Google Reader announced its shutdown exactly a year ago
> all the air sucked out by Google<p>I don't think that's fair.<p>Google Reader was Blockbuster Video.  It lacked the personality of all of the RSS Aggregators (aka mom'n'pop rental stores), but it looked nice, it had most of what you were looking for, and the price was fair (lol).  But it was a giant, faceless and unchanging monolith.<p>Well, the brick and mortar rental DVD market is dead.  And so is the cloud RSS aggregator market.  Is it Blockbuster's fault that DVD rental died?  No.  It got replaced by better things.  Netflix, Amazon Instant, Hulu+...<p>Cloud RSS Aggregation sure felt nice, but as a business, I'm not convinced it was at all sustainable.  Being an inherently read-only medium, where you have to maintain a huge library of content to be useful, is shaky ground to me.<p>We like the technical idea of RSS, but we all read Facebook, Reddit, and HN.  Why is that?