Funny, I was at the O'Reilly conference in 2005 (Etech) when Google Reader was *launched*, and wrote a blog post about it[1].
Here was my take on the launch:
> At first I wondered if this would be the product that pushes RSS aggregators to the mainstream, but I'm beginning to think that a full-featured RSS reader won't ever cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream. A product like My Yahoo suits the purposes of a huge percentage of the mainstream audience, so unless their needs change significantly, there's no incentive to change to another aggregator.
Sadly this seems to be true: My Yahoo didn't make it, but the FB/Twitter/Insta/TikTok/Google News algos serve as curated feeds where non-nerds prefer to get their news. There was a lot of anger amongst the digerati when Google Reader shut down, but in retrospect it seems to have been the right move.
Here was my take on the launch:
> At first I wondered if this would be the product that pushes RSS aggregators to the mainstream, but I'm beginning to think that a full-featured RSS reader won't ever cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream. A product like My Yahoo suits the purposes of a huge percentage of the mainstream audience, so unless their needs change significantly, there's no incentive to change to another aggregator.
Sadly this seems to be true: My Yahoo didn't make it, but the FB/Twitter/Insta/TikTok/Google News algos serve as curated feeds where non-nerds prefer to get their news. There was a lot of anger amongst the digerati when Google Reader shut down, but in retrospect it seems to have been the right move.
1 - https://www.reemer.com/archive/v1/2005/10/07/web_20_google_a...