/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24761812/236714_Google_RSS_Reader_HHerrera.jpeg "The Demise of Google Reader: The Web’s Lingering Yearning")
At the Google Reader team’s workspace in Mountain View, California, there was a sign with the words “Days Since Cancellation” and a number that always read zero. This was around 2006, during the time when Google Reader was still growing and thriving. The tool provided users with a powerful way to curate and read the internet, and it was highly regarded by its devoted user base. Although it was not Google’s most popular app, it was beloved by many.
Despite its popularity among users, Google always had doubts about the future of Reader. Various individuals within the company seemed determined to shut it down, which created a sense of inconsistency for the team. Eventually, Google did decide to shut down Reader, and the announcement was made in March 2013. The app officially went offline on July 1st of that year. Google claimed that the decision was made due to a decline in usage over the years.
The announcement of Reader’s shutdown was strategically buried by Google, as they published it on the same day that Pope Francis was elected as the head of the Catholic Church. The company believed that the news about the Pope would overshadow the news about Reader. However, the dedicated following of Reader was outraged by the loss of their cherished tool.
Reader’s demise marked the beginning of Google’s reputation for discontinuing and abandoning products, and this reputation has only grown worse over time. The tragedy of Reader was that it had the potential to become something significant, but Google failed to recognize this. In its functionality, Reader foreshadowed elements seen in platforms like Twitter, the newsletter trend, and the rise of social media. To executives, Reader may have appeared to be a simple feed aggregator, but to users, it was a tool that helped organize and make sense of the vast internet.
Even after a decade, the people who were involved in building Reader look back on the project with fondness. The small team behind the app did not work on it for fame or professional gain but rather out of a genuine passion for finding better ways to navigate and share the web. Despite facing internal obstacles and bureaucratic red tape, their motivation was to create a tool that they themselves wanted to use. They had succeeded in making the web more accessible and all they wanted was to keep Reader alive.
The story of how Google Reader came to be is not a particularly exciting one. It began with a battle between feed formats, RSS and Atom. At the time, feeds were crucial for sharing information on the internet, and the existing formats had their issues. Jason Shellen, a product manager at Google, reached out to Chris Wetherell, a former colleague, and asked him to create a simple Atom-based app as a tech demo. Wetherell quickly built Fusion, a basic app that converted RSS feeds to Atom and displayed them in a browser. To his surprise, he found himself using Fusion to read articles, and he immediately saw its potential.
At the time, social networks like Facebook and Twitter were not as prevalent as they are today. Most people experienced the internet by visiting websites individually, and managing multiple sites was a hassle. Fusion presented a simple and efficient solution to this problem. Wetherell and Shellen envisioned a tool that could incorporate various types of feeds, such as photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube. Wetherell dedicated his 20 percent time at Google to further developing Fusion into a comprehensive feed-reading product. Eventually, he showcased it to the team behind iGoogle, Google’s homepage product.
Wetherell’s ambition for Fusion went beyond being just an article-reading service. He saw feeds as a versatile tool that could contain various forms of information. He described it as “polymorphic,” with the ability to encompass videos, news, and more. Ultimately, Fusion evolved into Google Reader, providing users with a seamless and efficient way to consume and organize content from all across the web.
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Alex Smith is a writer and editor with over 10 years of experience. He has written extensively on a variety of topics, including technology, business, and personal finance. His work has been published in a number of magazines and newspapers, and he is also the author of two books. Alex is passionate about helping people learn and grow, and he believes that writing is a powerful tool for communication and understanding.
