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Here's an alternative: Google throws a credit card form in front of Google Reader and people can pay for the service.

bradleyland 14y ago
Never happen. At best, Google could spin the service off in to a separate company, but as Google exists today the product makes no sense. The income from a paid Google Reader service wouldn't register a blip on Google's financials, but would detract from their focus.
- rkwz 14y ago
  >but would detract from their focus. Why not just stop the development on it and let the service to continue? I never had any problems with Google Reader, nor do I want a particular feature to be added to it. It's fine as it is.
  - VikingCoder 14y ago
    It's fine as it is? It's fine, as long as it crawls every feed, merges the contents, archives them, serves up the bandwidth, allows people to write custom front-ends that prohibit Google from even showing you any extra data like say an ad?
    - larsberg 14y ago
      As opposed to gmail, which I visited in a browser (with AdBlock) once, to set up two-phase auth during that loud security push?
  - bradleyland 14y ago
    Remember the recent Google Reader outage? There's no such thing as a zero-touch web service. There's always some resource commitment, and sometimes running a successful business means making the hard decisions, like shutting down services that are used, but don't generate revenue, and don't contribute to your core business.
- mandelbulb 14y ago
  Google Reader made quite a lot of sense for Google but they castrated the service so far that it became a standalone product with no relevant connection to remaining Google environment. So, I agree, after all those bad decisions it would have been very difficult to make Google Reader a relevant revenue source. However, long-term support of such a core service is part of Google's reputation, it was even so important to the users Google could at least have been able to cover the costs.
arindone 14y ago
I'm skeptical that it would be enough to even come close to pay the engineers working on the project, never mind supporting the data storage for all the users

Never happen. At best, Google could spin the service off in to a separate company, but as Google exists today the product makes no sense. The income from a paid Google Reader service wouldn't register a blip on Google's financials, but would detract from their focus.

rkwz 14y ago
>but would detract from their focus. Why not just stop the development on it and let the service to continue? I never had any problems with Google Reader, nor do I want a particular feature to be added to it. It's fine as it is.
- VikingCoder 14y ago
  It's fine as it is? It's fine, as long as it crawls every feed, merges the contents, archives them, serves up the bandwidth, allows people to write custom front-ends that prohibit Google from even showing you any extra data like say an ad?
  - larsberg 14y ago
    As opposed to gmail, which I visited in a browser (with AdBlock) once, to set up two-phase auth during that loud security push?
- bradleyland 14y ago
  Remember the recent Google Reader outage? There's no such thing as a zero-touch web service. There's always some resource commitment, and sometimes running a successful business means making the hard decisions, like shutting down services that are used, but don't generate revenue, and don't contribute to your core business.
mandelbulb 14y ago
Google Reader made quite a lot of sense for Google but they castrated the service so far that it became a standalone product with no relevant connection to remaining Google environment. So, I agree, after all those bad decisions it would have been very difficult to make Google Reader a relevant revenue source. However, long-term support of such a core service is part of Google's reputation, it was even so important to the users Google could at least have been able to cover the costs.

arindone 14y ago

I'm skeptical that it would be enough to even come close to pay the engineers working on the project, never mind supporting the data storage for all the users