Reader Shutdown: Google puts another nail in RSS’ coffin

It’s probably a good thing that I wasn’t able to write anything last night about Google’s announcement it would be shutting down Reader, it’s RSS aggregator, as of July 1. I was a bit emotional, as anyone who was following my tirade on Twitter can attest to.

I’ve been a Google Reader user since 2005, having evolved to that product after using Newsgator and then Bloglines. But as I saw the writing on the wall that it was being neglected and I decided Reader was the best – really the only – alternative out there.

To give you an idea of how much of a power user I am, I have accounts for both personal and professional purposes. In my personal account I’ve read 300,000+ items since October of 2011, which is as far back as their tracking will go at this point. I used to use Shared Items all the time.

I love Reader because it works for me in more or less the way I want to. It allows me to read as many sources as I want at a time of my choosing. I’ve always described it as “TiVo for web content,” providing me a time-shifted experience that meant I wasn’t missing anything even while I was doing actual work.

Update – Laura at PaidContent puts the above point like this:

The best thing about Google Reader, from my point of view, is that it allows me to scan a lot of information quickly, with the assurance that I’m not missing anything. That’s why, for me, it fills a completely different role than the (equally useful) Twitter does. Twitter provides a snapshot of a moment in time, and you’re likely to miss tweets as they whiz by; Google Reader stores everything. The search on Google Reader is also vastly better than the search on Twitter, and it goes back indefinitely.

But RSS has been on the decline in terms of popularity, buzz and attention for years now as people have shifted over to the “social web.” So many people have written what they think are greatly insightful pieces about how Twitter replaced their RSS feeds, a statement I always felt betrayed a misunderstanding of both Twitter and RSS.

On the social web if your attention isn’t fully devoted to the stream you’ll miss something. But because RSS feeds just aggregate in the background they’re there whenever you’re ready for them. If you want to start with the most recent stuff, great. If you want to start with the oldest posts, that works as well. RSS was flexible enough that you could futz with it and mold it to your own preferences.

But RSS was never understood by the masses. It was too techy for most people. Most people who used it didn’t even know they were using it, despite it being the power behind MyYahoo, iGoogle and other personal portals. So it has not gotten the resources it should have considering just how powerful it is.

Regarding the shut down, some people have been making the argument that it was a free service so the extent of the outrage many people are feeling needs to be tempered. But a company’s inability to monetize a product is not my concern. If they are offering a free product – especially a product that was rolled out in an effort to own a particular market and destroy competitors – then it’s the same implicit contract that exists as if I had paid for it. Sure, every company has the right to shut down something that’s not working for them, but it’s a bit disingenuous to come into a new country, burn everyone else’s field to the ground in order to bolster your own business then arbitrarily fold up your tent and say “Eh, wasn’t worth it.”

Plus, Google Reader was a portrait of my entire interest graph in a way that Facebook, Google+ and even Twitter could never, ever be. It was a representation of everything that I was finely tuned into. This is stuff I wanted to read so much I took the positive action to subscribe to a site in order to follow it. If Google, which makes most of its money from selling ads against contextual content, couldn’t monetize that then it wasn’t really trying.

Update – John at RWW puts the above point like this:

Google makes most of its money from understanding its users intent and interests. Its search algorithm does a remarkable job at ascertaining those things, but each query requires some degree of guesswork. Reader users were explicitly declaring the things they were interested in, through subscribing to feeds, clicking headlines, sharing content and tapping the star button. We were just handing it data, all day long. Of course, the revenue potential would only grow as Google put more effort into iterating and marketing Reader, which it scarcely did. Along the way, it could have offered targeted perks to publishers, many of whom would gladly pay for any chance to stand out in a crowded online news ecosystem.

As I said on Twitter, this is the moment I start questioning my use of all other Google products. I’m sure Feedburner doesn’t have more than a year of life left, though considering migrating the back-end of RSS is much more complex than migrating the front end of RSS one can only hope they’re working with a partner to make that as easy as possible. Some people have advanced the idea of Google Currents as an alternative to Reader, but considering Currents is on the top of no one’s mind I can’t see that being a long-term solution as opposed to a stop-gap before we go through all this again when Google shuts that down for lack of resources and attention.

There are some alternatives. Feedly has made a big push to be the choice people make and I’ve heard a lot of people talk about NewsBlur, which is free up to a certain number of feeds and then charges a small fee. Flipboard is a favorite of some people, but it’s primarily a tablet app and therefore not for everyone.

Honestly, though, I’m less interested in something like this – though I’m certainly going to look into it since RSS is such an important part of my workflow – than I am in seeing someone like Automattic build an open-source aggregator that is sustained by a community of people as opposed to any one company that can decide such a product does or doesn’t fit into their business plan at any given time.

