I have one question I want to propose to the gluttony of companies rushing to replace Google Reader. If it was such a valuable product, why would Google shut it down? I think we are getting too emotional in how we are viewing this market just because a lot of us used Reader. If Google thought there was money to be made with a great RSS reader, they wouldn't have left Reader abandoned for years. If there is a market in which the market leader isn't able to make money, I don't think that I would be rushing into it.
Some of the alternatives available to Reader also have one additional feature built in - Discovery. These companies might look at acquiring Reader users and giving them a taste of discovery, while satisfying the feed reading use case. Discovery then leads to potential monetization avenues. Google could have moved Reader users to Google Currents [1], but I'm not sure why they chose to shut down the product the way they did
I expect that Currents won't live very long. I don't see what value it adds in that space with competitors such as Pulse, Zite, Flipboard and a lot of others. Is anyone actually using Currents? If so, is it any good?
The same thing happened with Yahoo and delicious. People love that stuff, but Yahoo never bothered to develop it. In this space, growth comes through developing public API's. Google is notoriously bad at developing service API's. Don't misinterpret Google's failure to innovate and develop their product as a signal that such a product is inherently not valuable.
