Google Reader, reasons for a closure
The way people consume news has changed, said Richard Gingras, head of News and Social Products at Google. For this reason, the Internet giant will close the first day of July his Reader service dedicated to news syndication via RSS.
Since March, when Google announced the closure of Reader, it had not given much explanation. At the time of the announcement the reactions of faithful service users were of wonder, myself included.
Rather than passively receive content, now users are more active: they want more interesting content at the right time, without having to take it all at once, said Gingras.
“As a culture, we have moved to a state where news consumption is almost constant process. The tablet and smartphone users consume news slowly throughout the day, replacing the traditional way of reading news while having brf eakfast plus a lighter reading throughout the day”, he said.
Since the announcement of the closure of Reader, there had not been many explanations of why they left this product. But Mr. Gingras arguments do not convince me.
Perhaps the strongest statement is in Google´s Blog: the service has experienced a decline of users. Pretend to control how readers consume news, and even more, wanting to predict whether they do it through social networks, is a mistake.
If Facebook is facing a crisis today is because of that. But that’s a topic for another time.
Closing Reader prevent news’s superconsumers to quickly access the news. And we know that these users are almost always sending the stories firsthand to social networks, such content becoming somtimes viral material.
In addition, a social network does not work as a news reader. There are things much more mixed, and we have no control over the sources.
So are the costs incurred by Reader and low rate users, compared to other Google services, the cause of his “death”.
For those who use content syndicators, there are other alternatives that I will discuss in a future post.
The question now is, what will you do from July 1, 2013?
Note: Originally posted on Mirador Social Media
