Google Reader Blog

This is a really good example of how to write a shutter letter. But it's not appropriate to criticize companies that shutter free services (i.e. Google) for not doing every single checkmark on this list (especially if they only miss one of them[1]).

Google has a lot of free products. Notably, Google's shut down of Reader comes under a lot of flak for how it was delivered to the public. But 37signals sold Breeze for $10. Google Reader was free. And yet, Google did everything 37signals did here except recommend alternatives. They even gave a longer sunset.

37Signals had customers - Google only had users. There is a world of difference in the utility and obligations in the company-user relationship there. Google could shutter any product it wants without telling anyone. It would be bad press, but doing anything more is a kindness and respect for users in imitation of how companies should treat customers. You didn't earn that kind of respect or attention from Google, they gave blog posts and announcements and free data and sunsets because they care. In most cases you would only get that kind of attention because companies don't want to burn paying customers from using their other products.

This in no way criticizes 37signals. It's a great discontinuation announcement. But stop deifying them and demonizing Google when Google actually went above and beyond in letting you know. Those comments aren't productive, they're just angry.

[1]:…

They did have comments and other social elements [0]. It was possible to follow people and share articles with or without adding your own note to it. They had a bookmarklet that allowed you to share any article, even if it didn't have an RSS feed. Their move to Google+ sharing wasn't exactly an improvement though [1].

I never got why people moved to Twitter, it wasn't, and isn't, as good at consuming or sharing content as Reader was. It's just one more step towards the more centralized web we have today, and hopefully we will move back to a more decentralized experience soon.

[0] http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2009/03/google-reader-is-your-new-watercooler.html
[1] http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-design-and-google.html

It looks like I wasn't remembering the Youtube announcement correctly. I was thinking of this:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/05/little-bit-of-polish.html

I believe that just says they are letting video and audio tags through. When those are in the feed the ipad can play the video inline in reader. A little testing seems to show that they are also letting their iframe embed through as well and when you use that you do get the html5 version of the player on the ipad and iphone. It looks like the Vimeo iframe embed isn't allowed to pass though but hopefully they will allow it. I put together a demo feed that shows the difference if anyone is interested:
http://serveany.s3.amazonaws.com/soclose.atom

> OK, you want to push Google+? Isn't google+ supposed to be a platform (and not simply an application). Let google reader be an application on top of the Google+ platform.

They actually did start to integrate them. Google Reader had native sharing functionality for several years. Then in 2011 they suddenly removed it and replaced[1] it with sharing through Google+. My small network of Reader-using friends were split over wanting to join Google+, so that mostly killed our practice of regularly sharing links with each other.

[1]: https://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-design-and-google.html

Well Google has an incentive to make everything better, but they can't literally work on everything, so they have to pick and choose.

For example Google has repeatedly explained Reader was killed because "usage has declined"¹ So this validates my point: they put resources in developing a product, but it doesn't get enough traction, so they kill it and redirect their resources to other projects that will hopefully be more successful and provide more users and ad revenues to Google.

¹ http://googlereader.blogspot.ca/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html