"But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web."
"To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it."
"Ultimately, Wetherell ended up spending some of his 20 percent time — Google’s famous policy of letting employees work on just about whatever they wanted, which ironically died about the same time Reader did — building Fusion into a more complete feed-reading product."
Arguably the death of 20% time at Goggle marked the point where it stopped being an engineer-driven company and became a paperclip-maximiser (paperclips, in this case, being ad views).
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