Karl Olson

Now, to be fair, there are various Google projects that had a narrow, but devoted fan base (App Inventor, Wave, Buzz.) However, while Google’s internal metrics may say it’s not worth keeping the lights on at Reader, the fact that Google Reader’s closure globally out trended news of a new pope suggests the service was very widely loved and used. Huge read counts like my own came up in blog and forum discussions about this news all over the web. For many people, Reader was how they took in the internet. Even forum posts were pushed through RSS for the most extreme Reader users, and even more social platforms like tumblr blogs were often fodder for Reader rather than the social service itself. Beyond that, the fact that Google had all that information means of all their ways of data-mining people for better ad information, Reader had to be painting some very detailed pictures, so the idea they couldn’t monetize the service seems just plain wrong. They have 175 thousand data points on just me from what I’ve read. Twitter only has a couple thousand tweets, and a lot of that isn’t links to full articles from sites that themselves have very clear profiles.