This post ignores one fact: VCs did, in fact, throw millions at Reader-like services and competitors a few years ago, when the RSS scene was hot. Most of them went nowhere, the luckiest got acquired.
A few lifestyle businesses will forever chug along on a few million hardcore fans like me; nevertheless, the overall technology in its current incarnation is an evolutionary dead-end: it's heavy on resources (all that bandwidth!), fundamentally uni-directional and too user-unfriendly to break into the mainstream.
We need to ditch RSS and the current breed of pub/sub tools, rebuild them from scratch with monetization and aggregation in mind (while maintaining a fundamentally decentralised approach), and only then we'll be able to build an ecosystem of easy-to-use apps that can self-sustain in the long run.
A few lifestyle businesses will forever chug along on a few million hardcore fans like me; nevertheless, the overall technology in its current incarnation is an evolutionary dead-end: it's heavy on resources (all that bandwidth!), fundamentally uni-directional and too user-unfriendly to break into the mainstream.
We need to ditch RSS and the current breed of pub/sub tools, rebuild them from scratch with monetization and aggregation in mind (while maintaining a fundamentally decentralised approach), and only then we'll be able to build an ecosystem of easy-to-use apps that can self-sustain in the long run.