There are many fine RSS readers, but what I miss most was the social and community features.
The communities that spring up around things like GReader are like lightning in a bottle. Perhaps the companies that can afford to build things like that have concluded that other forms of social media are more profitable.
There still are niches of the internet that operate like a book club for excitable nerds, but they can be short-lived. Most eventually succumb to politics, lecturers, eternal September, and/or a zero-sum debate-team mentality.
On the other hand, I never used a thing in Google Reader other than subscribe to feeds. It's probably inevitable though that it would have become more of a social media product over time.
> It's probably inevitable though that it would have become more of a social media product over time.
Personally I would have welcomed that.
Google Reader did essentially become a social media product over time. By the end it was the primary social network for many of the people in my research area. I was mystified when they shut it down to redirect resources to yet another Facebook clone rather on building on a successful foundation that was already present.
By now most people realize that this is just how Google operates, by shuffling resources around in a blind panic. But many people can point to the first product shutdown that crystalized the realization for them. Google Reader was mine, and judging by the comments in this thread it served the same purpose for others as well.
Perhaps, but they were one more thing to log into, and the Reader/Gmail integration was unparalleled. Also, for those of us who really liked the simple Reader UI, nothing really ever replaced it. Not even the explicit attempts to mimic it.
I never used Reader but I see this question a lot, and feel that the framing of it clouds insight.
The problem isn't making things, it's all of the barriers to entry. For example, say it takes 2 weeks to make something. Since most of us have to work, that means a 1 year commitment to save enough to do it over a vacation. Which is really a 2 year commitment until a vacation, or 1 year of grinding, or the sacrifice of vacations altogether, or nights and weekends for an indeterminate amount of time. On top of that, most people struggle to save 10% of their income. So if a project has even a $10,000 budget, that requires $100,000 of income. The numbers quickly become so insurmountable that an adult will almost never find the time that they had as a teenager. A decade may pass in the blink of an eye with no forward progress on life goals (that's happened to me twice now). And most projects take 6 months to 2 years or more..
So major projects can only really happen through a corporate structure or with outside funding. Then the problem becomes organizational, or founders spend most of their time fundraising. Sure, occasionally someone makes something. But traditionally there are 100 failures we never hear about. Today that number might be more like 1,000 or 10,000.
Google axing projects on a whim is power imbalance. They hold all of the cards, have almost unbounded potential, but are so hyper-focused on profit today that they can't seem to innovate on anything. Major corporations today are basically black holes sucking up all available capital and talent, performing no better than small 2-5 person teams would if they had adequate resources.
I'm sure someone will react vehemently against what I'm saying. But we're discussing this on Y Combinator's website, a startup accelerator founded on the idea that small teams can pivot faster than the biggest companies. After writing this out, it seems that only startups can save us. Are any working on a Reader alternative, I wonder.
Also I dream of the day when the musical chairs of competition stop and we move to a post-scarcity society. I thought that was going to happen around the year 2000, but if anything we've slid backwards since wealth inequality is the highest it's been in human history.
One reason, which I don't see mentioned a whole lot, is that far fewer places offer a real RSS feed (complete with the article / post in question) than once did. If they offer an RSS feed at all.
I looked at aggregation options for news recently, and discovered that walled gardens and the use of custom CMS's by news organisations have made RSS aggregation of say breaking news all but impossible.
Sure, you can still get blogs, reddit, hacker news etc. But the days of essentially every website having an RSS feed are gone.
