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Interesting, but doesn't speak too well of Google. Shouldn't Google know how people were using Google Reader before deciding to axe it? And even if that infor
by erehweb 14y ago
Interesting, but doesn't speak too well of Google. Shouldn't Google know how people were using Google Reader before deciding to axe it? And even if that information's in a different part of the company, shouldn't the chief architect of Google+ have access to it?
- eric_cc 14y agoWell regardless of what data google has about Reader's use... the best way to really understand how people used it is to ask.
- erehweb 14y agoThe asking should come before the axeing.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ajross 14y agoSurely you "have access" to wikipedia, so therefore nothing there will surprise you, right? This doesn't sound so weird to me. No one was working on Google Reader. The traffic to the web app was negligible. It generated little to no revenue. And even the API traffic probably didn't amount to much. It just wasn't on the radar. The fact that got missed wasn't that Reader was a popular app, it simply wasn't, period. What they missed is the demographics: the specific people who relied on Reader, though few in number, are disproportionately loud and influential tech leaders and journalists. So they were shocked at the outrage.
- njr123 14y agoIs it really true that the web app was getting no traffic? I know quite a few non-tech people that use it to follow blogs
- Mahn 14y ago"No traffic" is relative; I'd say it easily had somewhere around 50-100k users. This might seem like a lot, but it's sadly peanuts for Google.
- saraid216 14y agoEh, depends on what you mean by "user", which in Googlespeak, is pretty ambiguous. I mean... I know I have stuff in Reader, but I never managed to use it seriously when I switched to it after Newshutch died. Do I count as a user? How many people are like me?
- Karunamon 14y ago>The traffic to the web app was negligible. This is completely and demonstrably false. It drives more traffic at this point than G+ itself. http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have
- joshma 14y agoThis is not demonstrably false, as the Quora post you linked to is 3 almost 2 years old. (For comparison, the latest answer is right around when G+ launched.) The large majority of the population doesn't even know what RSS is, let alone use it for their day-to-day reading.