I just heard that Google will be retiring Google Reader. Reader was the first RSS feeds aggregator that I have ever used. And like many firsts, it is something that I loved. I have a twitter account, Facebook and a Google+ account, but the content I get from those channels is incredibly shallow. Maybe it is my fault and I should friend or follow more interesting people. But really, such is the nature of those social media. You post quips, comments and tweets with a link and that's it. I prefer blog posts that have paragraphs of thought on a single subject. Thus Google reader was my favorite social media tool.
From the standpoint of a user, retiring Google reader is a bummer, but as a developer, this makes me happy. Somewhere in the bowels of Google there are developers who built this product. Either they have just lost the fight and their project was killed, or they have been relieved of their duties from having to support a product that they were tired of working on. If I were them, and I have been in both scenarios, I'd be happy. While it sucks when your project is retired or put on the back burner, it still means you will work on something new. New means that you will learn about a new product, business, or technology. And learning makes most developers I know happy.
Thinking about the company, I think this is great. Supporting applications or features just because there are users drives me crazy. Its good to give users what they want. It is bad to let clients drive the direction of your product. For whatever reason, Google decided that this product costs more than the benefits it provided, and they had the guts to kill it.
Telling clients that they know what is best for them may sound arrogant, but I also think its true and good. Google has developers, who only have so much time to write code, debug issues, and develop products. As long as they spend some time listening to users and tracking their usage patterns, those developers are the only ones who can assess if its better to support reader or go in another direction. A user would never be able to make that decision.
It will be a pain to find a new application that will fill the void left by Google. I hope they provide something else that replaces it. If not, I'm sure someone will develop a similar application or maybe I'd build something for myself.
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