I don't usually upvote Marco.org articles but this one was very good. Before Reader there was a vibrant (niche, but vibrant) market for RSS readers. Reader decimated that market and arguably killed innovation in RSS altogether. I remember when PubSubHubBub and RSS Cloud came out and wondered why anyone would bother implementing them for feeds when all that mattered was if Google Reader was fetching your stuff fast enough (it was).
It's going to be interesting to see how things develop in the wake of the shutdown. There's already a mad rush to provide alternatives, and a bunch of open source readers are in heavy development (I'm using Selfoss personally: https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss). It might turn out that Reader shutting down is the best thing that could have happened.
It's going to be interesting to see how things develop in the wake of the shutdown. There's already a mad rush to provide alternatives, and a bunch of open source readers are in heavy development (I'm using Selfoss personally: https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss). It might turn out that Reader shutting down is the best thing that could have happened.