Google Reader was a beloved feed-reading tool that allowed users to curate and read the internet. Launched in 2005, it made the vast and sprawling web feel small and accessible, helping users feel like they weren’t missing anything. However, within Google, the future of Reader always felt uncertain. Various individuals within the company were constantly trying to kill it, despite its loyal following.
In 2013, Google announced the impending shutdown of Reader, citing declining usage as the reason. The announcement was buried amidst other updates and coincided with the election of Pope Francis, as the executives believed the Pope’s story would overshadow the disappointment of losing Reader. However, the loyal following of the app was outraged and this marked the beginning of Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products.
The tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of becoming something big, but Google failed to see its potential. Reader was more than just a feed aggregator; it was a way for users to organize the internet, make sense of the web, and collect all the things they cared about, regardless of their location or type. It was a tool that helped users make the most of the internet and its loss was deeply felt by its dedicated users.
A decade later, the people who worked on Reader still hold fond memories of the project. The small group that built the app did so out of a genuine love for finding better ways to curate and share the web. They faced internal politics and obstacles to create something they believed in. They wanted to keep Reader alive because they saw the potential it had to improve the web.
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The beginnings of Google Reader can be traced back to a battle between feed formats. Feeds are essential for information to move around the internet and there were two main feed formats in the early 2000s: RSS and Atom. In 2004, Jason Shellen, a product manager at Google, reached out to Chris Wetherell, a former colleague from the Blogger team, and asked him to build an Atom-based app as a tech demo.
Wetherell created a simple app called Fusion that converted RSS feeds to Atom and displayed them in a browser app. However, instead of just being a tech demo, Wetherell started using Fusion to actually read content from the sites whose feeds he had grabbed. He realized the potential of Fusion and sent it to Shellen, who also recognized its value.
At that time, most people experienced the internet by typing in URLs and going to websites. Tools like NetNewsWire and Bloglines existed, but they were primarily used by tech-savvy individuals. Fusion, on the other hand, offered a faster and smoother reading experience that felt like a better way to keep up with the web.
Wetherell and Shellen envisioned Fusion as a tool that could bring in various types of feeds, such as photo streams, videos, and podcasts. They saw the potential for a social network component, where users could follow their friends’ blogs. Fusion eventually evolved into what would become Google Reader, a more complete feed-reading product that handled RSS, Atom, and more.
In addition to its role in revolutionizing web consumption, Reader also had the ambition of turning everything into a feed. Wetherell and Shellen saw feeds as a way to transform information into a polymorphic entity with many forms. They presented this vision to the team working on iGoogle, Google’s web-homepage product, which unfortunately was later discontinued.
Despite its demise, Google Reader left a lasting impact on the way we consume information on the internet. It paved the way for platforms like Twitter and influenced the rise of newsletters. It was a product created out of passion and a genuine desire to make the web better, and its legacy lives on in the memories of those who worked on it.
