Who Killed Google Reader?

Metadata

• Author: David Pierce
• Full Title: Who Killed Google Reader?
• Category:#articles
• URL: https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social

Highlights

• In his presentation, Wetherell shared a much bigger, grander ambition for Fusion than an article-reading service. He and Shellen had been talking about the fact that a feed could be, well, anything. Wetherell kept using the word “polymorphic,” a common term in programming circles that refers to a single thing having many forms.  “I drew a big circle on the whiteboard,” he recalls. “And I said, ‘This is information.’ And then I drew spokes off of it, saying, ‘These are videos. This is news. This is this and that.’” He told the iGoogle team that the future of information might be to turn everything into a feed and build a way to aggregate those feeds. (View Highlight)
• The vision, he wrote, was to “become the world’s best collaborative and intelligent web content delivery service.” It promised to “build a robust web service and best-of-breed user interface for viewing subscriptions” and to produce an API that would let other apps tap into the same underlying data. (View Highlight)
• For a while, the internet got away from what Google Reader was trying to build: everything moved into walled gardens and algorithmic feeds, governed by Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and others. But now, as that era ends and a new moment on the web is starting to take hold through Mastodon, Bluesky, and others, the things Reader wanted to be are beginning to come back. There are new ideas about how to consume lots of information; there’s a push toward content-centric networks rather than organizing everything around people. Most of all, users seem to want more control: more control over what they see, more knowledge about why they’re seeing it, and more ability to see the stuff they care about and get rid of the rest. (View Highlight)