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.
Reader appealed primarily to information junkies, who wanted a quick way to keep up with all their favorite publications and blogs. (It turned out there were two types of Reader users: the completionists, who go through every unread item they have, and the folks who just scroll around until they find something. Both sides think the other is bonkers.) The team struggled to find ways to bring in more casual users, some of whom were put off by the idea of finding sites to subscribe to and others who simply didn’t care about reading hundreds of articles a day.
David Pierce
Good recap of the (struggling) life and (untimely) death of Google Reader, 10 years after its shutdown. However the narrative that Google Reader was on the verge of becoming ‘something big’ repeats the same fallacy that most tech products fall trap to sooner or later: if the engineers that passionately built the product and its highly engaged first adopters both love it, surely everyone else can’t wait to experience it as well, right?!
The reality is that Reader was a niche product for a niche audience, a point demonstrated by how in the 10 years since none of the alternatives have reached widespread adoption. I continue to be a happy Feedbin user, as it has added useful features such as integration of newsletters and social channels. My information consumption habits have shifted considerably though. Back in the Google Reader days I used to be a completionist, going through all my subscriptions and reading the headlines at the very least; in the years since I turned partially to the opposing side, skimming the front page for recent articles, although I do keep a handful of feeds where I read every new post.
I think this dynamic applies to a certain extent to Twitter and by extension microblogging. Despite its notoriety, Twitter never made it past a peak of around 330 million monthly active users, with daily actives significantly lower, and there’s little reason to think it ever will because of the havoc Elon Musk is wreaking on the platform. The many alternatives launched over the past year will probably attract their own niche audiences, never managing to surpass the original product, instead fragmenting the addressable public into smaller, less-influential bubbles. Even Threads, backed by the much larger Instagram user base, has lost momentum following the initial excitement, and active users may have already dropped a staggering 82%. Tech managers should at some point acknowledge that most products can’t appeal to the maximum number of people, and adjust their expectations and business strategies accordingly.
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