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Forcing Social Consumption


Google has made disappointing its customers a matter of routine. I have previously written on this blog about how their search is not serving me or my clients well. Now they have gone and decided to kill their one web asset that actually made a lot of sense - Google Reader. I spend a disproportionate amount of my time on Google Reader every day. While it may not be perfect, it did meet my needs for many years and I had grown attached to it. Just like that they served an interstitial to let me know that I would lose Google Reader on July 1 2013.

At what point does a company grow too big to remain relevant, too big to realize that despotism is not the way to keep your customers around - that comes a point when enough stupid decisions have been made for people to walk away for good. Have there not been enough failures in the last fifteen years to learn lessons from ?

I have to believe the reason they are choosing to kill Google Reader is because the user population was not willing to bite the social media baits and hooks that Google tried to dangle around them. Based on this decision by Google, it appears that passive consumption of media will continue to be penalized heavily. You either hop on the social media bandwagon or are left out in the cold.

I have imported my feeds to The Old Reader - hopefully they don't up becoming the kind of problem they helped solve.
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Anu said…
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8:04 AM
sam said…
I like the Google Reader interface more than anything.
5:29 AM
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