Digg Hints Its Replacement For Google Reader Will Include Social Media Content

RougeFemme writes "To capitalize on Google Reader's shutdown, Digg is building an RSS reader from scratch. But this Reader replacement will go beyond RSS to include social media content, like Facebook, Tumblr, Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. From their blog post: 'Google did a lot of things right with its Reader, but based on what we’re hearing from users, there is room for meaningful improvement. We want to build a product that’s clean and flexible, that bends easily and intuitively to the needs of different users. We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News. We likely won’t get everything we want into v1, but we believe it’s worth exploring."

No!

[MrEdofCourse]

Not Digg. No, just, no! There's so many things wrong with this.

Here comes Digg thinking Google Reader was just an RSS reader and now wants to join in on the replacement game. Great, so now we'll have a Bazillion and TWO RSS readers!

Google Reader was more than just an RSS client (which there have always been more than enough of). Google Reader was a feed manager and aggregator, with the ability to share posts from feeds and generate new feeds based on the combination of shared items along with a public API for all of it.

The loss of this functionality is pretty significant, especially since Google crushed and eliminated all competition in this field. This is what is needed.

One really important criteria for anyone attempting to fill in here, is that they have to be trust worthy long term. Many sites/companies invested a lot in Google Reader's infrastructure and are now feeling some serious pain as Google has abandoned it. The last thing we want to do is trust someone with a history of foolish abandonment.

So, Digg...

1) You apparently don't even understand what Google Reader is.

2) You have a horrible history of abandonment.