Yesterday, I tweeted about missing Google Reader:
Six years on, I still miss Google Reader.
— Jorge Arango (@jarango) October 4, 2019
The tweet touched a nerve; lots of folks have chimed in, mostly agreeing with the sentiment or recommending substitutes.
To be clear, I still read RSS feeds every day. (I use Reeder on the Mac and iOS and synch my feeds using Feedly.) Although I’m open to exploring alternatives, I’m not unsatisfied with my current arrangement. (Ringing endorsement!) So I’m mostly not lamenting the loss of Google Reader’s functionality. Instead, I miss what Google Reader represented: a major technology company supporting a truly decentralized publishing platform.
Google’s brand imparted some degree of credibility to an emergent ecosystem. I suspect a nontrivial number of people must’ve tried RSS feeds because Google provided a tool to read them. It’s great that tools like Feedly, Reeder, Feedbin, NetNewsWire, etc. exist, but none of them have the broad appeal or brand power that Google does.
I said I’m “mostly” not lamenting the loss of Google Reader’s functionality. This is because while current RSS readers offer the basics, Reader was a natural, cohesive component of my personal information ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, it looked and felt like (and integrated with) other Google tools like Gmail and Google Calendar, which I was using extensively at the time. As befit a Google product, Reader also offered excellent search capabilities. None of the RSS readers I’ve tried since offer the same level of coherence and integration that I experienced with Google Reader.
I sense Google Reader was a casualty of Google’s primary business model: selling its users’ attention to the highest bidder. I doubt RSS provided the scale or control required to run a mass advertising business. IMO it’s no coincidence that Google pulled the plug on Reader at a time when centralized social networks (Facebook, Twitter) were gaining traction in the mainstream. (Google+, which the company had launched a couple of years earlier, failed to take off. I wonder if they saw Reader as competition for G+?)
Six years after Google Reader’s disappearance, we’re wiser to the limits of centralized control over news aggregation. Subjectively, I sense many people are rediscovering the joys of blogging. (And, like me, using the social networks mostly as a way to publicize our blog posts.) Podcasts — which are based on syndicated feeds — seem to be more popular every year. While I miss Google Reader, I believe decentralized syndication is an essential part of the web’s future — not just its past. Is the time right for Google (or any of the other major tech platform companies) to embrace the platform again?