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22 March 2013updated 12 Oct 2023 10:45am

We can get as upset with Google as we like – we’re not going anywhere

Google Reader - the aftermath.

By New Statesman

It begins harmlessly enough. You’re chatting to a friend, a neighbour perhaps, over the garden fence. Suddenly there is a huge crash from inside the house. Oh my god – the BABY! You go inside and immediately fall over a large pile of books. There are books everywhere – unsurprising, you realise, as all your bookshelves have mysteriously vanished. The floor is covered, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus along with the full EL James trilogy have migrated from behind your (unread) copy of “Wolf Hall” and are now displayed at the top of the pile.

There’s a note. It says “We know your bookshelves had a devoted following who will be very sad to see them go. We’re sad too. There are two simple reasons for this: usage of your bookshelves have declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience. Love from Google.”

You look around and realise (with an element of disgust at the unimaginative cliche) that your house has in fact been built on sand.

You find a pencil and start a reply to the note.

I’m OUTRAGED at the change, and will be moving out with immedi…

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But hang on. Where would you go? You’ve got nowhere to go. For several years now you’ve lived in this house. The thought of moving into a thin-walled shack, to Bing, or Yahoo, insulated with the paper torn from advert posters is horrible. No – you’ll just have to suck it up. Head bowed, you find a plastic bag and start tidying up the books.

And here we go again. As I wrote about last week, Google reader is being killed off, and people are unhappy about it. They will no longer be able to trust Google, they say  – which will make it harder for Google to get them to use new features, like Keep, which it brought out yesterday.

As John Hempton says:

Google is in the process of abandoning its mission. Google’s stated mission is to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. RSS is a way that a small number of us organize our information. Google no longer cares. It seems what they care about is mass-markets…

According to him, this is Google’s problem: it makes financial sense for Google not to have Reader. After all, Reader doesn’t make money or create opportunities to make money. However, the move to abandon Reader is itself financially risky. It will affect how willing Google consumers are to adopt new features.

Here’s the Economist:

The more people used Reader, the more attractive it was to have an RSS feed and to write posts in feed-friendly ways. And the more people provided RSS content and structured online interactions around the blogs that pass through RSS, the more attractive it became to be a part of that ecosystem. If you then pull away the product at the heart of that system, you end up causing significant disruption, assuming there aren’t good alternatives available

The trouble is that there aren’t good alternatives – not to Google as a whole. As I wrote back in Feburary, Facebook, Twitter and Google are all at various stages of the tipping point between user-orientated and profit-orientated, and every so often, users realise what is happening and get upset about it. But the reason the companies are doing this is because they can. We’re probably not going anywhere.

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  • Arts and Culture
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  • Business / Corporate Services
  • Client / Customer Services
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  • Education, Curriculum and Teaching
  • Environment, Conservation and NRM
  • Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance
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  • Health - Medical and Nursing Management
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