Why Google reader is important for us - 2

Last week when i were writing the previous post, I could not imagine that the post would find a huge publicity on internet and tech news. I should thank Miguel Jorge  for first referring to the post and translating it into Spanish which helped a lot to spread the news on the internet. And also special thanks to Sarah-Perez for writing about it on TechCrunch, which appeared on too many other news websites, and definitely ensures that the voice will be heard. 

And also great thanks to many other friends which helped to spread it by sharing on social websites like chernobylheart, techdelight, VahidOnline and many others on twitter and many others (more than 500 indexed page on Google!) by writing about the same issues on their Weblog or linking the post. 

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time which we see such a strong request from users against stopping an online service and probably first, which did not stayed just on internet :) 

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In previous post, I wrote about some of the reasons why Google Reader gained a lot of  success and popularity between Iranian users. Among all the ways for skirting the heavy filtering in Iran (which all are painful, slow, expensive and not for a normal users) Google reader is the simplest and best one!

This popularity is due to enabling users to access easily to blocked and censored news websites (which now includes all the non-governmental news websites, weblogs, social websites, image and video and music sharing websites) by subscribing to their web feed. And thanks to sharing the same domain with google.com and https protocol, it is not easy to filter the Google reader, then it is accessible via https protocol. 

Unlike Google Reader, in Google Plus, one can only share the link, for reading the full content you should click on it. If the link is filtered (which is the case in most of the time), it is not possible to access via Google Plus.

And all these are true When Google+ is not filtered yet, but like many others similar websites, it should be filtered very soon. And because it is on a Google sub-domain they can filter it without blocking the whole Google domain.

I am not sure about the probably CEO related reasons behind new strategy for choosing the sub-domains for their products by Google, but whatever it is, It will just ease them to be filtered.

It is true that, only social features are going to be removed and integrated on Plus, but, these features are vital to keep the Google reader lively. I also wrote in previous post about the user communities in Reader here.

But after all, now I am sure that Google has heard the voice and I hope they will let the Google Reader be the way it is now, without scarifying it for Plus. For sure if final state of plus is much better, users will select and immigrate to it.  

All this week, I was waiting for this promised changes by Google to Google Reader, but apparently we should wait a bit more to see what is the final decision about Google Reader.