Remember Google Reader? It was one of the more beloved products buried by Google in 2013. The big question is, who killed it? That's what David Pierce at The Verge asked a few weeks ago. I'll spoil the answer now (but you should definitely still read Pierce's excellent article). Basically, the Google+ effort (turned up to 50!) sucked Reader's life away.
Pierce wrote:
"The tide turned when Google decided not just to build a social product but to fundamentally re-architect the company’s apps around social...It would come to be known as Google Plus...By early 2011, with the [Reader] team severely diminished, Reader had been officially put into 'maintenance mode'...the product was otherwise to be left alone. Reader was integrated into Google Plus, sort of, before Plus began its inexorable decline...The damage was done for Reader, though."
The Google+ upheaval was pivotal in Reader going down. Given Google's seismic social shift, though, it’s a wonder that Blogger didn’t suffer the same demise as Reader. A full ten years after Reader died, Blogger lives on. Well, it exists. Like Reader, and given the dearth of any updates and Google's lack of marketing the blog platform, it's likely that Blogger has been in “maintenance mode” for a while, a suspended animation.
So what other factors might be helping Blogger avoid Reader’s ultimate fate?
Pierce explains that Reader never garnered Google’s full support (even before Google+) because it had too few users; it wasn’t in the hundreds of millions. This suggests that Blogger must have enough users (over 100M) for Google to let it be. A large Blogger user-base is plausible since it began many years before Reader and had time to grow. And the fact that Google bought Blogger in 2003 further implies the service had around 100 million users or was clearly on track to reach such a large scale.
Whatever the reason Blogger survives, I'm glad it does. I can only hope Goole never adds it to the graveyard. But with enough time and neglect, the Blogger user-base could dwindle down to a scale small enough for Google to decide it's time to pull the plug. In other words (and I hate to say it), Blogger's fate seems inevitable.
But one can always hope.
Amidst the demise of Twitter (web 2.0 social media) and the resurgence of small online communities (Mastodon et al.), we see a burgeoning Fediverse, a more independent web. And it's reminiscent of the Blogosphere back when the web was more personal and less commercial. Despite being owned by Google, what if Blogger (a remnant of that former time) has enough core energy left within it to be fully reinvigorated into the current social zeitgeist?
Blogger may be mostly dead, but it's not all dead. It might take a Miracle Max.