Whatever the case, Google Reader will be missed. But more than that, I hope this serves as a wake up call for a group of people who love RSS and know what it can do and spurs some innovation in this market. It’s too powerful not to attract more attention, even if it does remain popular primarily among the geek set. There are other technologies that have survived – and thrived – on less.

Media’s “good enough” problem

The nut graf from Mathew Ingram’s piece on free content and it’s place in the media publishing world:

When it comes to things like media, your real competition isn’t the product that is better than you, but the one that is good enough to satisfy your customers — and if readers are happy to patronize media outlets that use writing they got for free, or writing they have aggregated and excerpted, there is precious little that freelance writers or any of us can do about it. Our only option, as a number of commenters at Hacker News pointed out, is to make it clear that we want better quality writing by actually paying for and/or clicking on it.

I’ve done my share of free or low-cost writing ($10-$25 per post/article) for other outlets and found it to be a satisfying experience. But he’s right in saying that the best way to support quality is to vote with your dollars. That’s true of any product or industry, but there will always be a market for “good enough” that satisfies what people are looking for at little to no cost.

Visuals increase Twitter engagement rates

Not surprising that putting a photo or other image in a Twitter update increases engagement with that update significantly. It’s the same logic that applies on Facebook and is the reason Pinterest and Instagram have such high engagement rates: Visuals pop.

The consistent display of multimedia updates has been one of the driving factors behind Twitter’s clamping down on the ecosystem of apps in the last six months or so. It wants photos and videos to display in a uniform way for readers since it knows that people like visuals and it wants to encourage that as it looks to attract more media company attention.

Google cleans up Google+ profiles

Google has rolled out a number of small updates to Google+ that, in aggregate, add up to some nice features.

Included in the updates are better profile management in the form of more clearly labeled boxes for personal information that you may or may not want to be public and a much larger – about twice as high – cover photo for your profile.

Better profile management and enhanced ability to show off photos are two common concerns among moderate-to-heavy social network users so these are likely to be very popular.

Quora adds reviews to attract more eyeballs

I tell you…as much as I’m tempted to think Quora is kind of flailing in their “let’s just add one new feature after another” pattern of late, I’m kind of digging the fact that they’re not throwing in the towel until someone actually rings the damn bell.

Their latest rollout is of Reviews, which give people the ability to add star ratings to what they write up. The idea is that when people ask if X show, movie, book or whatever is good people can leave a response that has a quantifiable star rating, thus hopefully making it more of a destination for those seeking such opinions before they go anywhere else. It’s also a huge SEO play since these pages will likely come up highly for searches for “X Movie Title review” and the like.

Most people don’t mind brands listening to their conversations

The majority of those responding to a recent survey by J.D. Power & Associates say they don’t mind brands listening in on the social media conversations being had about those brands.

The study found that most of those between 45 and 54 were aware brands were monitoring what was being said, while many young people 18 to 20, about 40% of respondents, weren’t hip to that fact. More than that most of those who knew this was going on were also completely cool with this happening.

Where it gets interesting is in the number of people who feel such monitoring is invasive. That means, tactically, that any engagement based on what’s being said is going to be seen as unwelcome at best and creepy at worst. The eMarketer story rightly points out that the best advice is often to not respond or engage unless there’s an overt call to do so. If someone wants to get a brand’s attention it looks very different than someone who’s just sharing an idle opinion. But, of course, this goes against the thinking prescribed by those who feel engagement rates of less than 100% are completely unacceptable, despite that never being all that realistic.

On a related note, a SimplyMeasured study found that 30% of companies in the Interbrand 100 have Twitter profiles specifically dedicated for customer service purposes. In such cases, where people have a much different expectation of what sort of listening and interaction is likely, the response rates by the brands are much closer to that 100% mark. But again, that’s a whole different type of program that has it’s own goals.

The big Facebook News Feed changes to note

Yesterday, as you all know, Facebook unveiled changes to its News Feed, the first such update that feature has seen in years, basically since it was introduced. There have been people comparing the changes to features on just about every other social network out there, from Twitter to Tumblr to Google+ and even to the new MySpace. So what are the big points to take away from everything that was announced:

• Material shared through apps will appear much more prominently.
• There are new, separate feeds that show updates from Friends, Music people are listening to, Photos being shared, updates from Pages you have Liked and Games updates including new invitations and friend achievements.
• Photos in the News Feed will now display at 600×600 both on the web and within mobile apps.

There’s obviously a huge emphasis on image-based updates here, something that will be important for brand publishers to take into account as they evaluate their content mix.

