https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social
"There was a sign in the Google Reader team’s workspace at the company’s
headquarters in Mountain View, California. “Days Since Cancellation,” it read,
with a number below: zero. It was always zero.
This was in 2006 or so, back when Google Reader was still growing. Back when it
still existed at all. Google’s feed-reading tool offered a powerful way to
curate and read the internet and was beloved by its users. Reader launched in
2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge and
sprawling web feel small and accessible and helped a generation of news
obsessives and super-commenters feel like they weren’t missing anything. It
wasn’t Google’s most popular app, not by a long shot, but it was one of its
most beloved.
Within the company, though, Reader’s future always felt precarious. “It felt so
incongruent,” says Dolapo Falola, a former engineer on the Reader team.
“Literally, it felt like the entire time I was on the project, various people
were trying to kill it.”
Of course, Google did kill it. (Google didn’t respond to a request for comment
on this story.) Reader’s impending shutdown was announced in March of 2013, and
the app went officially offline on July 1st of that year. “While the product
has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined,” Google SVP Urs
Hölzle wrote in a blog post announcing the shutdown.
Google tried its best to bury the announcement: it made it the fifth bullet in
a series of otherwise mundane updates and published the blog post on the same
day Pope Francis was elected to head the Catholic Church. Internally, says
Mihai Parparita, who was one of Reader’s last engineers and caretakers, “they
were like, ‘Okay, the Pope will be the big story of the day. It’ll be fine.’
But as it turns out, the people who care about Reader don’t really care about
the Pope.” That loyal following Hölzle spoke of was irate over losing their
favorite web consumption tool.
Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader
and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it
had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it.
Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one
of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from
Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google
Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring
technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making
sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its
location or type, and helping you make the most of it.
A decade later, the people who worked on Reader still look back fondly on the
project. It was a small group that built the app not because it was a flashy
product or a savvy career move — it was decidedly neither — but because they
loved trying to find better ways to curate and share the web. They fought
through corporate politics and endless red tape just to make the thing they
wanted to use. They found a way to make the web better, and all they wanted to
do was keep it alive."
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: July 4, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-4-85562651
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
