Google announces closure of Google Reader. WTF!
http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html
http://googlereader.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html

This is why we can't have nice things. Google Reader was just better than most of the alternatives back in the day so they all slowly disappeared as everyone switched. Which then meant there was no money in building a better alternative because Google owned the space. Now it's not paying it's way in Google so they shut it and have effectively killed a whole segment of the software market. And as Dave Winer might say, it's worse than it appears because it kills the idea of rich feeds whether it's RSS/Atom or whatever, which is why G+, Twitter, Facebook and a host of other newer services don't provide them.

Meanwhile we're all supposed to be switching to mobile devices with "Apps" so we get fed "News Services" like Currents, Flipboard and so on that only run on these mobile devices and have more focus on surface froth in the UI than on actually consuming large quantities of news. And they heavily push MSM sources who will pay for the privilege of being highly visible.

The real losers here are the small blogs on wordpress.org, blogger.com and others who will lose visibility, readers and comment engagement because there's no longer any easy way to follow them.

 I'm all right jack because I never used Reader much, preferring my own home written news reader (php+MySql hosted on my rented server) but I'm already suffering from the lack of RSS on major services.

Yahoo! and Marissa Mayer are you watching all this? Here's hoping you pick up the ball that Google just tossed over their shoulder. You've got the resources, servers and infrastructure to directly replace them.

And the real puzzle? There's a whole bunch of ex semantic web, Atom, XML people inside Google. Did they all get sidelined?