Google illiterate (reader) 2
Google Reader lived on borrowed time: creator Chris Wetherell reflects
My translation: Google never really believed in the project. Google Reader started in 2005 at what was really the golden age of RSS, blogging systems and a new content ecosystem. The big kahuna at that time was Bloglines (acquired by Ask.com) and Google Reader was an upstart.
And it entered the market with big ideas, a clear, clean slate and captured the imagination of early adopters despite some glitches. The Google Reader team, which included Chris (who was the Senior Software Engineer), worked hard to keep pushing the product forward. Among the folks who worked on the project included backend guru Ben Darnell, Mihai Parparita and Jason Shellen.
I wonder, did the company (Google) and the ecosystem at large misread the tea leaves? Did the world at large see an RSS/reader market when in reality the actual market opportunity was in data and sentiment analysis? Wetherell agreed. "The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model," he said. "Monetization abilities were never tried."
"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, as noted in this November 2011 blog post by Chris who wrote.
Reader exhibits the best unpaid representation I've yet seen of a consumer's relationship to a content producer. You pay for HBO? That's a strong signal. Consuming free stuff? Reader's model was a dream. Even better than Netflix. You get affinity (which has clear monetary value) for free, and a tracked pattern of behavior for the act of iterating over differently sourced items - and a mechanism for distributing that quickly to an ostensible audience which didn't include social guilt or gameification - along with an extensible, scalable platform available via commonly used web technologies - all of which would be an amazing opportunity for the right product visionary. Reader is (was?) for information junkies; not just tech nerds. This market totally exists and is weirdly under-served (and is possibly affluent).
Marco Arment said it is good that Google Reader is shutting down, because "we're finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade." It won't be easy or trivial. As we finished up our dinner, Wetherell said that it took a lot to make Google Reader work.
For instance, it was Google Crawler that gave the system ability to make lightning-fast connections and bring up recommendations. It is one of the main reasons it cannot be open sourced. The systems are too intertwined with Google's search and other infrastructure to be sold as well.
In addition, Google had a separate recommendations team fine-tuning Google Reader, and those people don't come in cheap. And let's not forget that it was Google's infrastructure that allowed millions of accounts to be hosted and many billions of items -- photos, videos, text objects -- to be saved for people to consume them at their leisure.
It wasn't -- and it still isn't -- a cheap exercise, said Wetherell, rationalizing why he somewhat understands Google's predicament. "This is and will always be a Google-level problem, especially if you are building a service for more than a few people," he said.