Google just revealed plans to shut down eight of its services as part of what it’s calling an ongoing spring cleaning effort. Some of them are pretty arcane, but among TechCrunch writers, anyway, we’re pretty bummed to see that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1.
This will probably come as a shock for the loyal fan base of Google Reader but “the Google” is shutting it down. I’m biased of course but I’m not surprised.
As Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch put it, RSS keeps playing an important role in the “backend plumbing for many web and mobile apps” and it surely introduced many of us to the idea of real-time content feeds. But with social media taking over, RSS readers have been outgrown on many fronts:
– by social networks that brought serendipidty and discovery
– by more beautiful readers like Flipboard and Pulse
– by smarter and more relevant ways to filter information such as Prismatic or our own content suggestions
– and by more integrated ways to combine content discovery and curation like Pinterest, Tumblr or our own Scoop.it platform
I can not help but think this comes right when our own Read.it iPad App – our interest-based reader that just launched last week – made it to the home page of the App Store and within the Top 15 of its category. This is just an experiment for us right now but the simple fact of having it picked up and promoted by Apple is a nice acknowledgment of the role that community of curators like Scoop.it’s can have in organizing the Web on a long-tail of interests in a much better way than algorithms, social networks or… RSS.
See on techcrunch.com
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Your new product is an app for Mobile? What will be availbel for those of us fossils who cannot use Mobile ..No service
I really am glad to hear someone else isn’t going mobile. 🙂 I don’t think I’m a fossil I just don’t like answering the phone or paying double for it.
Don’t worry Chuck: we’re committed to remaining a Web service 😉 But mobile platforms and the iPad in particular offer interesting ways to experiment.
In part I think content curation is like using categories in stead of tags. Categories are broader in range and can be more about the idea or theme versus tags which try to be specific and end up becoming a disorganized mess with overlapping terminology. In the long run tags require too much maintenance, like a weedy garden. Meanwhile categories can stretch to fit in various elements of the theme or idea. I have never done much with feed readers because it was time consuming to organize them by topic. There are always going to be ideas and resources which… Read more »
Agreed Laura. And this is why we like the combination of serendipity human curators will always bring and the topic-centric model which gives you better relevance. What we’ve also called humanrithm http://sco.lt/6cn9wv – Following topics have already been bringing a broader yet relevant choice than tags and we’re experimenting with the concept of categories (we call them interests) with Read.it (but they’re the same as searches you can do on the Web site). Defining a few interests is easy and then all you have to do is browse the resulting feed.
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