[addicted]

> Google Reader is often cited as the best RSS Reader but was killed

1. Google Reader was not necessarily the best reader. The anger and frustration with the handling of Google Reader lies in the fact that Google Reader was the first reader from a major tech company. That essentially killed all the other innovation in this space and then Google Reader was itself killed in such a short span that there wasn’t an opportunity to have a smooth transition for the entire industry with it.

2. The one spade that did see a lot of competition growth and innovation were off-web RSS clients (precisely because Google Reader wasn’t a player in this space). But even these were completely handicapped by the elimination of Google Reader because Google Reader has become the de facto syncing solution for your RSS list and read states, etc. Again, the short time between announcement and end of life meant many of the popular clients couldn’t find a smooth transition for their users.

3. Google Reader had a social network effect component where someone could publish RSS articles they were reading and others could subscribe to their feed. In this sense it almost acted as an alternative to Twitter. The Twitter implosion has shown exactly how hard it is for alternatives to a social network to arise (because you invariably get many alternatives and it’s hard to get everyone onto one).

And the RSS reader social network space was nascent so the fragmentation as a result of the destruction of Google Reader meant a lot of people migrated to Twitter instead (Google had hoped they would migrate to Google+ instead but Google+ was awful so that didn’t happen).