Google Reader

» see reader.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

google reader launched on 7 october 2005. it was an RSS aggregator. you gave it a list of feed URLs (from blogs, news sites, comic strips, your friends' personal pages, basically anything that exposed an RSS feed). the reader checked all of those feeds in the background, every hour or so, and showed you new items in a single unified inbox-style view.

this was the way a specific kind of person consumed the open web from 2005 to 2013. you would have between 50 and 500 feeds. you would open google reader in the morning, see a few hundred unread items, scroll through them, mark the boring ones as read, save the interesting ones for later. that was your news. that was your tech reading. that was how you stayed up to date with everything.

google killed it on 1 july 2013. the announcement came on 13 march 2013, citing "declining usage." nobody who actually used reader believed the declining-usage claim. the user base was small but loyal and famously vocal. the shutdown triggered one of the largest user revolts in google's history. a lot of trust in google products died with reader, and i am not sure it has ever recovered.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually did ~

the technical bit was simple. RSS is a small XML format that describes the items on a webpage, like blog posts or news articles. any site that wants to be subscribable just publishes a feed URL. when you add that URL to a reader, the reader periodically fetches the feed and shows you new items.

google reader did this well. it was fast. it cached aggressively. it had keyboard shortcuts that you would learn by accident and never forget (j for next, k for previous, s for star, shift-a for mark all read). the unread count was prominent. you could organize feeds into folders. you could share interesting items with friends who also used reader. there was a small social layer with comments and likes that became surprisingly culturally important.

i used google reader heavily from about 2007 to 2013. my subscription list was about 200 feeds. tech blogs, design blogs, programming language news, a few personal blogs of people i had never met but whose writing i liked. opening reader in the morning was part of my daily routine for six years. when google announced the shutdown i was genuinely angry, in a way that surprised me.

~ the social layer ~

google reader had a sharing feature that became its own small social network. you could "share" an item from your feed reader, which would push it to your reader-using friends. the shared items showed up in a separate feed. you could comment on each other's shares.

this was a meaningful social space, especially for tech people. some friendships and professional relationships started through google reader sharing. people followed each other's "shared items" feeds the way they would later follow people on twitter. the conversation quality was high because the audience was small and self-selected.

google removed the social features in november 2011 to push users toward google+. this was the first warning shot before the eventual shutdown. removing the share features alienated the most engaged part of the reader user base. the protest at the time was loud. google ignored it. the broader shutdown came 19 months later.

~ how google killed it ~

on 13 march 2013 google announced reader would be shut down on 1 july 2013, giving users about three and a half months to export their subscription lists and migrate to other readers. the announcement cited "declining usage" as the reason.

the response was severe. petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures. mainstream media coverage. extensive blog posts from prominent technologists arguing that the loss of reader would damage the open web. it was the first time a google shutdown felt like a betrayal of users rather than a product decision.

the actual reason for the shutdown is still debated. the official "declining usage" was probably partly true and partly an excuse. the strategic reason was almost certainly that google wanted to push the reader audience to google+ and to consolidate engineering effort. the unintended effect was that the audience went to twitter, not google+, and google's social ambitions never recovered the way the company hoped.

~ what we lost ~

the open web's central nervous system. for a generation of internet readers, google reader was the fabric that connected them to thousands of independent blogs and small publications. when reader died, the natural reading habit died with it. some people moved to feedly or inoreader. most people drifted to twitter and stopped reading blogs. the publications themselves saw traffic drops. several small blogs cited the reader shutdown as the reason they stopped writing.

the trust in google. google reader is the original case study for "things google ships will eventually be killed even if you love them." every google product launch since 2013 has been accompanied by users asking "but how long until google kills it?" that question is now baked into the relationship developers and users have with google. one shutdown changed the default assumption.

the daily ritual. opening google reader in the morning was a specific kind of online experience. unhurried, comprehensive, focused. you saw what you had subscribed to, in chronological order, with no algorithm sorting it for you. the modern algorithmic feed is different. you do not control what you see. you do not know if you have seen "everything." that absence of control is the price of the post-reader internet.

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