“That’s a big number – by almost any scale other than Google’s.”

Thirteen years ago today, Google killed Google Reader. In 2023, The Verge wrote a great piece about the shutdown: Google’s feed-reading tool offered a powerful way to curate and read the internet and was beloved by its users. Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge and sprawling web feel small and accessible and helped a generation of news obsessives and super-commenters feel like they weren’t missing anything. It wasn’t Google’s most popular app, not by a long shot, but it was one of its most beloved. In the essay, Google Reader is presented as a victim of Google+. I was at Google when Google+ was announced and can corroborate the feeling of an end of an era at the company. The first large internal presentation was a shell shock: the arrival of secrecy, bureaucracy, corporate delusion, inevitable sycophants following not-so-inevitable bozos. But perhaps it was the opposite – Google as a company would have changed anyway, and Reader…