"the shuttering of Reader in order to make way for that ghastly Google+"
There's a lot of erroneous assumptions in there. Reader was never really a product with much support, it was more a labor of love of a small dedicated team. Reader was not shutdown to "make way for G+" anymore than any of the other spring cleaned services were shut down because of competing services. Even the original (ex-Googler now) Reader engineers have pretty much outlined many of the reasons, including the decline of RSS, which was killed off in large part by people moving to services like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
It's really regretable, but it's time to realize that the rest of the world moved on, and if we want federated, open services, it's going to have to built from the ground up, and in a way that users, not hackers, will want to use it.
There's a lot of erroneous assumptions in there. Reader was never really a product with much support, it was more a labor of love of a small dedicated team. Reader was not shutdown to "make way for G+" anymore than any of the other spring cleaned services were shut down because of competing services. Even the original (ex-Googler now) Reader engineers have pretty much outlined many of the reasons, including the decline of RSS, which was killed off in large part by people moving to services like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
It's really regretable, but it's time to realize that the rest of the world moved on, and if we want federated, open services, it's going to have to built from the ground up, and in a way that users, not hackers, will want to use it.