Tragic story, I’m still hurt, not because I didn’t find my own ways to build my feed reader (and have been using consistently ever since) but this story encapsulate the blindness of big tech better than anything else.
And 2 decades later, guess how I’m consuming the most out of Reddit and now Kbin/Lemmy and the fediverse? An RSS feed reader, that’s right!
Add to it a dash of webmentions and social reactions, without owning the social graph and you have probably the direction at which the open web is heading to, right now.
And this time, neither, Google, Facebook or Reddit or Twitter will be part of it, because they are blind but above all because people want something else.
And they want to define and own it.
Who killed Google Reader? Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.