[credo]

These tweets are great marketing for his new company Storyworth and I mean that seriously :)

No one (well, almost no one) would have known who this guy was and that a company called Storyworth existed, but now a lot more people will know about it and how the founder is older and wiser now compared to when he was at Google :)

[earbitscom]

I've actually been a Storyworth user for quite some time and it's a slick service. It has really helped me connect with my grandmother.

[WKPlus]

Can't agree more.

[justin66]

Not especially, in my opinion. In light of his comments to the effect that Reader was a failure because it didn't achieve 100M users, I'm not even remotely interested in whatever Storyworth is.

[snowwrestler]

Why? That's not a number he invented, he's saying that that 100m is the user number that would have convinced Google execs to continue funding Reader.

The real question--unaddressed in these tweets--is why Google insisted on such a large user base to keep a project going.

[justin66]

That's fair, and I agree completely. I think I might have misinterpreted his tweet. Which, you know... twitter.

[hkmurakami]

Big companies often have arbitrary guidelines such as "only billion dollar lines of businesses are worth having". In this case 100M users may have been the threshold where $1B/year in revenue from the product was realistic.

[kbenson]

It seems like a large number, but at Google's scale it might actually be rather small. Google is a large company, and each product is something that takes resources that could be better spent somewhere else. I don't expect Honda or Ford to keep around a car that only sells a few thousand a year, knowing that it requires continual work and refinement, space in their plants to build, space on the lots to sell, and a business strategy. I don't expect Google to act any differently.

[eachro]

But now you have heard of Storyworth and that's the whole point.

[pawadu]

But I could never do business with the guy that shut down Google Reader.

So who are Storyworths competitors? They can have my money