"I get why Google finally killed Reader. It was essentially free infrastructure and storage for an ecosystem of apps that generated more value (both financial and intangible) than the product itself."<p>That's not what I see at all.<p>From day 1 when I switched from "feedonfeeds" which is basically a self hosted simple web based reader to using Reader many years ago, I always thought the purpose of Reader was for the mighty GOOG to associate my gmail address and web search history and all that stuff with a list of sites I follow so as to sell better advertising. And better spamming of other people with similar interests. So someone reading aaronsons quantum physics blog might get ammo spam because I (and probably many others) read both aaronsons and esr's blog.<p>The true meaning of the abandonment of RSS by GOOG is they're shrinking their "big data" source collection, not growing it, maybe for the first time ever. They've grown their data gathering for so many years, weird stuff like streetview vans gathering wifi SSIDs, over 100 spam emails per day for me even when I no longer use email as a major communications tool, etc. But now they're in a pruning mode, gathering less data not more. That inflection point is the "REAL" story. Maybe eventually they'll inevitably roll back to just spidering the net for search. Or they'll give up on all the "big data" stuff and pivot 100% into phones. Could happen?<p>Another interpretation is reader was for infovores or whatever I am. People who think learning about the world is watching Laverne and Shirly reruns on old fashioned broadcast TV are very profitable to advertise to, but they don't/didn't use Reader. And people like me use adblock. So I'm not very profitable for GOOG. For example, people who won't see our ads, do read both aaronsons blog and esrs blog which is kinda interesting, but who cares, they adblock anyway so no way to spam them. Its more profitable to track and spam the old fashioned TV watchers.