I was disappointed to learn today that Google has announced the retirement of their Google Reader service, effective July 1st. Google Reader allowed for users to subscribe to blogs, newspapers and other content sources via RSS feeds. RSS subscription services have waned in popularity as mainstream users have gravitated towards more magazine like, content rich interfaces, such as those provided by Flipboard, News360 and Google’s own Currents.
Regardless mainstream preferences, anyone who follows a large number of news sources would appreciate the speed at which RSS allows them to browse and consume information. As Android Central observed about today’s announcement “power users know the best way to get some things done is with good ol’ RSS”.
The value that Google Reader provided was not necessarily so much in their Reader client, as there are a variety of better 3rd party clients on each channel for consuming RSS content. Reader’s value was that subscriptions could be stored and synchronized across channels and across these 3rd party clients as well. Once a user has viewed, read, or flagged content on one client, say on their phone, it’s state would be reflected back on their desktop client. One thing that I am struggling to understand about Google’s decision, is that regardless of the popularity, wouldn’t their information hungry user profiling and personalization engines want to maintain a source of detailed information on not only which news sources their users are following, but which articles they read and flag for follow-up?
Regardless, the loss of this synchronization capability to these “power users” will leave a void, and it may be an interesting one to see how the demand is filled. On Twitter, Marco Arment and Guy English had some interesting thoughts:
@marcoarment Watch ADN get used to sync RSS subscriptions.
— Guy English (@gte) March 14, 2013
As ADN looks to expand beyond a mirror of Twitter, and provide content storage and synchronization across all social media channels, this may be a logical offering.
Or, maybe Google is right? Perhaps there aren’t really that many of us “power users” of RSS left out there, and we’ll just have to adapt to one of the other thousands of ways to consume content in today’s age.
