Friday Trivia: Saying Goodbye to Google Reader - SEO-e

Welcome to SEO Advantage?s Friday Trivia feature, where we discuss, dissect and comment on the internet and marketing, and how the two intertwine.

We recently learned that Google Reader will be going dark on July 1^st, but do you know what year it was created?

1. 2001
2. 2003
3. 2005

Answer: C

Although Google Reader has gained prominence in the RSS world, it?s actually among the newer feed readers. The service was first launched in 2005, and will have been in operation for not quite eight years when it goes away this July. In those years it became one of the top RSS readers in existence, offering a clean, easy-to-organize method for viewing news and blogs.

Google Reader and the Online Marketing Connection

Arguably, even as a relative late-comer, Google Reader can be given at least some of the credit for the popularity of RSS, and hence the popularity of blogs, which have become a mainstay of online marketing. Gmail is one of the top free e-mail services on the web, and many Gmail users became Google Reader users by default because of the connected service. For a fair portion of users, Google Reader offered their first experience with an RSS aggregator.

As more people began to use RSS as part of their daily lives, blogs became even more popular. They shifted from a method primarily used for personal expression to a near-requirement for businesses looking to grow customer engagement. Some blogs themselves became businesses, garnering deals for books and television shows.

While personal blogging still exists, the blog has now become a powerful business platform. With the loss of Google Reader, however, some users are moving away from RSS altogether, and instead continuing a trend that had already begun to gain traction. As online marketers, we need to be aware of this shift and account for it. That means realizing that consumers who are leaving traditional RSS readers behind aren?t leaving blogs behind. They still want the kind of engaging content and conversation that springs from blogging platforms, and businesses need to provide an easy way to track that content.

Social Media: the New RSS?

The reason so many are finding it easy to move away from RSS is that forward-thinking businesses are already providing an alternative method of tracking updates to favorite blogs: social media.

At SEOA, for example, every blog post we publish is immediately shared on our Facebook page. Chances are that?s how you ended up here reading this. This practice gives you a way to track us without an RSS reader, not to mention an easy method for sharing posts you might find interesting, and multiple options for joining the conversation.

This type of change is part and parcel for the online marketing experience. The dynamic landscape of the internet is what attracted so many of us to the field in the first place. From the perspective of an internet user the loss of Google Reader may be a disappointment, but from the perspective of an online marketer, it?s an opportunity to move forward, adapt, and develop new approaches.

Source: http://www.seo-e.com/online-marketing/friday-trivia-saying-goodbye-to-google-reader.htm

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