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Google Reader? The diaspora that followed is often considered to be the "death" of RSS, and certainly the "death" of "Social RSS". RSS usage in general did tank after Google Reader. Though, there's a correlation/causation question there. Google Reader shutdown to entrench Google's attempt at a walled garden social network, but Google was considered late to the "walling in your garden" party at the time, so market forces (Facebook, Twitter) what they were at the time, it's possible that even if Reader didn't shutdown, RSS probably was "doomed". Similarly, Google Talk? For a brief period everyone was using XMPP (whether they knew it or not), to the point where even Facebook capitulated to using XMPP for real-time communications, partly to integrate with Google Talk, just in time for Google to drop most Talk support and XMPP support in the "upgrade" to Hangouts. Again, things are washy in the correlation/causation question. If Google had pushed Talk longer, would XMPP be more of a thing today? Or was the walled garden communications network too tempting to the market that it would have gone that way anyway? Personally, I think Google losing a lot of its "roots" in trying to use standards to best fit (RSS, XMPP), versus rolling everything internally/proprietarily was a key change in the web at the time, and I'm willing to ascribe it more to the causation side of things, but there's certainly a healthy debate to both sides. |
This comment gave me an idea: what does Trends say for RSS?
It has two results:
- For the search term: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss
- For the "computer file format": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Both charts are nearly identical.
There's a noticeable blip in March 2013 when the closure was announced, but that blip sits within a concretely downward trend.
I had to dig a bit to locate the very tiny downward slope in July when Reader actually shut down; there's nothing noticeable there.