JC Penny'd

Google announced some terrible, terrible
news a few days ago, its Reader product is to end in June of this year.
 Somewhat surprisingly, this has caused an uproar - a bit more than the
folks at Google expected with the various online petitions circulating. There
is one even on the White House - We The People page.  Tech and social news
sites were instantly in an uproar decrying the news in breathless posts,
followed by a flood of giddy articles on what services could replace readers
and which had the best importing tools and interfaces.  

What’s all the fuss? you might ask.  

If you are unfamiliar with Google Reader
(GR from here on out) or RSS feeds, here is the skinny.  RSS or Really
Simple Syndication,  which GR is mostly based on, provides a method of
subscribing to a blog or webpage. These subscriptions allow for news stories,
posts, and updates to come to you rather than having to go to each individual site
to see them.  GR provides a place to aggregate these subscriptions into a
single-managed feed. Folks like me who have over 500 news subscriptions in
their feed laud the management tools, which allow the ability to quickly find
stories and keep them for later reference or to share. 

It also provides a quick

take on what news is ‘trending’ in the tech publications - if you saw a
story come up repeatedly from various sources one could fairly well know
something big was breaking. An NPR commentator, I forget which, stated that
Google Reader went from a news hounds friend to a pro tool in a relatively short time, a statement that I find disturbing and depressing -(more on this later).  I use GR to find stories for the AV Nation shows, but I was sucking up info on it long before.

I feel like I have just watched Goolge get JC Penny’d.  The store, if you have not been listening to business news radio of late, made some big changes in the last few months with hipper
styles, must-have exclusives, and, in a radical departure from standard retail,
offered everyday low prices. The company was only marking up the items by 20%
rather than the 50 -60% standard, eschewing the cycle of sales. The reality,
and the argument JC Penny has been making, is that most sales are preceded by
price increases so that the (x) off percentages will appear larger and still
make the store more money than if you had bought an item “at full price”.
 Seems pretty logical no?  Instead of having to wait for a sale or
coupons or other price cut incentives, JCP was offering a known entity - the
price will always be low.  It’s a win-win, right? Well, no, actually, as the
company's stock has been nose-diving, and sales are downright dismal. Why?

JCP ran smack dab right into the “but I like it that way” contingent of shoppers whose attraction to the process was not in the buying of goods they needed or wanted but the whole framework of rituals. The aforementioned business news shows all had some variation of the interview with ‘former’ or ‘confused’ JCP shoppers who were dismayed at the loss of their preoccupation with trying to game a system.  Forget that, just like a Vegas gambling house, the price game was already won by the retailer.  Whether these folks knew it or not, they were facing the loss of the false sense of power the game gave them.

This same sense of gaming the system is the explanation many are giving for the demise of GR.

A common refrain from a good number of folks, including some of my friends, is that they now use their social graphs to get the news. I use Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook and G+ to get industry and world news as well, but it is not a reliable source(s). Is Twitter useful? Yes- but having it as your main news feed is akin to kids learning from other kids on the playground just what sex is - never the full story and nearly always full of incorrect and sometimes dangerous presumptions.

The Social experience was lauded as opening a new stream of information, one unbounded by the restrictions of traditional media.  We were to get the news often ignored (or, if conspiracy-minded - censored by the Left/Right/Gov’t controlled media) to fill in the gaps.  Instead, many have chosen to narrow cast by limiting the news they get by relying on their friends who most probably are interested in just the same things and have similar opinions.  This is getting the news you want, and it makes folks happy, or rather, it lulls them to a false sense of knowing.
 

This is more than a loss of product; it signals a change that may very well alter many users' views and
trust.  Yes, I realize that many Google products have gone to the grave before, but when a base of 10 million users means nothing to a company (and offers them no alternative) - one has to wonder.   I wonder where all of those Reader addicts will get their feeds - this is a grand opportunity for a biblical slingshot.  Google Reader was praised as being the largest single source driver of traffic to sites, even larger than Fark.com. How panic’d are people? Feedly reportedly gained over 500,000 new users, including me, in less than a few days. 

Think of it this way: if Feedly gets only 2% more of the reader refugees, this is a substantial number to base some serious growth on.  What other productivity tools will Feedly offer me?  I am eager to find out

 This article originally appeared on the AVNation.tv page.