March 14, 2013
Digg Announces Plans to Build Google Reader Replacement

Digg.com says they’re building a Google Reader replacement, as I saw via iPhone in Canada.

Digg says it hopes to implement the best of Google Reader’s features including its API, but also looks to ramp it up to work with what’s required to be on the internet in 2013, most importantly social sharing. They continue to say it’s a pretty big undertaking but they are confident they can “cook up a worthy successor.” The company is also asking the public for feedback in what you’d like to see in a new Reader replacement.

I say this… if Google really values “open” as much as they say they do, release the source code, or as much as possible so that the API and UI (I don’t care if the UI is stuck in 2010, it works great for me) can be re-implemented elsewhere, even just so the core that (I think) most people care about is implemented:

  • The API for third party readers like Reeder, Flipboard, etc
  • The frontend UI
  • The backend crawler

Hell, even just the API and the frontend. Will they? No chance of course, google is as “open” in this respect as anyone else. IE: closed.

Sorry for the tons of stuff about google reader, I’m still pretty broken up about this.





Posted by Arcterex at March 14, 2013 12:43 PM