Why the World Doesn’t Need Google Reader Anymore

Google Reader had a good run. As one of the first hosted feed readers, it took the world by storm, effectively killing the market for other feed readers and the innovation that comes with it. In any other place, this would be called monopolistic price-dumping, but in the online world there are no penalties for giving away your product for free.

As you may know, Google announced they are discontinuing Google Reader as of July 1, 2013, which has upset many people online. In reality it’s a blessing. For the past eight years we have seen little innovation in the feed reader market because of Google’s monopoly.

Introducing Curata Reader

Many have used Google Reader without qualms because it’s “good enough.” But why settle for “good enough?” As the sun sets on Google Reader, we are happy to announce we are launching Curata Reader as an alternative to Google Reader.

Over the past few weeks at Curata we realized it makes sense for us to develop an alternative to Google Reader for people looking for a replacement. While there are many other products vying to be the next Google Reader, Curata Reader is different for the following reasons:

• We understand our users. Our customer base has collectively curated and consumed millions of pieces of content over the past few years. We understand how business users, informational service professionals, and marketers utilize dynamic online content. We’re not just striving to make a great feed reader. We are particularly focused on making this a great experience for users whose jobs depend on it.

• We already do it. Curata’s flagship curation product does everything that Google Reader does and a whole lot more. Curata Reader and content consumption overall is not new turf for us, nor is it about building something from scratch. It’s more of an exercise in welding together technology we already have in our back pocket and wrapping it in a new content consumption-oriented user interface.

• We can out-do Google. While Google Reader was a great experience for many, it was pretty simple in how it aggregated feeds, rendered them, and provided recommendations. Curata Reader leverages our Natural Language Processing technology to analyze the content itself to provide a more customized, personal, and intelligent experience.

• We can out-do anyone else. In the past few weeks there has been a lot of chatter about who has the best replacement for Google Reader. Some products have nearly cloned Google Reader. Others have declared RSS dead and are attempting social media-based approaches. While Google Reader and social media are both powerful mechanisms for receiving updates, both can be overwhelming with the volume and irrelevance of content they surface. Rather than delivering a fire-hose of feed entries, or relying on social signals, we use our existing machine learning technology to look at the content itself so you can proactively get only the content that’s most relevant for you.

While we’re not revealing much about the actual product at this point, we are accepting requests for beta invites. We’re only giving away 10,000 at this time, so sign up for yours today.

Read the official press release.