Reader's Waves

Quite a bit of discussion has taken place over the past forty-eight hours following the news that Google Reader will fade away on June 1st. Some have focused on the implications the announcement will have on the RSS spec, but a great deal — possibly even a majority — of the discussion has taken place around blog readerships. David Sparks’s article The RSS Apocalypse and Aldo Cortesi’s piece Google, destroyer of ecosystems stuck out in particular, where the two bloggers conveyed a similar concern: the potential loss of a huge swath of readers either unable or unwilling — or both — to find an alternative method for subscribing to their websites. But as Shawn Blanc said at the end of Goodbye Google Reader, “Only time will tell, and, in truth, those subscribers who don’t port their feed to another service likely weren’t all that engaged of readers anyway.”