Goodbye, Google Reader
I sit down with cereal every morning and Google Reader is open before the milk even hits. That’s the routine. I’ve got around 1,200 feeds in there—blogs, YouTube channels, Tumblr, whatever—and I scroll through new stuff that published overnight. It’s how I find most of what ends up here. It’s how everyone who does this kind of work finds their material.
Tonight Google announced they’re killing it. July 1st, it’s gone.
Anyone who doesn’t curate content for a living probably doesn’t even know what RSS is or why this matters. But it’s been essential infrastructure for people like me. You subscribe to feeds from different sources, and anything new that gets published just aggregates into one place instead of you having to visit a hundred websites hoping you haven’t missed something. Google Reader ended up being the standard way everyone did this. It was simple, fast, reliable. You didn’t think about it—it just worked.
The announcement has the blogging world in a panic. Where does everything go? Feedly’s trying to set up some kind of migration deal. There’s NetVibes, NewsBlur, Bloglovin’. But they’re not Google Reader. They’re not the thing that everyone already uses.
Marco Arment wrote something smart about this. He said Google Reader’s dominance kind of suffocated the whole RSS market. Once Google made their version good enough, nobody else bothered trying to compete or innovate. They had closed off product development by just being the canonical solution. Now that it’s gone, maybe that opens things back up. Maybe something better emerges. But that’s not helpful right now.
I need to figure out where to move my subscriptions. Feedly might work. I could go back to manually visiting websites. I could just lean harder on Twitter and Facebook for news, though that feels worse than before. Or I could let some of it go—just keep the feeds I actually care about and delete the rest. That might not be a bad outcome.
Google Reader was invisible. You never thought about it. It was just there, and you trusted it to do its job. And now it’s gone, and suddenly you realize how much you relied on something you never even had to think about.