Hacker News Reader

> My point is simply that there existed no universe in which a responsible Google would continue supporting it

What about the universe where someone decides that keeping the goodwill of the (yes small, but as we've seen in the past week very vocal) Reader userbase is worth the miniscule cost of keeping it alive in maintenance mode?

View on HN

> Reader userbase is worth the miniscule cost of keeping it alive in maintenance mode

What makes you think it is a minuscule cost? Crawling the millions of feeds and updating the XML parsers as feed formats change is going to cost very real dollars.

A better solution would have been for Google to auction off the service. This would have allowed smaller companies to run it and impose a small fee. While it might not have made sense financially for Google to do this, it might make sense for a small company with a small staff focusing just on this product to make a go of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com