Should-Read: Tim Carmody: Pour some out for the sites that aren’t here: Google Reader: "Some of the best things ever seen or used on the web can’t be saved... http://kottke.org/17/04/pour-some-out-for-the-sites-that-arent-here
...They’re already gone. These are some of them, nominated by Kottke readers: Google Reader: On the one hand, Google kind of ruined RSS, up until then the best distribution method for serial content, by turning it into a product. At the end, some of the best RSS readers weren’t even RSS readers, just frontends for Google Reader, which handled all the resource-intensive work.
On the other hand, Google Reader was a really wonderful community. It had a lightweight social graph component, but it was really oriented around news and stories and blog updates that people shared. Everything that people wanted online comments to be, Google Reader was. And when it ended, it took all of that away, leaving social media networks — which were really never designed to do content distribution — as the only game in town. I honestly don’t know if we’ve ever recovered...
