Death of Google Reader ≠ death of disaggregation

James Temple

I certainly commiserate with those lamenting the demise of Google Reader, a well loved product that many relied on to capture the droplets of compelling information amid the fire hose of online content.

But some commentators saw a far more ominous message in the news that the online giant is officially pulling the plug on Reader, which allowed people to track and scan multiple RSS feeds that  update whenever a particular author or publication adds content.

Many read the news as a kind of nail in the coffin for RSS and some fear that would amount to a victory for “silos” on the Internet, forcing people to navigate to particular sites (say the NYtimes.com or SFGate.com) to cobble together their daily reading.

Eric Goldman, law professor at Santa Clara University, went a little further in a post for Forbes. He argues the demise of RSS, which feeds you news directly instead of forcing you to go to it, enhances the troubling tendency of people to seek out Internet echo chambers, where they only encounter voices and opinions that support their own.

“Without an RSS reader as reliable and efficient as Google Reader, my information flows will be lower-volume, slower, more heavily intermediated by third party algorithms, and–as the dystopians predicted–less diverse,” he said.

I agree with Goldman that this is a dangerous trend that’s already created a far more polarized society, where each side of debates now feels entitled not just to their own opinion, but their own set of facts.

But I don’t think the death of one product or even one technology would notably worsen this.

For starters, RSS may or may not be in all that much trouble. There are already plenty of popular products that rely on it, like Flipboard, Feedly and Pulse, and probably some more on the way.

That alone addresses a big part of this.

But ultimately I think RSS matters a lot less in the age of social media, as anyone can follow their favorite writers and publications directly on Twitter and to some degree Facebook.

Goldman addressed this, saying he believes social media doesn’t work as well for news:  ”I already use it extensively as a complement to RSS, but it’s scattershot and much slower to read.”

But I actually think it’s better. I personally dropped Google Reader long ago as I found it far easier — and much more entertaining — to use Twitter as my news feed. In addition to seeing what my favorite writers post, I immediately see the breaking and trending stories by people I never knew to follow. I also get to interact with them, posing them questions or posting counterpoints.

In both the case of RSS and social media, I believe you get out of news feed what you put into it. The more you tweak your follows and lists, the better and more personalized your results become. See Alexis Madrigal’s masterful take on that point over at the Atlantic.

But beyond that, I simply don’t believe that people would be any more broadminded in setting up their RSS feeds than they are in choosing whom to follow on Twitter, Facebook or any other platform. And I definitely don’t believe that readers are going to rush back to reading single news outlets promising “all the news that’s fit to print” anytime soon.

The Internet broke that model long ago, and all the media kings’ horses and men (and women) have not been able to put it back together again– much as they’ve tried.

People obviously still seek out general interest publications (luckily for me), but it’s generally just one part of their reading experience.

More typically, modern readers cobble together personalized daily briefings on their favorite subjects from across the Web. They hop, skip and jump their way through news on their favorite sports teams, actors, hobbies, stocks, local news and more, arriving via social media, aggregators, RSS feeds, search pages and links within other stories.

It’s  why Twitter works, why aggregators do so well and why tablet apps weren’t the panacea the industry had hoped. It’s also why we’re not likely to return to media silos anytime soon, whatever the fate of RSS.

More on the end of the Google reader here.

Categories: Uncategorized
Seattle p_i_newmedia
http://blog.seattlepi.com/techchron/2013/03/14/death-of-google-reader-%E2%89%A0-death-of-disaggregation/
blog.seattlepi.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-22
67080
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VWPUANCHZLLIHUA7IMGU4DAIONDC353H
<urn:uuid:33a220a6-f695-4bc4-908f-45f464f995cc>
2016-05-27T18:12:15Z
104.96.220.99
sha1:DXV3QARFY2NRTDBKKGAGBLARHUILEXYG
<urn:uuid:9ff8d72b-7fd3-4c1e-9eba-033fc5ad62c3>
http://blog.seattlepi.com/techchron/2013/03/14/death-of-google-reader-%E2%89%A0-death-of-disaggregation/
response
<urn:uuid:3c2d216c-90f5-492e-9818-f482d4b7da48>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-217-139.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-22
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf