Google Reader May Evolve Into Read/Write App
James Corbett has
an interesting post speculating that Google Reader might become a 'read/write' app
over the course of 2007. Says James:
"The addition of support for tagging and link blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a fully fledged Reader/Writer (let's call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is the first product that will tie the major pieces of the Read/Write web together - RSS/ATOM (feeds), OPML, Social-Bookmarking/Tagging (folksonomies), Attention and Microformats."
I agree that Google Reader has been adding some fantastic functionality over recent months. Indeed I now use Google Reader as my main RSS Reader - just last week I loaded it up with a bunch more OPML files and RSS feeds. Also by reading the official Google Reader blog, you can tell the engineers are passionate about building up and adding new things to the product - something sadly missing in other top online RSS Readers, some of which have stayed largely the same for 2+ years now.
It remains to be seen whether Google Reader will add more 'writer' features over 2007 - Google has to be careful the product doesn't become too geeky and experimental. You can quickly scare off people with talk of OPML and microformats (guilty!). But I think Google Reader is the most interesting online RSS Reader around right now, so if they can integrate the 'writer' functionalities into the product in a way that they're very easy to use... the RSS reading market could come alive again.
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Indeed, a very interesting observation by James Corbett. At first I only liked the link blog possibilities in Google Reader but since about a week I am using it more and more. It seems it will replace Bloglines someday.
Although Google Reader allows tagging I don't think it will become a full-fledged social bookmarking tool or an annotation service like Clipmarks. On the other hand Google could bury its Notebook product and then...
I far prefer NewsHutch to Google Reader. It has a 'flow' like quality thats hard to describe; give it a try.
There are other interesting readers out there, such as Spokeo. It syndicates multimedia content from social networks.
Now if they would just let me *search* my feeds it would be the best reader out there....
Interesting article. I agree that as link blogs become more popular, they may attract readers away from actual blogs.
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how the Google Reader look and feel could be extended to every Google service, essentially allowing people to star and share anything, not just RSS items - http://www.imjasonh.com/2006/12/seeing-stars-and-shares.html
Very interesting post and insight from James. I elaborated a bit more about this idea on my blog, hope you like it:
http://notariussystem.blogspot.com/2007/01/missing-piece-of-blogosphere.html