James Corbett has
an interesting post speculating that Google Reader might become a ‘read/write’ app
over the course of 2007. Says James:
“The addition of support for tagging and link
blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a
fully fledged Reader/Writer (let’s call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is the first
product that will tie the major pieces of the Read/Write web together – RSS/ATOM (feeds),
OPML, Social-Bookmarking/Tagging (folksonomies), Attention and Microformats.”
I agree that Google Reader has been adding
some fantastic functionality over recent months. Indeed I now use Google Reader as my
main RSS Reader – just last week I loaded it up with a bunch more OPML files and RSS
feeds. Also by reading the official Google
Reader blog, you can tell the engineers are passionate about building up and adding
new things to the product – something sadly missing in other top online RSS Readers, some
of which have stayed largely the same for 2+ years now.
It remains to be seen whether Google Reader will add more ‘writer’ features over 2007
– Google has to be careful the product doesn’t become too geeky and experimental. You can
quickly scare off people with talk of OPML and microformats (guilty!). But I think Google
Reader is the most interesting online RSS Reader around right now, so if they can
integrate the ‘writer’ functionalities into the product in a way that they’re very easy
to use… the RSS reading market could come alive again.
