Google Reader retires next week, and the Great RSS Gold Rush of 2013 is reaching fever pitch. Bloomberg Businessweek reports.
An RSS reader pulls in feeds of articles from various websites. Created six years ago, Google Reader had taken over the market. When the company announced the decision to power down Reader, they gave two reasons: usage has declined, and they want to pour all their energy into fewer products.
For Google, RSS was small beans. Reader had several million followers, but the company is focused on “obvious markets that serve hundreds of millions of people,” according to Reader creator Chris Wetherell. "This is a perfect way to avoid the risk of creating entirely new markets which often go through a painful not-yet-serving-hundreds-of-millions period and which require a dream, some dreamers, and not-at-all-measurable luck.”
Some might interpret the fact that one of the Internet’s largest, richest companies abandoned this idea as a red flag. Not Feedly, Digg, AOL, Newsblur, and others, which are quickly developing their own readers to fill the Google Reader vacuum. It’s not that they believe everyone wants to immerse themselves in an endless sea of headlines. Instead, they’re betting that the technology will open up larger news-reading markets.
With Google out of the way, RSS might finally develop to its full potential.
[Via Businessweek]
Image: Matt Galligan via Wikimedia
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com