Tag Archives: google

One of the most impor­tant things for me about gReader is that it bal­ances the two pri­mary uses of the inter­net: infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Dis­cus­sion that fol­lows the shar­ing of infor­ma­tion – blog posts, news items, opin­ion pieces, edi­to­r­ial images, book reviews, pic­tures of Zoe Sal­dana, etc – is more mean­ing­ful, directed, and inter­est­ing to me than post after post of peo­ple talk­ing about them­selves. I like that the pri­mary verb of gReader is “share” – but not about you; about con­tent that’s mean­ing­ful to you. I like that I have to click on a spe­cific tab in order to get the lit­tle win­dow that allows me to post only about myself. I like that gReader pro­vides a sin­gle inter­face to both read con­tent on the inter­net AND dis­cuss that con­tent with my friends.

– Court­ney Stan­ton in Wherein I try to explain why Google Reader is the best social net­work cre­ated so far

Google Reader is the place on the web that I spend most of my time. It’s a haven for vora­cious read­ers like me and I’m quite wor­ried that changes to it might break it. Even before the main com­peti­tor Blog­lines almost went bust, Google Reader has had a monop­oly on the online feed reader mar­ket. Noth­ing else came close. It was a monop­oly that nobody could truly dis­rupt till now. There are com­pa­nies like feedly and Reeder who built their prod­ucts around Google Reader instead of try­ing to com­pete with it.

I hope Google under­stands the impli­ca­tions of any changes and don’t stray too far away from the orig­i­nal prod­uct. But it doesn’t help much when they warn you by say­ing, “If you don’t like it, take your data and leave.” I’m keep­ing my fin­gers crossed.