The End of Google Reader = The End of RSS

Although there have been a slew of Google projects that have died in the past due to poor adoption rates, I don’t really feel that the death of Google Reader is one of them; if anything, this could really signify the beginning of the end for RSS feeds.

My reasoning is that with the burgeoning success and uptake of social media – with Twitter at the helm – the need to be notified of new posts has largely migrated across to these platforms, which offer a few more bells and whistles too.

RSS is a bit of an oddity when it came to users as although they were popular with the tech geeks and data-whores, the average user didn’t have much use for their fairly specific agenda.

To top this off, the majority of feeds available only contain the excerpt of the post, so they are really just a notification gateway linking through to the webpage; something that Twitter and Facebook do far more seamlessly and are already integrated into the majority of users’ lives, not to mention the integration of these platforms at system-level of both mobile and desktop devices, more recently.

I don’t really think the future of news consumption has really been determined just yet so this year could be an interesting time to observe its development.