Last week we reported on the demotion of the link to Google Reader below the “more” fold inside Gmail, asking whether it was part of a general trend away from enthusiasm about RSS. That made me very sad, because it decreased the likelihood of casual discovery of this fabulous technology. Now it turns out that Google says (via Twitter, not on its blog or feed!) that the move was a mistake and will be returned soon, possibly as early as today.
Alexia Tsotsis wrote last night that the company determines the placement of services in the toolbar by popularity, and the Picasa photo sharing service was correctly added, but according to a Google representative it should have been in addition to and not instead of Reader. In celebration of the good news, perhaps we should all send the following video, Common Craft’s intro to RSS, to a friend in need of a life changing web technology. It’s easy to be snarky about peoples’ supposed over-reaction to the demotion of a link, it’s another matter to recognize a valuable tool and share it with others.