But it will be most interesting to see how things change with brand Pages being given their own content feed. Will engagement rates plummet as people opt to focus on updates from their friends as opposed to all those brands they randomly Liked to get a one-time coupon 18 months ago? Will a larger percentage of updates from a brand Page show up in that specialty feed where it doesn’t have so many other updates to break through?

All questions that, I’m sure, will be analyzed over and over again as more people get access to the new look and feel. You can preview that here and get on the waiting list to be given access, though everyone should have it inside of a month or so.

Finally, the notion of this redesign turning Facebook into everyone’s “personalized newspaper” is a tad overstated and hardly a concept Facebook has any unique claim to. After all, that’s exactly what we A) Have now with Facebook (albeit minus posts that can’t for whatever reason cut the EdgeRank mustard), B) Have available to us through a well-manicured RSS reading list and C) Have on just about every other social platform. So while this is a nice journalistic hook that many people have caught on to it’s hardly a new concept that Facebook has invented out of whole cloth.

You can read more about it…well…just about anywhere, but in particular I’d point you to a write-up by my Voce/Porter Novelli colleague Andrew Stolzfus.

Good content = good advertising

There’s a ton of good points made in Brian Morrissey’s piece at DigiDay about Twitter’s emerging role as a media company powerhouse. Specifically he dives into how the company is putting the pieces together to lead a new wave of advertising changes, changes that will put the focus back on quality creative as opposed to the soulless algorithms that have dominated much of the last decade of online advertising.

Here’s the nut graf:

All the innovation, he noted, has been around targeting and bid management for Google’s auction system. What’s been a distant third is creative. Bain made the case that this is backwards. Twitter’s ad system is designed to reward those that create good content. That’s done by people, not machines.

When people talk about “content marketing” it too often means something that is an ad first, with slightly longer text shoe-horned in in some manner. But what Twitter is aiming to do is take content that is already produced – in this case Tweets – and turn them into an advertising unit, which allows for much higher-quality material to filter through than in the other scenario.

It actually makes me think of all the talk about “native advertising, which is back in the news thanks to a new initiative by The Washington Post and now Fortune, which says it will write articles exclusively for advertisers.

Imagine if this kind of situation worked out a bit differently. Instead of new material being written at the behest of advertisers, what if advertisers could pay to promote a story that was already written? So after an article is published – say a profile of a CEO, review of an important new product or what have you – a company could come in and say “We’ll pay $X to stick that to the front page for 48 hours/have that get five extra tweets” or something along those lines.

I can’t imagine it would compromise anyone’s ethics any more than they already are in this new “native advertising” world for existing stories to receive paid promotion as opposed to people being asked to write stories for the express purpose of marketing dollars.

The Internship is to Google as Top Gun is to the Navy

Last week the trailer for The Internship was released. It’s terrible on a number of levels, from the ridiculous levels of cultural ignorance shown by Vaughn and Wilson’s characters (they know The Hunger Games but not X-Men? Really?) to the tired generational jokes on display here. But in an odd way it appears that this is to Silicon Valley what Top Gun was to the defense industry, a thinly veiled piece of propaganda wrapped in a homoerotic narrative.

More interesting than the trailer itself (which isn’t a high bar to clear) is the way it was released, via Google+ Hangout, showing just how much corporate involvement there was in the movie’s making and how they see the movie as a giant commercial.

Three short stories about online publishing

There’s a lot of meaning about the nature web content packed into this sentence from Tumblr in their announcement of a redesigned publishing interface:

After months of careful crafting, we’ve reduced creation on Tumblr to its essence, while carrying over every single feature and making room for some BIG new ones (like completely customizable drag-and-drop photoset creation, faster uploads, and inline reblogging!).

There’s so much about the state of online news media that is summed up in this paragraph in a story about Slate and the pivots it’s trying to make:

In this regard, Slate is like other high-minded publications navigating a tough, even contradictory mission. On one hand, they promise smart and independent ideas; on the other, they’re heeding social media metrics that could tug them to the lowest common denominator. While news sites like BuzzFeed cut their teeth on silly cat photos only to climb up the intellectual and media food chain, it’s unclear whether this process can work in the opposite direction.

The ending of The Verge’s piece on the current state of traffic and editorial direction at digg is all about how the site, at this moment, isn’t giving people enough power and say in what stories are surfaced on the front page and how there aren’t profiles people can set up. And it ends with this conclusion:

The last time Digg took some control back from users was in 2010, when the “version 4″ redesign caused a revolt and mass exodus to Reddit. That level of disaster hasn’t happened with this redesign. But without empowering its users, Digg may have trouble making a real dent in the online conversation.