I post con tag "Google Reader" archivio

La parodia virale sul film La Caduta descrive perfettamente lo stato d'animo alla notizia della chiusura di Google Reader.

La scellerata decisione di Google di chiudere il suo servizio di feed reader è spiegata su Quora da Brian Shih, ex product manager di Google Reader, con l'intenzione di Mountain View di concentrare tutta l'esperienza social degli utenti su Google+. Nessun'altra distrazione è accettata.

Let's be clear that this has nothing to do with revenue vs operating costs. Reader never made money directly (though you could maybe attribute some of Feedburner and AdSense for Feeds usage to it), and it wasn't the goal of the product.

Reader has been fighting for approval/survival at Google since long before I was a PM for the product. I'm pretty sure Reader was threatened with de-staffing at least three times before it actually happened. It was often for some reason related to social:

- 2008 - let's pull the team off to build OpenSocial.
- 2009 - let's pull the team off to build Buzz.
- 2010 - let's pull the team off to build Google+.

It turns out they decided to kill it anyway in 2010, even though most of the engineers opted against joining G+. Ironically, I think the reason Google always wanted to pull the Reader team off to build these other social products was that the Reader team actually understood social (and tried a lot of experiments over the years that informed the larger social features at the company). Reader's social features also evolved very organically in response to users, instead of being designed top-down like some of Google's other efforts.

I suspect that it survived for some time after being put into maintenance because they believed it could still be a useful source of content into G+. Reader users were always voracious consumers of content, and many of them filtered and shared a great deal of it.

But after switching the sharing features over to G+ (the so called "share-pocalypse") along with the redesigned UI, my guess is that usage just started to fall – particularly around sharing. I know that my sharing basically stopped completely once the redesign happened. Though Google did ultimately fix a lot of the UI issues, the sharing (and therefore content going into G+) would never recover.

So with dwindling usefulness to G+, (likely) dwindling or flattening usage due to being in maintenance, and Google’s big drive to focus in the last couple of years, what choice was there but to kill the product?

Personally, I think that there is still a lot of value a service like Reader could provide -- particularly in a world with increasing information overload coming us from many different sources. But Reader at Google was pigeonholed as an RSS-reader explicitly, and didn’t have a chance to grow beyond that to explore that space. But that’s neither here nor there.

Google ha annunciato la chiusura il prossimo primo luglio del suo servizio di feed reader.
Va bene, ora è panico. Dopo otto anni tocca trovare una valida alternativa.

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.