We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade. Now, we’ll be forced to fill the hole that Reader will leave behind, and there’s no immediately obvious alternative. In fact, I agree with Marco and think we’re going to enter the golden age of RSS readers: New items and read items are synced across all my linked reader applications and the Google Reader web app, so they’re always consistent.ĭespite Google Reader effectively killing off competition in the market, there are other web-based feed readers available, so I think we’ll be fine on that end. It 1 lets me scan through my feeds quickly wherever I am and allows me to read items or take action on them (“star” it, send it to InstaPaper to read later, save the link to Pinboard for archiving and search). Take, for example, the excellent Reeder app for iPhone/iPad. Google Reader started its life as a web-based feed reader, but over time, its real value became its ability to act as a centralized place that other applications could sync against. Plus, it distracted from the company’s headline social project, Google+. Its user base was tiny in comparison to search and maps, and Google never made an attempt to monetize the product or make use of the massive amount of data it had on users and their subscriptions. If you were the kind of person who still used Reader in the age of Twitter and Facebook, you no doubt depended on it, making the announcement of its closure really sting.Īnd yet, the end of Google Reader was inevitable. It was (and is) one of the best way to efficiently scan and consume large amounts of information. RSS never went mainstream, so Google Reader was always sort of a geeky niche product. I’ve been a heavy user of Google Reader for over seven years, so I was a little upset yesterday when I saw that, buried in a “ spring cleaning” blog post, Google quietly announced that it was killing retiring the web-based RSS reader on July 1, 2013.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |