Google Reader for Android

Google Reader's mobile web app works really well and it has a great interface, so there aren't many reasons to create a native application for Google Reader. The main issue is that the application doesn't work offline, but this is a feature that could be easily implemented.

Instead of improving the mobile web app, Google decided to release a native Android app for Google Reader. The application supports multiple accounts, synchronizes your subscriptions and works offline. It also lets you search your feeds -- a feature that's inexplicably missing from the mobile web app.


Google Reader for Android uses infinite scrolling, has bigger touch areas, it integrates with the operating system's "send to" actions and has a neat trick in the settings that lets you navigate between articles using your phone's volume keys.

Google Reader's Web Page Monitoring to Be Disabled

Google Reader's blog announced that the feed generator for pages that don't have feeds will no longer be available starting from September 30. Google says that not many people used this feature, which is not surprising, considering that it's quite difficult to find it.

Google Reader's page tracking feature was useful to monitor the web pages that don't have feeds. For example, you could use it to find when Google changes the privacy policy, when Google Chrome adds new extension APIs or when there are new products in the Google Store.

Unfortunately, Google Reader's feeds looked terrible. The title for each item was "generated feed for [URL]", the feature didn't detect new images and the feeds were updated when the new versions of the pages were added to Google's search index. Here's Google Reader's feed for google.com and here are the changes found by Page2RSS. Page2RSS found 8 changes in September, while Google only found one. Page2RSS has another important advantage: the service constantly monitors web pages and it's not tied to a search engine that indexes billions of web pages.

Bloglines to Be Discontinued

Bloglines, one of the most popular web-based feed readers, will no longer be available after September 30th. InterActiveCorp, the company that acquired the service in 2005, also owns the search engine Ask.com.

When we originally acquired Bloglines in 2005, RSS was in its infancy. The concept of "push" versus "search" around information consumption had become very real, and we were bullish about the opportunity Bloglines presented for our users. 
 
Flash forward to 2010. The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year, being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn't the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.


Most Bloglines users will probably migrate to Google Reader, which is now the most popular web-based feed reader. Unfortunately, Google Reader is still a niche service and this won't change in the future, so Google will eventually discontinue it. Instead of subscribing to feeds, people prefer to subscribe to other people. Google Buzz, Google Me and other social services will use Google Reader's back-end, while offering a people-centric experience.

Here's the Google Trends chart for RSS: