In early March, Google announced that it would “retire” Google Reader tomorrow, July 1st. An outcry followed. Google Reader had come to define the way many of its information-addicted users sorted through otherwise unmanageable amounts of Web content. It provided an answer to a question everybody asks when they sit down in front of a computer: What should I read right now? Everything.
Reader allowed its millions of users to quickly scan and read every story from any number of Web sites in a single, constantly updated stream. It worked fairly simply: many Web sites produce standardized feeds of their content. Users add the feeds of the sites they want to read—which can number dozens, hundreds, or thousands—to their list, and instead of visiting those however many different Web sites each day, they just wait for the sites’ content to come to them. Launched in 2005, Google Reader was not the first feed reader, but it became the most iconic.
The use of feed readers never became a truly mainstream Web habit, which is why Google is comfortable closing Reader over the shouts of its devoted user base. Moreover, the way we discover and read on the Web has changed dramatically since the birth of Google Reader, eight years ago. While Google Reader’s sharing features spawned an ersatz social network based on sharing feeds with other users, what most users read was largely self-directed.
Since 2005, social media has become the de facto way one keeps up with the Internet, and it has been repeatedly fingered over the years as the culprit in the demise of feed readers generally. Facebook transformed, from a place to stalk classmates, into an unending stream of things to view: links, photos, comments (and advertising). By July 2012, one billion things were shared daily on Facebook. At the same time, Twitter rapidly became more and more popular, creating personalized news—and not news—feeds. Twitter is the most efficient link-sharing medium on the Internet; there is always something to read, and it is almost always up to the minute, with four hundred million tweets per day. And while community-driven link-sharing Web sites have existed for a long time, there has been nothing that approaches Reddit’s current scale or scope as a community-driven link-sharing site. Over the last couple of years it has become a true internet juggernaut, with thirty seven billion page views and four hundred million unique visitors in 2012.
Nonetheless, in killing Reader, Google created a new product category overnight: the Google Reader replacement. A number of companies have sought to build the next Google Reader, in order to woo its millions of users to their Web sites. Good alternatives already exist, but press attention has largely been lavished on one built by Digg, a news Web site that was revived last year. Digg Reader, currently in its early stages, is explicitly intended as a successor to Google Reader; the first thing it asks new users to do is import their Google Reader feeds. It complements Digg’s Web site, which uses algorithms and human editors to surface news and interesting content from around the Web. The current interface is focussed and pleasantly minimal: a soft gray sidebar shows a list of feeds, while content appears in a larger pane on the right side. That’s it.
But a feed reader still represents a fundamentally different vision of gathering information than the social model that has gripped the Web. It is largely a single-user enterprise—a digital monk diligently scanning feeds. And it is intensely focussed on the Web sites most important to the user, rather than the omnivorous grazing that characterizes scanning news on social media, as links are surfaced by the people the user follows.
While Digg Reader is young, and new features are still being built, it will remain a product for power users, tied to that traditional one-person feed reader model, for the time being. When asked what a more social-oriented Digg Reader could look like, Jake Levine, the general manager of Digg, replied by e-mail, “I don’t know if we have the answer yet. For now, we know we have to nail the single user utility.” In the meantime, its internal sharing features are rudimentary, built on “diggs,” —think a Facebook “like”—but they require a concerted effort to use. Digg also denotes stories that are popular in the Reader.
Another reader service that launched last week, called Potluck, provides a vision for what a socially driven feed reader might look like: it creates a list of stories based on what a user’s friends are reading and sharing. When a user wants to share a story, she clicks a button in her browser, called a “bookmarklet,” to dump it into her friends’ Potluck feeds. So when users arrive at Potluck, much like Digg Reader and Google Reader, they find, on the left, a feed of new stories. But those stories are placed in the feed explicitly because a friend—or two, or twenty—has shared it. Imagine a version of your Twitter feed stripped of everything except links tweeted by the people you follow.
There is something to this model: Rdio, a streaming music service, provides a more subtle version, populating its home page with the albums that a user’s friends are listening to. The model creates a passively communal experience in which you know that you’re always caught up with the things your friends are listening to or reading. Still, there are obstacles. Philosophically, the problem with these kinds of social services is that they perpetuate groupthink in a literal fashion. But the more practical issue with people-powered services is that they rely on people. Potluck, right now, feels a little desolate. It’s a classic ostrich-and-egg problem: it needs active users to be interesting, but it’s going to be difficult to ensnare active users when it’s not that interesting.
Everybody consumes the Web differently, so it’s hard to imagine a single reading service that works for every person. But it seems reasonable to think that one combining a person’s deep and abiding interests with the serendipity of social media could work for most. Digg may well be in the best position to accomplish this. It has a Web site, which surfaces new material from the around the Web, and the Reader, which provides a comprehensive view of a user’s favorite Web sites. In addition, Betaworks, its parent company, recently purchased the “read later” service Instapaper, which allows users to save Web articles they come across to access later on their mobile devices. And Digg is just one of a number of companies striving to figure out a better answer to, “What should I read now?” Google Reader may be gone, but there’s never been a better time to read on the Web.
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