Great comment from AJ Kohn on that thread (I don't know how to link directly to his post, unfortunately): The Reader interface was pragmatic and efficient so i

Great comment from AJ Kohn on that thread (I don't know how to link directly to his post, unfortunately): The Reader interface was pragmatic and efficient so it appealed to those, like me, who are information consumers. At the heart of it all are two main points: Time-Shifted Consumption and Deliverability It's never been about having real-time access to information. It's about time-shifting the consumption and knowing that I will see that content at some point in time if I desire. Feeds are to Reader as Season Passes are to TiVo. (As an aside, the latter is the model that should have been marketed to users.) Using other methods such as G+ or Twitter or Facebook or any other mechanism that tries to find, shape and filter the information based on interest etc. are usually not comprehensive and rarely allow me the comfort of knowing I can rely on reviewing whether or not I value that content. In short, I might not see it fly by in my stream and curation services might remove content that I may enjoy. ===== In the same thread, Rob Ferguson writes: Not specific to Reader, but regarding RSS (even Twitter to some extent), the multi-feed publish/subscribe model allows people to create separate feeds that each represent a facet of their personality, something they want to say. While the single-output model of G+ or Facebook has some advantages, e.g. seeing the 'whole person', the trade off is that you can't really specialise or segment content. ===== Nelson Minar writes: So I'd say the main value of Google Reader in the last year has been the very fast centralized feed crawler, along with its API that made it easy to put more modern UIs on top of Google's RSS reader infrastructure