It's time to get Google Reader back.

Hi, Giktayms! I present to you the translation of the article "by the author Drew Allen's article" to bring back Google Reader ".

To young readers this straightforward statement may seem insane, but let's understand.

1. You find on the Internet the author who interests you. This could be your creative friend, a favorite brand, an online publication or a site that you are eagerly reading, a YouTube channel, a favorite writer, a funny joker on Twitter - yes, anyone.
2. You have a collection of this kind of authors, and you want to receive information about fresh recordings, updates, materials, videos, whatever that may be.
3. You add your subscriptions to this incredibly cool Google tool, and it allows you to automatically keep up to date with all the fresh stuff from your favorite authors in one place.
4. You never miss a thing, you don’t have to crawl through extraneous nonsense or see an advertisement that is blocking interesting materials.

And what if now I tell you that Google created this tool more than ten years ago, and then, for reasons not completely clear to me, I decided to completely kill the project?

Well, believe me. It happened .

Google Reader was exactly the tool I described above. Why was he given to die? In short, just in a nutshell. Social. Network.

First, more and more authors pushed their readers to keep an eye on updates and to contact them on Facebook and Twitter. Everyone made an account in social networks, and it was so easy and simple to get all the interesting news from friends, bloggers and brands.

Secondly, in mid-2011, Google launched its social network Google+. They thought that if people want to receive updates from each other in this way, then they will come up with their own Google method for this. Then, in 2012, Google Now appeared, which presents concise information / news cards in your Google application, which try to predict your thoughts about what you are interested in watching or reading.

You see, Google viewed Reader as a "news" reader. And from a technical point of view, this was true. At the time of its launch in 2005, it was a rather ordinary way to read news - through the RSS feed (google).

Now people have Google Now for urgent news and then Google+ for less important reading. And everything in this world was beautiful - up to a certain point.

Since then, two significant problems have arisen.

1. Google mysteriously killed its social network in 2017. Someone will say that she has never been alive. I say “mysteriously,” because it’s more like a lobotomy. Now this is not a social network as such, as we are accustomed to count, but a specialized network of interest communities discussing their topics online. The problem is that they removed the simplicity with which a person could subscribe and follow the updates of the beloved author.
2. Other social networks have broken their main promises made to users, both intentionally and unintentionally.

Even if Facebook had never made an algorithmic news feed, a huge number of our acquaintances would have deprived us of the opportunity to use the feed in order to keep abreast of updates from the authors, which we value most.

I’m not in a position to change the fact that my school pals publish hundreds of memes daily, so I’m to a certain degree glad that Facebook sift out some things.

But I also know (and you too) that if there is a brand or blog that I WANT to be up to date with updates, then Facebook is the LAST place to do it. Chances are high that you do not get into the 1% of readers who see their posts.

(I know that there is an option "Priority in the show", but again, this method practically does not work for all people / authors that you are interested in watching. And then updates are shown only from the pages, not from friends.)

So Facebook, Instagram, Google Now and Twitter in general are doing something like building scientific hypotheses (with varying success) that we would be interested to see when we open the application. Sometimes they are right, but they are often mistaken.

On top of all the misfortunes, in the heyday of Patreon and YouTube, in the period of simplicity creating all types of content online, now even more personalities, brands, authors have appeared, for whom I want to watch and greedily absorb their work.

So. Google, it's time to resurrect Google Reader. It was simple, functional, convenient to keep abreast of new products from favorite authors.

And this important quality is quite difficult to find on the Internet these days.