On Making Sense of the Maelstrom

Google's announcement that it would be closing down the Google Reader project has provided some terrific insight into the tech news industry as a whole. It will be interesting some day to look back at the data that has been posted online in the form of blogs, comments, and articles. In a couple of years the dust will settle and some interesting studies can be performed on the death of a web tool. In the meantime one can try to make some sense of the maelstrom.

One of the consistent themes surrounding the demise of Google Reader is the idea that Google was providing a back end service to a number of clients. This is intriguing for several reasons and we will explore several of them bellow. First, some background:

There were many users that navigated to the Reader webpage and consumed their news from the feed, but a large number of users linked their Google Reader feeds to a third party client to read their subscriptions. Mike McCue of Flipboard mentioned to Liz Gannes(All Things D) that 2 million users had linked Google Reader to their Flipboard accounts. If Flipboard/Google Reader crossover alone is so high, one can imagine the number  of users that have connected via other clients.

This has become a problem for Google. In the past few years, Google has made it inconvenient for one to connect external clients to any of its services, at least if the service needs to work everywhere. Mail clients are available on various platforms, but IMAP on a desktop/mobile client combination does not offer the same functionality as using Google's Gmail web client in Chrome and the Gmail app on iOS. Rather than limit what third party clients can access in Gmail, Google has created an environment in which their native apps are superior to other options.

The same is not true of Google Currents. Google decided to not offer APIs at all for that service and it is not hard to imagine Currents getting the "spring-cleaning" treatment. Currents is, after all, Reader's closest direct successor. Google+ and Google Calendar are in similar positions, in some ways, as Google Reader, but they form a part of the core experience offered by Android, and should not suffer the same fate.

All this to say: Google killed Reader because Google is not in the business of providing back end services to other companies. Amazon does that, and does it well, but Google wants to be a consumer services company. Google wants to take action on the data it collects and capitalize on the data through advertising. Why should Google send all of its data to any app that feels like plugging in? Other companies were taking great advantage of a service Google was providing, and doing so at Google's expense. Google is not in the business of providing services to third party developers; it provides services to consumers.

It is frustrating to have a product that one knows and loves yanked away, but Google Reader was not serving a function in line with Google's core business. Services that are in line with Google's goals are quite safe. Google Keep provides note taking ability that was a glaring omission from Android (do not try to replace Evernote with them, that leads to anger, fear, aggression, but copy and paste your content out of that tiny Tasks window in Gmail into a full screen Keep tab and close that piece of tasks garbage forever). Calendar is also a central core of Android, and Google+ provides a much need social angle for the company.

Google provides useful services at a small cost (tiny ads on the side of the screen) and there is no reason to avoid using those services unless one is sensitive to privacy concerns or does not like the way the services or interfaces work. Google always provides a way out of its services if the terms become to unbearable or it closes down a project through its Data Liberation project. In short, do not let the Google Reader shutdown ruin your digital life.