When Google announced its plans to shutter Google Reader in March, the Internet freaked out. Twitter users raised their virtual pitchforks in outrage. Bloggers wept, scrambling to find a suitable replacement by the service's July 1 death date.
Obviously Google had to have a good reason to shut Reader down. The company has reams of data on how we use its products, and would not shutter a product that was providing sufficient food to its info-hungry maw. While some users remained devoted, the usage numbers just didn’t add up. The announcement shouldn't have been too unexpected. Google hadn't iterated on the service for years. It even went down for a few days in February.
But there’s another reason Google decided to put its RSS reader to death. According to Mountain View, most of us simply consume news differently now than when Reader was launched.
"As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process,” says Richard Gingras, Senior Director, News & Social Products at Google. “Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day -- replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.”
Google Reader, and other RSS readers, subscribe to this "old" model. You sit, you pore through the day’s news link by link. Yes, some people are glued to their readers constantly. (Guilty!) And yes, you can use an app like Feedly to get your RSS fix on the go, but it’s a passive news-getting experience. With its updates to Now and Plus, Google wants its readers to take this more active approach to news consumption.
Indeed, Gingras said that Google is looking at “pervasive means to surface news across [Google's] products to address each user's interest with the right information at the right time via the most appropriate means." Here are a few ways it's doing that.
Google Now's approach is to leverage artificial intelligence techniques to learn your tastes and habits so it can deliver headline news you’ll want to read, when you want to read it. Since it’s on mobile, it can take advantage of device sensors to consider data like your location, the time of day, and whether you’re stationary or on the road. Over time, it will learn, for example, that you like to get the top headlines during your 8 AM commute, and that you prefer stories about politics and food. If this worked perfectly, it'd be an extraordinarily efficient way to get the news. But to start, it still has to learn your preferences, and -- far worse -- it's not available on many Android devices yet (oh Android fragmentation, you rear your ugly head again).
While Google Now caters to your breaking news needs, Google+ steps in for more leisurely interest reading. Google has been trying to push Google+ as a social media news source (instead of Google Reader) since 2011. At Google I/O last month, Google+ gained some functions that make it smarter about surfacing articles and images readers might be interested in checking out. Say someone posts an article on Google+ that you like. Tap (or click) it to flip it over and see an automatically generated list of related hashtags that you can click to get more related content. In this way you can explore varied sources you otherwise wouldn't know about, or get deeper knowledge on a subject you're interested in.
No matter what Mountain View says about changing user habits, though, both Now and Plus do one thing: They keep you in Google's world. It's a de-emphasis of content source. In other words, rather than reading Cat Fancy religiously, you're reading the Animals category religiously -- a category populated by the sites Google's products think you'll enjoy most. The focus is on the places, people, and subjects surrounding an article, not the brands that create them. And instead of receiving the headlines from CNN in your reader, they're pushed to you on a Google service like Now or Plus.
Or it could be that Google really has your best interests at heart. Whatever the reason, the reality is inescapable. And if you're not interested in subscribing to these newfangled ways of getting the news, at least Digg has its reader coming out, and Feedly's not going anywhere.
