Google illiterate (reader)
On Wednesday, Google announced that it was shutting down Google Reader.
I'm not saying that the second event was directly caused by the first, but the two are linked. As the NYT explains today, the settlement is no less than an attempt to change the very culture of Google, to make it less freewheelingly Silicon Valley and more of a mature and responsible corporate giant.
Google Reader was a part of that freewheeling culture, although just how freewheeling Google was is open to debate. Om Malik has a fantastic interview with Reader's founder, Chris Wetherell, who hacked it together with a small team and who never really managed to get Google senior management interested in the product or its potential.
"There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity," he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears. Costolo, of course is working hard to mine those affinity-and-context connections for Twitter, and is succeeding. What Costolo understood, Google and its mandarins totally missed.
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 -- a way to find what you were looking for on the internet -- and didn't 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. All of that was good business, as Daniel Soar explained in 2011:
Google is learning. The more data it gathers, the more it knows, the better it gets at what it does. Of course, the better it gets at what it does the more money it makes, and the more money it makes the more data it gathers and the better it gets at what it does - an example of the kind of win-win feedback loop Google specialises in - but what's surprising is that there is no obvious end to the process.
The end to the process, it turns out, is the government -- the Germans, of course, but also US states and many other authorities around the world. Governments love gathering data themselves, but they're less excited when a private, for-profit company does it -- and often does it better than they themselves can do it. What's more, while many of their citizens are still excited about Google and its range of offerings, a lot of them are worried, too, that they're losing their privacy and that Google has a scary amount of information about them.