Some Thoughts On Google Reader’s Impending Death
With out much fanfare, and in spite of the fact that Google has various other vestigial services and products that haven’t gained any mainstream adoption or traction (Google+ is being crushed by Tumblr for coolness, and on that note, why isn’t Orkut jammed into Google+ yet?) the company has decided to kill one of my favorite Google services, Reader. In fact, since I started using Reader in 2007, I have read nearly 175,000 items. That’s in spite of occasional sabbaticals from using the service because, well, I could pretty much do nothing but read news for hours on end. 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