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The Google Reader furore reached embarrassing levels of absurdity days ago. I have attempted many times to formulate my feelings on the matter into words (for t

The Google Reader furore reached embarrassing levels of absurdity days ago. I have attempted many times to formulate my feelings on the matter into words (for the sake of balance if nothing else) so here goes nothing: The rage about the death of reader has been engendered and encouraged by over-zealous bloggers and early adopters, who placed a personal agenda ahead of sensible appraisal of events. A breach of the trust placed in them by the wider user base who look to them for guidance. -------- Their temper tantrum has achieved several things: -------- - Underscoring the severe issues with citizen journalism, where influence and weight is placed in the words of those who have no code of ethics or conduct to adhere to. I was particularly taken aback by what I consider to be an unprofessional article by Om Malik: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to-yourself/ http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to... - Riding roughshod over the launch of interesting Google products such as Keep and The Drive API. Ironically the people who say they would not use Keep because they could not trust it to be around in x years time are arguably the ones who, by drowning launch coverage in unrelated negative feedback, contribute most to the likelihood of that outcome. In this way - the prophecy becomes self fulfilling, and a lot of self-important people get to pat themselves on the back for 'getting it right'. - Highlighting the reality that almost no tech products live on in the same form ad infinitum. Old systems built upon old technologies make way for new systems built upon new technologies. This iterative process has long been the life blood of the developing platform that is the internet. This is a good thing - this process gave us Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Maps, Foursquare & Reddit from the ashes of such things as MySpace, Digg, MultiMap & Alta Vista. Far worse would be the continued life of an old and increasing unused technology to pander to a small but influential community. Doing that would be a waste of Google's engineering talent and by extension a disservice to it's wider user base. IE 6 anyone ? - Highlighting the need for data portability and transparency. This is a good thing - In my opinion the only good thing to come out of this childish whining session. The thing is, Google already caters to this need as well as any, and far better than most, major internet tech firms. Therefore is doesn't seem rational or sensible to lynch them on these grounds either. -------- The aforementioned temper tantrum has notably NOT achieved one thing: -------- - Persuading Google to continue to actively support and develop Google Reader. Some facts to finish off: Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the interests of it's shareholders. It makes good business sense for Google to frequently kill off experiments. Allowing them to re focus engineering talent on yet more experiments. Everyone enjoys the innovations that come from Google's experimental culture (G-Mail etc...). However - Google are not prescient ... they cannot always accurately predict what will be useful to the widest audience along the path to their eventual goal of making all the word's information accessible. In order to be right some of the time, Google, like everybody else, has to be wrong some of the time too. If they did not recognise when they were wrong and account for it then their pace of innovation would grind to a halt under the weight of their own legacy support. When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have your cake and eat it too. RSS was and is a dead technology. Bloggers telling me otherwise (no matter how loudly, and with what ridiculous hyperbole) is akin to musicians telling me that the CD is still alive and well. I don't care ... neither do most other people ... HMV is still shutting down! -------- I desperately hope that someone with a louder voice than I possess manages to get some traction when they inevitably say: "Go home internets, you're drunk."

omaranto 14y ago
I don't know what people mean when they say RSS is a dead technology, but it solves a problem for which I know no other solution: reading blogs or other websites that are very rarely updated and are about unpopular topics. If a website only has new content every few months on average, I don't want to visit it manually: if I visit to often I waste my time, if I try to visit infrequently I'm likely to forget about the website. I definitely want to know when its been updated before visiting. If it were one some popular topic I could probably find out about it from social media, but if it has a narrow readership this is less likely.
- hugofirth 14y ago
  You are right I suppose - perhaps then my analogy would be better suited to describing RSS as a niche technology. The issue is that niche technologies work in conjunction with a paid business model. Google's core business model is that of mass market and driving eyeballs to ads. Reader did not fit within the confines of their model any more.
  - taligent 14y ago
    Google's core business model is that of mass market and driving eyeballs to ads. Reader did not fit within the confines of their model any more. So we should all look forward to Keep, Drive, Maps, Docs, Now, Glasses, Self Driving Cars and their many other products being discontinued sometime soon ?
    - hugofirth 14y ago
      If they are not successful then yes. That is exactly what I am saying. However by choosing Google's most popular products your point is both self defeating and an exercise in "reductio ad absurdum". Maps is an area of core competency for Google, has huge commercial implications and is a dependency of many other products. Maps is as safe as anything bar Search. Drive (and by extension Docs and Keep because they all form part of the same umbrella product) is an attempt by Google to compete for the traditional Corporate business stamping Grounds of MS. It also has an API. It would be reasonable to assume that Google will continue to support Drive for at least a long as it has relevance in this area. As For Glasses and Self Driving Cars - the only products on your list to which your point could sensibly apply - YES. If they do not work. If nobody (and by nobody I mean insufficient volume. A few thousand early adopters is nobody in the numbers of Google) uses them then they would be deemed a failure. In this case it would be clear that that product was not quite what the market wanted at that time - Google should absolutely shut it down in order to continue to innovate and experiment. Heres the thing: Its still a good thing that these experiments happen at all! One of the great adages of science is that negative results are still results.

omaranto 14y ago

I don't know what people mean when they say RSS is a dead technology, but it solves a problem for which I know no other solution: reading blogs or other websites that are very rarely updated and are about unpopular topics. If a website only has new content every few months on average, I don't want to visit it manually: if I visit to often I waste my time, if I try to visit infrequently I'm likely to forget about the website. I definitely want to know when its been updated before visiting. If it were one some popular topic I could probably find out about it from social media, but if it has a narrow readership this is less likely.

hugofirth 14y ago
You are right I suppose - perhaps then my analogy would be better suited to describing RSS as a niche technology. The issue is that niche technologies work in conjunction with a paid business model. Google's core business model is that of mass market and driving eyeballs to ads. Reader did not fit within the confines of their model any more.
- taligent 14y ago
  Google's core business model is that of mass market and driving eyeballs to ads. Reader did not fit within the confines of their model any more. So we should all look forward to Keep, Drive, Maps, Docs, Now, Glasses, Self Driving Cars and their many other products being discontinued sometime soon ?
  - hugofirth 14y ago
    If they are not successful then yes. That is exactly what I am saying. However by choosing Google's most popular products your point is both self defeating and an exercise in "reductio ad absurdum". Maps is an area of core competency for Google, has huge commercial implications and is a dependency of many other products. Maps is as safe as anything bar Search. Drive (and by extension Docs and Keep because they all form part of the same umbrella product) is an attempt by Google to compete for the traditional Corporate business stamping Grounds of MS. It also has an API. It would be reasonable to assume that Google will continue to support Drive for at least a long as it has relevance in this area. As For Glasses and Self Driving Cars - the only products on your list to which your point could sensibly apply - YES. If they do not work. If nobody (and by nobody I mean insufficient volume. A few thousand early adopters is nobody in the numbers of Google) uses them then they would be deemed a failure. In this case it would be clear that that product was not quite what the market wanted at that time - Google should absolutely shut it down in order to continue to innovate and experiment. Heres the thing: Its still a good thing that these experiments happen at all! One of the great adages of science is that negative results are still results.