Hi Larry,

I’m upset about the decision to sunset Google Reader, but am even more worried about what my 78 year old grandmother will do once the service goes away. Like most people from older generations, my grandmother was highly skeptical about the internet, and needed a lot of coaxing to accept the web.

I opened her up to the world of RSS a few years back and subscribed her to a bunch of feeds that I thought she’d like – recipes, quotes etc. The sign-in process I wrote down for her back then is still stuck to the side of the monitor. She follows it religiously and spends a good four hours going through her “internet articles” every day. The problem is, she’s completely hooked now and I know we will never ever be able to get her onto another service. It just wont work. Age is catching up, and she will find it very very hard to adopt anything else. We tried getting her onto Facebook and failed. We tried getting her an email address and failed. She thinks Skype is stupid because it makes weird breathing noises.

That aside, she is going to think that all this is my fault! I gave her this awesome new thing and now I’m taking it away. I know business is business, but I have to try. This is me, respectfully asking you to reconsider putting Google Reader down.

Sincerely,
Dhruv Shanker