The outrage and sadness of Google Reader's demise

Pope Who?

White smoke over the Vatican doesn't stand a chance as a trending topic next to the black smoke over one of Google's most beloved products. Google Reader has landed on the company's sunset list, and will wink out of existence on July 1. Problem is, Reader is not as widely beloved as its most fervid users assume. And speaking of trending topics, the extinction of Reader signifies the mainstream rejection of RSS as a hands-on tool for organizing a living library of real-time information flow. It has been eclipsed by social content discovery. As Brian Alvey, chief scientist of Ceros and creator of Blogsmith (Engadget's publishing platform) noted, "Dear RSS: @Twitter won."

More broadly speaking, Reader's ultimate fail is the latest major rebalancing of the internet's legacy symmetry of "push" and "pull."

Filed under: Internet

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