Google killed Reader in 2013, shutting down its RSS reader after years of neglect. Now, the team that built it reflects on what they made and how the web has changed in the decade since.
I knew a lot of this story already, except how horribly Google execs treated the Reader team, who built something wonderful and then were forced to constantly defend it and beg for resources, until they were dragged away to work on Google Plus and it was unceremoniously killed.
@andybaio The death of Google Reader remains one of the big eye-opening moments for me about where the digital giants really stood — that for all the rhetoric about empowering people and building an open Internet, they really were just ruthless profit-maximizers like any other. Naive of me to believe any differently... but in retrospect I realize how badly I'd wanted them to be an exception to the rapaciousness of corporate capital.