not even a computer can, but you can know everything that is worth to you.Įverything that interests you is a few clicks away. Of course you can not handle all the news in the world. This means that you will need to be up to date with all the news you can handle. And if you want to have power, then you need to be as informed as possible. The internet represents the most powerful way to distribute or find information. Information is accessible to absolutely everyone that wants to receive it in many ways: publications, audio and video forms and. That’s clear from Om Malik’s great interview with Reader’s creator, Chris Wetherell.We live in the information era. It was a reasonable decision-you can’t make money on a $1.99 app if you also have to provide an API and cloud storage-but it gave Google all the power. So dedicated apps won, and the people who wrote those apps trusted Google to provide a speedy and reliable service. Also, there’s not as much room, or user patience, for the ads that browser-based readers need to survive. Phones have limited resources and slower processors, and the drag that comes from the extra layer of the browser is noticeable. 2 Browsers, after all, are a natural environment for the mixture of text, images, and links that make up a typical news feed, and the Reader API isn’t necessary for a browser-based reader.īut browser-based readers have a hard time competing with dedicated apps on phones. But remember that lots of people are perfectly happy reading their feeds in a browser when they’re working on a computer. Google’s really good at cloud infrastructure, and maybe the Reader API would have taken over the syncing of desktop feed readers even without the push from the phone side. Would this have happened without the iPhone? Maybe. Thus, the march of Reader to world RSS domination. You have to use it on the desktop-either directly in the browser or indirectly through an application-to maintain synchronization. It was soon unthinkable for an RSS reader to not sync through Google.įor a user, once your phone’s RSS reader is using Google Reader, you’re hooked. NetNewsWire, both the iOS and OS X versions, dropped the News Gator syncing and went with the Reader API. They were so much better than what had come before. Then came apps, like Reeder, that used the Google Reader API for syncing. For what seemed like a very long time, RSS reading on the iPhone was frustrating. 1 When NNW became available in the App Store I got it, but its syncing, through News Gator, was kind of flaky. Steve Jobs’ sweet solution of web apps for the iPhone was anything but sweet, mainly because web developers hadn’t figured out mobile yet. But then I got an iPhone.Īt first, I used the Bloglines mobile site in Safari, but that sucked. Personally, I preferred Bloglines and stuck with it. This was, remember, back before Google seemed creepy, and all the cool people who had GMail invitations before the rest of us loved Reader’s GMailish interface. When Google Reader came out, many of the digital cognescenti went gaga over it. One of the easiest ways to avoid seeing the repeated items was to use a web-based service like Bloglines, which kept track of your subscriptions and the items you’d already seen. If you had more than one computer, “new” didn’t always mean “content I haven’t read.” More typically it meant “content I haven’t read on this computer.” Syncing solutions were out there, but were a relatively new development. The common characteristic was that you’d query every site for its content and display only the stuff that was new to you. You could read the feeds you subscribed to through your browser or through dedicated programs like NetNewsWire. Syndication of content had been around for a while and was still considered a hot thing. The way I see it, though, is that it was the iPhone that put Google Reader in the driver’s seat.Ĭast your memory back to 2005, when Reader debuted. It’s almost as if it were a fait accompli, that Google is a force of nature that inevitably takes over any field it gets into. What’s missing from the articles I’ve seen, though, is an explanation of how Google Reader got to be the 800 pound gorilla of RSS. I suspect he’s right-I certainly hope he is, because Twitter is no substitute for RSS. In this view, Google’s dominance over the area in the past several years had stifled innovation when it’s shadow no longer looms over the landscape, a thousand flowers will bloom. The optimistic view, best expressed by Marco Arment, is that this will usher in a sort of RSS Renaissance. Next post Previous post The iPhone and Google Reader hegemonyĪ lot has been written in the past 24 hours about Google’s announcement that it’s shutting down Reader in a few months.
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