A good lower limit. Not everyone has the time or inclination to take immediate action. I'm a heavy user of Google Reader and I haven't yet taken an action. I probably won't for at least a few weeks.
What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.
Gathering a specific demographic, such as Greader's is the dream of many startups. Specific demographics may require specific monetization strategies, but that hardly makes the business a flop.
Sometimes, to score a goal you need to move the goal post. In this case, use a different monetization strategy.
Agreed. I'm a big Google Reader user, and will inevitably be trying out Feedly, but just haven't had the chance yet.
Judging by the amount of people I've spoken too over the last few days, there's a whole lot more than 500,000 of us. I'd love to see how many people Google considers not worth their time. I'd happily pay for Reader.
I'd love to give The Old Reader a try... but when signing in through google, they seem to want "Manage My Contacts" permission.. there is no legitimate reason for needing to see my contacts to sign up. I'm pretty mindful of Android app permissions as well.
If it said that it was asking for it and why, I may have allowed it, in any case it doesn't seem to ask for that anymore... :) Now, if my import would process already.
In the last two days only 500 people in front of me have left the queue. Feedly definitely gets point for their speed, but as others have stated the layout just isn't for me.
Same here... I read all my news through Reeder on the iPad. I won't be taking action until I find out what services they plan to add to replace Google Reader.
Exactly. I'm waiting for word from the Reeder and NetNewsWire developers. Depending on the solutions (and timeframe) they come up with, I'm staying with Reeder or going back to NetNewsWire.
This probably won't help. Google projects are typically built to run on their very specific infrastructure. It's unlikely that an open sourced version would be viable outside of Google. It's always possible though.
Maybe they could release a version that would run on AppEngine and customers could just pay for their own or something.
Google can't open source Google Reader even if it wanted to because, to make connections and recommendations it used Google's Crawler which is part of the rest of Google's infastructure - something which Google definitely won't open source. As well as using Google's Crawler, the Google Reader team created separate recommendations to improve Google Reader and those people don't come cheap either - and giving up that knowledge is valuable to Google's competitors.
What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.