Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...The fact of the matter is, the way people consume information has fundamentally changed. And to tell you the truth, RSS readers were never going to be a mainstream tool for information consumption. Instead, they were a bridge technology -- a hold out until the social and mobile infrastructure could allow for a better set of tools.

 

The death of Google Reader isn't just about the retirement of yet another Google tool -- it represents a much larger shift in how people are consuming news and information. Information in a Social World The move by Google makes a lot of sense. While Google cited a decline in usage as the reason for Google Reader's retirement, it's pretty clear to us that if Google was ever going to make Google+ a success, it had to send Google Reader packing.

 

Although Google had previously gone through a period in which it created a seemingly endless flow of consumer applications and waited to see what stuck (anyone remember Google Wave?), now the search engine giant is reducing its products to a core list. And Google really needs Google+ to succeed for it to continue to evolve search in the long-term.

 

Today, the social graph is the killer app in information discovery. You know, like, and trust your social connections, and now you depend on them for information discovery. Although Google Reader served as one of the first news feeds for people to consume information, it has since been replaced by every social network that has its own news feed -- which enables you to discover new information in a way Google Reader never could....