I've hired research assistants through MeFi before, and it worked really well. I have a budget to pay people for work, but it is research assistant pay. So, I want to hire a couple MeFiers who would want to help me put together a list of companies/products in the space, when they enter, what features they have, etc.
Observing what pops up, and when, and what business models they follow, will be both interesting and help us answer some important questions about how new players enter the market and how markets are segmented. Rhaomi is dead-on in that the Reader is a complicated tool, so it is unlikely that there will be a clear One True Solution for everyone. I am an academic who researches entrepreneurship, and I have been really fascinated with the way in which the sunsetting of Reader is creating an opportunity for new ventures. Okay, I want to hire someone on this thread. It was very nearly a public service, and its going to be frustrating trying to downsize expectations for such a core web service to what a startup - even a subscription-backed one - can accomplish.
#Import to rssowl from feedly archive#
But to replicate its core functionality - fast updates, archive search, stability, universal access, wide interoperability - takes Google-scale engineering I doubt anybody short of Micosoft/Yahoo can emulate.
#Import to rssowl from feedly code#
It's possible to code up something that looks and feels a lot like Reader in three months, with the same view types and shortcuts. It's the staggering infrastructure that powers it - the sophisticated search crawlers scouring the web and delivering near-real-time updates, the industrial-scale server farms that store untold petabytes of searchable text and images relevant to you (much of it from long-vanished sources), the ubiquitous Google name that makes the service a popular platform for innumerable third-party apps, scripts, and extensions. It's not just the interface and UI, which is pretty easy to clone. Reader is like an iceberg, the vast scale and utility of which is hidden behind its deceptively minimalist, even outdated homepage. I did a lot of reading in the days after the shutdown announcement, from current and former Googlers and developers who worked with RSS, including mathowie (who flirted with the idea of making his own clone). After the initial shock, a lot of people were blithely smug, saying Reader's complacency had held the "industry" back and that there would be plenty of startups to fill the gap, even going so far as to wish it good riddance. July is going to be so much more of a pain in the backside than people realize.
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