[Orva]

> I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category.

I was seriously starting to think I am only one who wants this from web-based rss-reader. Most of the native rss clients are built around this behaviour and I really cannot understand why web readers don't. Maybe A/B testing with bad test cases (or without enough diverse user population) or maybe we are just crazy.

> It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps

Android at least has. It was/is really nicely hidden under all unofficial, privacy violating rip-offs in the Google store.

[seanp2k2]

If Google were smart, they'd open-source Reader and let the people who love it maintain and run it (It's probably much too dependent on their architecture for this to actually be a viable option).

[rikf]

I dont think they are killing ready because of the cost to maintain it. I think its more likely a strategic move to push people onto plus.

[yid]

This is almost certainly impossible. Systems at large Web companies have tons of dependencies on internal systems, libraries and build tools. It would probably be easier to rewrite Reader from scratch rather than open-source it.

[lotu]

Ignoring the dependence on architecture; who's going to pay for the servers that are needed to run Reader? They don't run off love last I checked.

[abraininavat]

If Google were smart, they'd open-source Reader and let the people who love it maintain and run it (It's probably much too dependent on their architecture for this to actually be a viable option).

So.. if they were smart they'd do something that's impossible, you're saying.