(2023-06-30) Who Killed Google Reader

Who killed Google Reader? Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge and sprawling web feel small and accessible and helped a generation of news obsessives and super-commenters feel like they weren’t missing anything

Within the company, though, Reader’s future always felt precarious

Reader’s impending shutdown was announced in March of 2013, and the app went officially offline on July 1st of that year.

the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web

“This is going to be the driest story ever,” says Chris Wetherell, when I ask him to describe the beginning of Google Reader. Wetherell wasn’t the first person at Google to ever dream of a better way to read the internet, but he’s the one everyone credits with starting what became Reader. “Okay, here goes: a raging battle between feed formats,”

there were basically two ways to build a feed. One was RSS...The other was called Atom. (Atom standards)

In late 2004, Jason Shellen, a product manager working on Atom projects at Google, called up Wetherell, a former colleague on the Blogger team, and asked him if he could hack together some kind of Atom-based app

Wetherell stayed up late one night building a simple app that converted a bunch of websites’ RSS feeds to Atom and displayed those feeds in a Javascript-based browser app so you could click around and read.

And then the strangest thing happened: as soon as he’d finished the Fusion app, Wetherell started using it to actually read stuff from the sites whose feeds he’d grabbed. He turned to his partner that night and said: “I think I built a thing.”

Wetherell’s prototype wasn’t complicated like NetNewsWire, it didn’t crash like Bloglines, and the Javascript interface felt fast and smooth

Wetherell and Shellen started imagining all the different kinds of feeds this tool could store. He thought it might bring in photo streams from Flickr, videos from YouTube and Google Videos, even podcasts from around the web.

Ultimately, Wetherell ended up spending some of his 20 percent time

building Fusion into a more complete feed-reading product. It handled RSS, Atom, and more.

In his presentation, Wetherell shared a much bigger, grander ambition for Fusion than an article-reading service

He told the iGoogle team that the future of information might be to turn everything into a feed and build a way to aggregate those feeds.

The pitch sounded good, and they got permission to keep working on it. Fusion wasn’t exactly made an official project or staffed like one, but it was at least allowed to continue to exist. Wetherell and Shellen recruited other people working on similar projects in their 20 percent time, and Shellen wrote an official product spec

The vision, he wrote, was to “become the world’s best collaborative and intelligent web content delivery service.”

Fusion was meant to be a social network. One based on content, on curation, on discussion.

“We were trying to avoid saying ‘feed reader,’” Shellen says, “or reading at all. Because I think we built a social product.”... he wasn’t allowed to call it Fusion. The team had been forced to change the name at the last minute, after Marissa Mayer said she wanted the name for another product and demanded the team pick another one.

Reader, “a name none of us liked,” Wetherell says, “because it does many other things, but… it’s fine.” But somehow, that became the choice.

Names matter, and Reader told everyone that it was for reading when it could have been for so much more

Even once the Reader team stabilized the infrastructure, lots of users hated the product; it had a lot of clever UI tricks but just didn’t work for too many users.

It wasn’t until the team launched a redesign in 2006 that added infinite scrolling, unread counts, and some better management tools for heavy readers that Reader took off.

the engagement with Reader was off the charts. “People would spend, I don’t know, five minutes a day on iGoogle,” Parparita says, “and like an hour a day in Reader.”

One feature took off immediately, for power users and casual readers alike: a simple sharing system that let users subscribe to see someone else’s starred items or share their collection of subscriptions with other people. The Reader team eventually built comments, a Share With Note feature, and more

At its peak, Reader had just north of 30 million users, many of them using it every day. That’s a big number — by almost any scale other than Google’s.

Almost nothing ever hits Google scale, which is why Google kills almost everything.

The bigger problem seemed to be that Mayer didn’t like it: Shellen says she told him at one point that he was wasting his engineers’ careers working on Reader.

Google’s executives always seemed to think Reader was a feature, not a product. In meeting after meeting, they’d ask why Reader wasn’t just a tab in the Gmail app.

the team only ever got as big as about a dozen people, many of them on loan from other teams at the company.

Threatened by the rise of social networks — namely Facebook and its quickly encroaching seizure of the online ad market — Google became desperate

the company’s big swing became Google Buzz, an app that tried to combine messaging, social networking, and blogging into one thing. That launched in 2010 and was killed in 2011.

The tide turned when Google decided not just to build a social product but to fundamentally re-architect the company’s apps around social. Two executives, Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, started a new project codenamed “Emerald Sea” with plans to build sharing and friend-based recommendations into just about every Google app. It would come to be known as Google Plus.

“As far as I could tell, nobody ever won against them,” Parparita says. “They just got their own way.” There was plenty of opposition to the project, including from the Reader team, but it didn’t matter.

“They could have taken the resources that were allocated for Google Plus, invested them in Reader, and turned Reader into the amazing social network that it was starting to be.”

By early 2011, with the team severely diminished, Reader had been officially put into “maintenance mode,” which meant that an engineer — Parparita, mostly — would fix anything spectacularly broken but the product was otherwise to be left alone.

Despite Google practically force-feeding its social network to hundreds of millions of people, users rebelled against Google’s real-name policy, resented its spam problem, and ultimately could never figure out what Plus could do that Facebook or Twitter couldn’t.

The damage was done for Reader, though. Its core team was gone, its product had withered, and by the end of 2012, even Parparita had left Google

And, of course, there’s the biggest question: what if they’d tried to build Reader outside of Google?

But Reader was also very much a product of Google’s infrastructure

Shellen and Wetherell ended up co-founding Brizzly, a social platform based on a lot of the ideas in Reader. Kevin Systrom, once a product marketing manager on the Reader team, went on to found Instagram and, more recently, Artifact.

everything moved into walled gardens and algorithmic feeds, governed by Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and others. But now, as that era ends and a new moment on the web is starting to take hold through Mastodon, Bluesky, and others, the things Reader wanted to be are beginning to come back.