Non si placano le polemiche per il nuovo Google Reader, incentrato (molto) attorno a Google+ e (poco) attorno alla lettura dei feed RSS. Tra i commenti negativi, anche quello di un ex Product manager Google che ha lavorato a Google Reader fino allo scorso luglio, quando ha abbandonato l’azienda.
Google has long neglected Reader as a product. (Hey can someone fix Recommended Items? Please?) Reader was fortunate to have a passionate team that was trying to do the right thing for their users by continuing to innovate and build on the experience, but it’s not hard to tell from the official blog that core updates died down a long time ago.
Reader never achieved the massively popular status of Gmail or Google News. But it did develop a fanatical following of users, and was one of the few places that Google was able to experiment with and learn about social features.
After I left Google in July, I heard that there was renewed effort around the project and that a new team was bringing some much-needed attention to the product. I expected them to give the product a facelift, and integrate G+ — both things that needed to happen.
But killing off functionality that could have easily been built on top of G+, and missing the mark by so much on the UI… and then releasing them under the guise of improvements?
Bad decisions, indeed.
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