Google recently announced that it would be shutting down a few products. Such closures often lead to laments by users, as well as acknowledgments that not all ideas turn out to be winners. But this time one of the products is Google Reader. The announcement was the source of anguish. “They killed it like a butcher slaughters a chicken,” wrote Om Malik, founder of tech news site GigaOM.
To recap, many websites, especially news sites, publish summaries as “feeds” in a format called RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication). Google Reader, a free service, aggregates these feeds, bringing them together into one meta-newspaper of the user’s design. There are many competitors but Google is good at making news searchable and browsable. For people who help to make the news, especially bloggers, Google Reader was the tool of choice. This has led many to question the wisdom of the decision to close it. “By killing the flower,” wrote MG Siegler in TechCrunch, another news outfit, “Google could also kill the bees.”
Ah, bees! My own Reader account has more than 1,600 feeds painstakingly sorted into categories. It will be with regret that, when Reader is shut in July, I will bear witness to six years of favourites, notes, and so forth drifting away into nothingness. So I sympathise with the lamentations.