Google Reader Suffers Down Time
Google Reader, the market leading RSS reading platform according to some reports, appears to have suffered from technical difficulties resulting in feeds not refreshing from around 11pm US PST Sunday. — Reports on the Google Reader user forums would confirm the issue.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Reader opened its API back in December 2005, positioning it as more than a consumer toy — a platform other tools could build against. By mid-2007 some reports already call it the market-leading RSS reader, which is what turns a routine service hiccup into news: the outage hit around 11pm US PST Sunday and left feeds unrefreshing, confirmed only through user forum reports rather than any Google status channel.
It also fits a pattern in this corpus — Google News broke just now in February 2007, so this is the second high-profile Google property to stumble this year. Pickup was modest (Download Squad ran the same item), suggesting the story mattered mostly to the RSS-heavy audience rather than the mainstream tech press.
First-order effects
- Users who route their daily reading through Reader saw feeds stop refreshing overnight, with the user forums — not Google itself — serving as the de facto outage notification system.
Second-order effects
- For a product described as market-leading, every hour of downtime raises the reliability question for heavy feed consumers evaluating alternatives, and exposes how an open API concentrates third-party dependence on one hosted service.
Third-order effects
- Analysts argued in 2006 that RSS is the most influential shift of the post-2001 technical and business community; if that holds, aggregation migrating into a few hosted platforms makes one company's uptime a shared-infrastructure concern for readers and publishers alike — the same usability and openness tensions panelists flagged at the Blog Business Summit in 2005.
The trend: RSS reading is consolidating into hosted platforms whose reliability becomes de facto infrastructure for the blog ecosystem, making outages systemic events rather than private inconveniences.