A Few Thoughts to Add on Google Reader

I was a bit distraught to learn of Google’s planned sun-setting of Google Reader this July as part of their “spring cleaning”. It’s hard to describe the unique and important role it plays in a daily routine to someone who doesn’t use it, but I’ll give it a shot.

Reader essentially allows users to subscribe to blogs, websites, columns, or really any other type of internet post using RSS feeds. I won’t get into the mechanics, but what this means is that for the 75 or so feeds I subscribe to, I have an inbox of posts that I can read or flip through at my leisure. Many people have written that Google+, Facebook, and Twitter are better suited to serve this role, but that’s just not true. They’re inherently different products.

For my subscriptions, I don’t want to miss a single post. I don’t even come close to reading everything that ends up in my Reader, in fact I probably only read 10% or so, but I do read every single title.

Some of my feeds are my favorite blogs on political and economic commentary, which is my primary source of news. I read the posts containing commentary, and they link to the articles at the NYT or Washington Post. I click the ones that I’m interested in reading. Other feeds are my favorite columnists – I don’t always know when they’re going to write a column, but when they do, it ends up in my feed and I read it there. I have some of my friends’ blogs in there as well. I want to read all of their posts, and it would be much more time consuming to check 5-10 websites a few times a day just to see if there’s something new. I also get all of my technology news, most of which is important for me to follow for work, from about 5 or so focused tech feeds. And that’s just part of it, I also subscribe to comics (xkcd), beer websites, photography websites, and a bunch of other scattered interest feeds.

My Reader “inbox” fills up with about 300-500 items a day, and if I don’t get through them, the count continues to grow. Sometimes I can get through 100 in 2-3 minutes by skimming the titles. Sometimes it’ll take 30-40 if there’s some good content I want to read. But the point is that nothing slips through. If I go away and don’t check it for a week, I come back to 3,500 items to skim. And in a normal day, I can read a few on the train on my phone, read some while I wait in line at a store, read a bunch on my computer at work or at home. I can do it on my own schedule.

With social media, you have to be constantly checking it – glued to the screen. 24 hours later on Twitter might as well be an eternity. Lots of things can slip through. And if you rely on Reader to make sure nothing you care about slips through, social media doesn’t even come close as a substitute. It took me years to build my subscription base to the point where it’s the right balance of information for me.

It’s not the only RSS aggregator out there, but I’m definitely not alone in believing that it’s the only one that really works across fixed and mobile platforms. While most of the posts I’ve read responding to Google’s announcement have shared my sentiment (somewhat ironically, I found them all in my feed), and I agree that this is likely a good opportunity for a start-up, one particular TechCrunch post titled “Good Riddance, Google Reader” rubbed me the wrong way:

Google Reader turned into a zombie a long time ago and it’s good that Google finally killed it. For years, Google Reader has been sitting on Google’s servers without any appreciable updates. Sure, it got a bit of a facelift in 2011, but it only lost functionality since Google decided to rip out its social features in an effort to drive people to Google+. Its core features hadn’t changed for years, its overall design wasn’t really up to snuff anymore and even after eight years on the market, it would still often take hours before some feeds finally updated.

I can’t help but think that a lot of the current outpouring of support for Google Reader is more about nostalgia than anything else. A couple of years ago, ‘shares’ on Google Reader were the equivalent of today’s Facebook Likes and Twitter retweets. It was the hot new way to measure how popular a story was, and a bunch of services ranked stories accordingly. Displaying the number of subscribers to your RSS feed was a point of pride for bloggers.

The post goes on to make some generally hard-to-argue-against statements that are factually correct, but simply miss the point. While it may not be a mainstream product, it’s still a very important product for what seems to be millions of monthly users. Who cares that Google hasn’t invested time or resources into improving it, or that it’s no longer a good metric for bloggers to see how popular they are? It works. It serves a specific role that very few competitors do well. The the people who use, really use it. They spend hours on it each day.

A common counter point to this is that Google is a big company that has finally grown up and needs to focus its resources on the bottom line. I agree – that’s what companies are supposed to do. But this seems short-sighted, as it violates the trust many people have put in Google. Trust that if you take a chance and invest time to build your routine around Google’s products, Google will support them. I’m not arguing that this is (or should be) the case for every Google product, but it’s become very clear over the past five days that a large portion of the journalism and blogging community rely on Reader. And many small firms rely on its infrastructure to power their products. This other TechCrunch post nails the point:

Google is experimenting with an Evernote-like service called “Keep,” which accidentally made a brief appearance today before disappearing again. If such a launch is indeed on the horizon, then the timing is downright bizarre. Google has not yet recovered from squandering its goodwill with the shutdown of Reader, whose demise has been covered not only by blogs, but also more mainstream publications like The Economist and The Financial Times. And Google is now becoming known for regular “spring cleanings,” which have led to the termination of services, programs and utilities that never caught on with large numbers of users.

And yet, Google thinks users will now trust our notes to its cloud, after previous shutdowns of similar services like Google Notebook or Google Bookmarks Lists?

Excuse me, but I just snorted coffee out of my nose while laughing.

I’m very confident that a viable alternative will emerge, probably backed by lots of venture money, between now and July. And I’d gladly pay a few bucks a month for something equivalent or better, if it comes to that. And I understand that Reader just isn’t part of Google’s grand plan for what the internet should look like, and how people should interact with it. But it seems to me that Google just squandered goodwill that likely exceeds the cost to maintain Reader.