{"id":19453,"date":"2013-03-15T10:14:01","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T15:14:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19453"},"modified":"2013-03-15T10:14:01","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T15:14:01","slug":"will-the-death-of-google-reader-also-be-the-death-of-rss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/03\/15\/will-the-death-of-google-reader-also-be-the-death-of-rss\/","title":{"rendered":"Will the death of Google Reader also be the death of RSS?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Felix Salmon<\/a> on the knock-on ramifications of Google’s announcement that it is killing Google Reader:<\/p>\n

But whether or not Reader was ever going to be a good business for Google, it was from day one a fantastic public service for its users. Google started as a public service \u2014 a way to find what you were looking for on the internet \u2014 and didn\u2019t stop there. Google would also do things like buy the entire Usenet archives, or scan millions of out-of-print books, or put thousands of people to work making maps, all in order to be able to get all sorts of information to anybody who wants it. [. . .]<\/p>\n

The problem with the death of Reader is that it was the architecture underpinning lots of other services \u2014 the connective tissue of just about all RSS readers and services, from Summify to Reeder to Flipboard. You didn\u2019t even need to use Google Reader; it was just the master central repository of your master OPML list, all the different feeds that you were subscribed to. Google spent real money to provide that public service, and it\u2019s going to be sorely missed. As Marco Arment says, \u201cevery major iOS RSS client is still dependent on Google Reader for feed crawling and sync.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arment sees a silver lining in the cloud, saying that with Google gone, \u201cwe\u2019re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.\u201d I\u2019m less sanguine. Building an RSS sync platform is a hard and pretty thankless task, it costs real money, and it might not work at all \u2014 especially in a world where less and less content is actually available in RSS format. (You can subscribe to my Tumblr feed in RSS format, but there\u2019s no such feed for my posts on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Path or even Google+.)<\/p>\n

RSS has been dying for years \u2014 that\u2019s why Google killed Reader. It was a lovely open format; it has sadly been replaced with proprietary feeds like the ones we get from Twitter and Facebook. That\u2019s not an improvement, but it is reality. Google, with Reader, was really providing the life-support mechanism for RSS. Once Reader is gone, I fear that RSS won\u2019t last much longer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Felix Salmon on the knock-on ramifications of Google’s announcement that it is killing Google Reader: But whether or not Reader was ever going to be a good business for Google, it was from day one a fantastic public service for its users. Google started as a public service \u2014 a way to find what you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,28,15],"tags":[204,328,58,329],"class_list":["post-19453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-media","category-technology","tag-blogging","tag-google","tag-internet","tag-usenet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-53L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19454,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19453\/revisions\/19454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}