' a first-class citizen in its suite of services, then using interaction data as more relevance signaling seems like an evolutionary step that only a handful of players the size of google can make good use of, but apparently in their infinite wisdom, they'll just shutter it.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
sethish 14y ago
It's worse than that. The google plus era redesign of all google sites ate up a massive fraction of the vertical space in Google Reader. And some social sharing features that made google reader an awesome place, were disabled in favor of sharing via google plus.
- karpathy 14y ago
  Agreed with this, most notable example of this for me was when they took away recommendations within Google Reader. That was a great place to go to see what blog posts my friends like. Now it's all multiplexed into their G+ timelines and I happen to catch about a third of it in between their useless updates about being in a park with their kids or a new funny meme.
mfkp 14y ago
Actually, there has been negative innovation. When google+ launched, they removed all of the sharing/social features (which I used heavily, had a large network of friends) to try to drive more users to google+.
brown9-2 14y ago
It seems like a disingenuous explanation - they effectively decided to kill it years ago when they stopped staffing a team, then they just can wait a few years until it's really stale to formally shut it down.
fudged71 14y ago
It's their way of saying that they were trying to work on new social ventures such as Google+ that are a new venue for some of these uses.
tomkarlo 14y ago
That would make more sense if there was a competitor that had arisen with better features and taken away users. Looking at the rest of this page, there doesn't seem to be any competitor at remotely the same scale as Google Reader. If usage is declining with nobody stealing users, it's less a sign that innovation stopped than the overall market demand started shrinking. In which case, adding more features might not make a ton of sense. There's not a lot of business sense to investing more in capturing a larger share of a declining business.

mgkimsal 14y ago

Was thinking the same thing - usage has declined in part because Google doesn't promote it. Google shapes the way many people discover, use and keep information (google search, maps, news, finance, gmail, etc). To let Reader languish then kill it because "usage has declined" is rather self-fulfilling. I bet if they didn't update their satellite images and road data, Maps usage would decline as well. They could have been working with the community to define new standards - tags, markup, etc - to allow richer interaction between rss readers and sites (thinking geoloc micro format work, and other semantic markup work in recent years). Making 'reader' a first-class citizen in its suite of services, then using interaction data as more relevance signaling seems like an evolutionary step that only a handful of players the size of google can make good use of, but apparently in their infinite wisdom, they'll just shutter it.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

sethish 14y ago

It's worse than that. The google plus era redesign of all google sites ate up a massive fraction of the vertical space in Google Reader. And some social sharing features that made google reader an awesome place, were disabled in favor of sharing via google plus.

karpathy 14y ago
Agreed with this, most notable example of this for me was when they took away recommendations within Google Reader. That was a great place to go to see what blog posts my friends like. Now it's all multiplexed into their G+ timelines and I happen to catch about a third of it in between their useless updates about being in a park with their kids or a new funny meme.

mfkp 14y ago

Actually, there has been negative innovation. When google+ launched, they removed all of the sharing/social features (which I used heavily, had a large network of friends) to try to drive more users to google+.

brown9-2 14y ago

It seems like a disingenuous explanation - they effectively decided to kill it years ago when they stopped staffing a team, then they just can wait a few years until it's really stale to formally shut it down.

fudged71 14y ago

It's their way of saying that they were trying to work on new social ventures such as Google+ that are a new venue for some of these uses.

tomkarlo 14y ago

That would make more sense if there was a competitor that had arisen with better features and taken away users. Looking at the rest of this page, there doesn't seem to be any competitor at remotely the same scale as Google Reader. If usage is declining with nobody stealing users, it's less a sign that innovation stopped than the overall market demand started shrinking. In which case, adding more features might not make a ton of sense. There's not a lot of business sense to investing more in capturing a larger share of a declining business.