Image via CrunchBase
Word on the street is Google Reader’s social functions, its funky community of shares and comments, and the archives of these interactions, will all be flushed down the memory hole tomorrow.
I check my Reader every day and it’s always a minute or two before I realize that these people I’m following, these comment threads I’ve become accustomed to, these excellent finds – will all be gone.
In Iran this may have real repercussions. “Gooder” as the Iranians call it, has been an under-the-radar social networking tool for young Iranians and activists in that country, and soon it will no longer be available to them:
In a country which all social website like twitter, facebook, friendfeed, and video or image sharing websites like youtube, tumblr, flickr, picassa and many more are banned, Google reader acts like a social websites and in lack of any independent news website (it should be mentioned that all international news channels like BBC, CNN, VOA, and all other non-governmental news website are banned,) Google Reader acts like a news spreading website. Easy access to Google reader made it suitable for Iranian community and through all these years, specially after June 2009 election, developed an strong community for spreading the news.
So that’s a pretty big deal, if you ask me, and Google is scrapping it anyways.
Francis Cleary has one of the best rants out there posted, of all places, on Google Plus. The whole thing is worth a read because it illustrates, at least to me, how so many different people can use Reader and never interact with one another and still have the exact same feelings about its value and its demise.
“Google Reader is was the best asynchronous social network ever made,” writes Francis. “It’s the closest thing to a party that 25 people, all on totally different schedules, can swing.”
Even if every Reader feature made it to Plus — and shit no they haven’t, and it doesn’t look like they will — the entire concept, culture and process is completely different. You can’t remotely replicate the closed, tight, context- and content-first communities of Reader in Plus. You can’t efficiently or effectively share, excerpt, annotate or discuss a 3,500-word longform news article on Plus alone without opening at least two other tabs.
You can’t sit back with a drink and catch up on discussions that don’t have to be carried on right fucking now or they’re gone forever in Plus. […]
Somebody else can swing in here and grab this niche now that Google’s flushed it. Not rolled it into Plus, but flushed it gone.
But can they? Can some bright young entrepreneur rush in to create a new Gooder for the Iranians? Can they draw us all back like moths to flame or will the Reader Diaspora simply melt into the great wide empty of the internet proper?
Somehow I don’t think so. This is the end, beautiful friend. Too bad Google couldn’t just ignore you forever. Your neglect, it turns out, was the very thing that preserved you.
Oh, and one more thing: I had never heard the term ‘sharebros’ until now. I assume that each various niche within the Reader community had its own self-identification. Hivemind or Horde or what-have-you.
Sign the petition to save Google Reader.
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