{"id":646953,"date":"2013-03-15T09:42:50","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T13:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=620870"},"modified":"2013-03-15T09:42:50","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T13:42:50","slug":"why-the-death-of-google-reader-doesnt-bother-me-that-much-social-news-has-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/646953","title":{"rendered":"Why the death of Google Reader doesn\u2019t bother me that much \u2014 social news has won"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled this week<\/a> about Google’s decision to “sunset” its Google Reader RSS service, including a post from my paidContent colleague Laura Owen about how much she relies on her feeds<\/a> — a sentiment I know Om shares. Unlike a lot of my fellow news junkies, however, I’m not really that concerned about Google’s decision, mostly because I stopped using my RSS feeds several years ago and haven’t looked back. For me, socially-powered news from Twitter and other services like Prismatic has not only taken the place of my feed reader but improved on it.<\/p>\n

I should note that this isn’t the only reason I’m relatively unconcerned about Google’s decision: I also think there will be plenty of alternatives for those who wish to continue using RSS feeds as their main information diet, including Feedly — which says it has cloned the Reader API<\/a> and created its own back-end for other services to use — as well as NewsBlur, and a proposed reader client that the new managers of Digg say they are working on<\/a> for release later this year. Instapaper founder Marco Arment says he remains optimistic about the future of the RSS reader market for much the same reason<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An RSS reader is no longer enough<\/h2>\n

For me personally, however, the reality is that RSS feeds have ceased to play a key role in my news consumption. I still think RSS is a crucial part of the plumbing that underlies the web — and I hope the death of Google Reader isn’t the beginning of an attack on RSS<\/a>, as some suspect — but for me it lacks a certain something, and that something is the element of social interaction.<\/p>\n

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For me Google Reader has been dead since 2009. Here's a post I wrote back then: scobleizer.posterous.com\/why-i-dont-use\u2026<\/a> Social killed it.<\/p>\n

—
Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) March 14, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like Laura, I used to have hundreds of RSS feeds from different blogs<\/a>, websites and traditional news sources in my Google Reader, and I used apps like Reeder and Feedly as a front-end for those subscriptions, and also imported them into Flipboard and other apps when that was available. But as I built up a number of Twitter lists — separated into different topics and focused on both blog sources, news feeds and individual users in those subject areas — I found I was spending less and less time in my RSS feeds.<\/p>\n

The key difference, as New York Times<\/em> editor Patrick Laforge (and others) have mentioned, is that social news distributed via Twitter and other networks is just that — social. It has a human element<\/a> that automated RSS feeds simply can’t duplicate (at least not yet). This isn’t just a touch-feely thing either: From a purely informational point of view, social news carries a ton of meta-data along with it, by virtue of the fact that a specific human being chose to tweet a link, or re-tweet one, or comment on one.<\/p>\n