Google ur doin it wrong

O leitor de feeds Google Reader vai ser desactivado a partir de 1 de Julho de 2013. Este texto só está disponível em Inglês.

Lack of users, Google says. That seems to be the main reason presented by the Big G to explain the decision to power down Reader. Well, I could be wrong but when your worldwide community of users goes so berserk that “google reader” becomes a bigger Twitter trend than “pope” on Pope election day, something just doesn’t add up.

I thought you had to be a genius to work on Google. Don’t you need a NASA-level IQ just to pass that admission test. Maybe it’s all those fancy offices. Too much time staring at aquariums and lava lamps.
So, usage of Google Reader has declined. Well, boo-hoo, why don’t you get your head out of your ass and do something about it? Nobody expects an eight year old platform to remain static forever. But to shut it down? I mean, you have an online infrastructure accessed daily by millions and millions of users, multiple times a day, and all you can do is say well thank you ladies and gentlemen, please proceed to the nearest exit as we’ll be shutting our doors on July 1st. Really?

Reader is just the next victim in Google’s strategy to build its own social network. It just doesn’t fit FaceGoogle. Reader is declining because resources have been slowly pulled away instead of making it a platform for innovation. And now, Google’s final answer is to alienate instead of integrate.

We’ve seen it before in late 2011 when Google+ was introduced. By then, Reader endured a visual upgrade but was amputated of one of its most important functionalities: sharing.
From that point onward Reader navigation became a much more opaque experience, with users forced to share items on Google+. Its former greatness relied on the possibility to track someone’s shared items. Everyone could signal/share articles from a specific field of knowledge, and these were free to follow on your own subscriptions feed.

In opposition to the once open landscape of Reader, we were forced to navigate in the enclosed rooms of G+. Now, Google just discards it altogether, sustained by the argument that “normal people” don’t use it; they don’t even know what rss is! The dictatorship of the “normal people” is just the expression of a culture that sees users as numbers instead of people.
Google has become one of those corporations building private walls on the vast space of the internet, closed in circles. And the simple truth is this: the Google we once knew and loved just doesn’t exist anymore.