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by slg 4828 days ago
I have one question I want to propose to the gluttony of companies rushing to replace Google Reader. If it was such a valuable product, why would Google shut it down? I think we are getting too emotional in how we are viewing this market just because a lot of us used Reader. If Google thought there was money to be made with a great RSS reader, they wouldn't have left Reader abandoned for years. If there is a market in which the market leader isn't able to make money, I don't think that I would be rushing into it.
5 comments
sachitgupta 4828 days ago
Food for thought: "RSS is a great $X million market opportunity. Google is not in the business of pursuing $X million market opportunities." (from patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/312017704045408256)
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Mikushi 4828 days ago
Just because Google didn't pursue Reader doesn't mean a smaller company cannot make it work for them.
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elvisds 4828 days ago
Some of the alternatives available to Reader also have one additional feature built in - Discovery. These companies might look at acquiring Reader users and giving them a taste of discovery, while satisfying the feed reading use case. Discovery then leads to potential monetization avenues. Google could have moved Reader users to Google Currents [1], but I'm not sure why they chose to shut down the product the way they did

[1] https://www.google.com/producer/currents

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dlib 4828 days ago
I expect that Currents won't live very long. I don't see what value it adds in that space with competitors such as Pulse, Zite, Flipboard and a lot of others. Is anyone actually using Currents? If so, is it any good?
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Finster 4828 days ago
The same thing happened with Yahoo and delicious. People love that stuff, but Yahoo never bothered to develop it. In this space, growth comes through developing public API's. Google is notoriously bad at developing service API's. Don't misinterpret Google's failure to innovate and develop their product as a signal that such a product is inherently not valuable.
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analog 4828 days ago
The RSS reader I use on my phone lets me view the text content without having to view the web page. No web page -> No google ads.
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