Why is it so hard to abandon Google Reader
When Google announced that it was closing Google Reader, the entire Internet was seething with indignation and frustration, hundreds of thousands signed petitions so that it would not be closed and in general for a few days no one discussed anything else (then everyone switched to the scandal with Adria Richards ). Despite the fact that I am also a fan of Reader, it was strange for me to see that such a number of people are so attached to something that has hardly changed since 2005. How many web products do you use that haven't changed for so long? (even Gmail made several big steps forward)
In fact, Google Reader is like a machine with a manual gearbox. When the automobile industry was only in its infancy, everyone traveled with a manual gearbox and believed that it could not be better, but gradually more and more technologies appeared that sacrificed control for the sake of comfort. First, the automatic transmission, then the auto-parking system and collision avoidance, and soon the first unmanned vehicles will appear, where the participation of the driver in principle is not necessary. A manual box is an increasing lot of enthusiasts who choose it not because it works better, but simply because they like to manage the process.
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If you think about it, RSS has come a similar way. In the beginning, Google Reader (or another RSS reader) - it was the best way to follow the news from several sources at once. Yes, with the addition of more and more subscriptions, he began to take too much time, forcing you to limit consumption, or look at the inscription “1000+ unread items” and skip the news, but just like with the first hand boxes - everyone liked it.
Then social networks appeared and for many it became a more convenient way of consuming content, like an automatic transmission. You could simply subscribe to smart curators and receive all the important news in one large stream. Many at this moment refused RSS (Robert Skoble then declared that RSS is dead)
After a couple of years, we got a little more progress - the equivalent of auto-parking, when there were reading rooms combining social streams, RSS and a whole bunch of everything else under one roof - Flipboard, Pulse, Currents and others. It was not a breakthrough, but it really became a bit more convenient, and some more people left RSS.
(Photo from dokas , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
And now, finally, we are approaching self-driving car services such as News360, Prismatic and Zite, which use machine learning and artificial intelligence to find the most interesting content, filtering garbage from your existing streams and finding things that are completely different. would pass by you. While this technology is still in its infancy, the accuracy of understanding your interests is far from ideal and there are still a lot of problems that need to be solved, but this is a big leap from what it was before.
But we must understand that even when the roads are full of unmanned vehicles, there will always be people who want to drive with a manual gearbox. Some - because they do not believe that the machine can do it better than themselves, some - because they just like it. There is a certain pleasure in the fact that you fully understand how information reaches you, and control the process - especially if you are a power user who sets everything up for himself.
That is why closing Google Reader is a mistake. Enthusiasts are a group of people who cannot be rejected, they passionately love the products they use and the lost trust does not justify saving resources that Reader consumed. And certainly these enthusiasts will not switch to Google+ or Currents, if the idea was in this. They will simply find another car with a manual gearbox.
In fact, Google Reader is like a machine with a manual gearbox. When the automobile industry was only in its infancy, everyone traveled with a manual gearbox and believed that it could not be better, but gradually more and more technologies appeared that sacrificed control for the sake of comfort. First, the automatic transmission, then the auto-parking system and collision avoidance, and soon the first unmanned vehicles will appear, where the participation of the driver in principle is not necessary. A manual box is an increasing lot of enthusiasts who choose it not because it works better, but simply because they like to manage the process.
')
If you think about it, RSS has come a similar way. In the beginning, Google Reader (or another RSS reader) - it was the best way to follow the news from several sources at once. Yes, with the addition of more and more subscriptions, he began to take too much time, forcing you to limit consumption, or look at the inscription “1000+ unread items” and skip the news, but just like with the first hand boxes - everyone liked it.
Then social networks appeared and for many it became a more convenient way of consuming content, like an automatic transmission. You could simply subscribe to smart curators and receive all the important news in one large stream. Many at this moment refused RSS (Robert Skoble then declared that RSS is dead)
After a couple of years, we got a little more progress - the equivalent of auto-parking, when there were reading rooms combining social streams, RSS and a whole bunch of everything else under one roof - Flipboard, Pulse, Currents and others. It was not a breakthrough, but it really became a bit more convenient, and some more people left RSS.
(Photo from dokas , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
And now, finally, we are approaching self-driving car services such as News360, Prismatic and Zite, which use machine learning and artificial intelligence to find the most interesting content, filtering garbage from your existing streams and finding things that are completely different. would pass by you. While this technology is still in its infancy, the accuracy of understanding your interests is far from ideal and there are still a lot of problems that need to be solved, but this is a big leap from what it was before.
But we must understand that even when the roads are full of unmanned vehicles, there will always be people who want to drive with a manual gearbox. Some - because they do not believe that the machine can do it better than themselves, some - because they just like it. There is a certain pleasure in the fact that you fully understand how information reaches you, and control the process - especially if you are a power user who sets everything up for himself.
That is why closing Google Reader is a mistake. Enthusiasts are a group of people who cannot be rejected, they passionately love the products they use and the lost trust does not justify saving resources that Reader consumed. And certainly these enthusiasts will not switch to Google+ or Currents, if the idea was in this. They will simply find another car with a manual gearbox.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/173859/
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