Google Reader was building the wrong future<br>Buttondown<br>Pricing<br>Log in<br>Build your newsletterSign up
Google Reader was building the wrong future<br>The app that taught us to directly follow our favorite creators.
Matthew Guay
July 1, 2026
blockquote>p]:py-2 [&>blockquote>p:only-child]:py-10 prose-blockquote:!px-8 prose-blockquote:not-italic [&>blockquote>p:only-child]:text-center [&>blockquote>p:only-child]:font-bold [&_blockquote_a]:text-current [&_blockquote_a]:underline my-8 mx-auto prose-img:border prose-img:border-border prose-img:rounded-lg prose-img:mx-auto prose-img:transition-colors [&_img.cursor-zoom-in:hover]:border-muted-foreground lg:!max-w-[calc(65ch)] [&_li>code]:inline-block [&_li>code]:px-1.5 [&_li>code]:mx-1.5 [&_li>code]:bg-gray-200 [&_li>code]:before:hidden [&_li>code]:after:hidden [&_li>code]:rounded-md [&_p>code]:px-1.5 [&_p>code]:mx-1.5 [&_p>code]:bg-gray-200 dark:[&_p>code]:bg-zinc-800 dark:[&_p>code]:text-white dark:[&_p>code]:border dark:[&_p>code]:border-zinc-700 dark:[&_p>code]:leading-[32px] [&_p>code]:before:hidden [&_p>code]:after:hidden [&_p>code]:rounded-md [&_p>code]:break-all [&_table]:bg-sidebar [&_table]:-mx-4 [&_table]:border [&_table]:outline-muted [&_table]:outline [&_table]:border-collapse [&_table]:border-solid [&_table]:mx-auto [&_table]:my-8 [&_table]:overflow-hidden [&_table]:rounded-lg [&_table]:shadow-md [&_table]:text-md [&_table]:w-full [&_td>p]:my-1.5 [&_td]:!px-4 [&_td]:font-system [&_th>p]:my-1.5 [&_th]:!p-2 [&_th]:text-sm [&_th]:!px-4 [&_th]:bg-card [&_th]:text-left [&_thead]:border-border [&_tr]:border-border break-words prose-a:text-blue-600 [&_a:hover]:bg-blue-500/20 prose-hr:mb-14 prose-hr:border-border prose-hr:mx-20 dark:prose-strong:text-white dark:prose-headings:text-foreground dark:text-foreground [&_small>p]:text-sm [&_small_thead]:hidden [&_small_td:last-child]:text-right [&_.caption]:text-sm [&_.caption]:text-muted-foreground [&_.caption]:text-center [&_.caption]:mt-8 [&_.caption]:-mb-4">What the Google Reader obituaries miss—and they’re many, beloved as it was by the commentariat—is that Google Reader was living on borrowed time from day one.<br>It started life as a feed previewer, to ensure the Blogger team’s Atom feed parser was working. Only, this internal tool was strangely useful as a way to get caught up on the headlines from your favorite sites. “I think I built a thing,” Googler Chris Wetherell recalls telling a colleague. And in the freewheeling early days at the search giant, where anyone could work on a 20% Time Project, that feed previewer slowly morphed into a feed reader app codenamed Fusion.<br>But others had already laid claim to the Fusion name. Names like Transmogrifier and Reactor were batted around, before the team settled on the Googly simplicity of Reader, and a quiet launch on Google Labs.<br>And “it immediately crashed spectacularly. The site simply couldn’t keep up with the traffic on the first day.” Or for many days thereafter, as “hundreds of thousands” joined Reader in the first couple weeks after it launched. “Everyone from Google used Reader, from Larry and Sergey to the newest engineers,” recalled Google user experience designer Jenna Bilotta. “It’s such a beloved project.”<br>Yet the name Reader belied the larger ambition behind the project. “How do you stop from being distracted by, well, the whole internet? It’s an endless divertimento,” pondered Wetherell aloud two weeks after Google Reader’s launch. The real goal was turning the internet into a never-ending TV.<br>Everything, all at once
The first prototype of Google Reader<br>Internally at Google, feeds weren’t what made Wetherell’s code exciting. Instead there was an idea, bubbling under the surface, as people published blog posts on Blogger, shared photos on Picasa, and uploaded clips to Google Video.<br>“The questions we began to hear from users changed from ‘How and what do I blog?’ to ‘Where do I find the good ones?’ and ‘How do I keep up with all of these great blogs?’,” recalled Google Reader product manager Jason Shellen years later. So when this “feed parser that had mutated into an unholy ur-product,” as Wetherell called it, showed up at Google, it seemed to promise an answer.<br>Google’s mission was stated as organizing the world’s information. And maybe, search wasn’t the only way to organize things. Maybe Reader promised a way that content could be “fused together perhaps in a new TV-like format.”<br>Or, as Wetherell more philosophically put it, during his pitch meeting for turning his code into a product: “Feed reading is inherently polymorphic.” Of more than one form.
Writers loved it for text, but Google Reader had everything—podcasts included<br>Feeds could be whatever you wanted them to be. Parse them into a simple reader, and you have a personal newspaper of your favorite sites’ headlines. Parse them up in another way, though, and you could have a slideshow, a flipboard, a list of today’s most important things distilled from the firehose. And then, maybe, you’d have...