Unintentional Interfaces: Google Reader's Censorship-Busting Power Will Be Hard to Replicate

Google’s brand name made Reader work in Iranians’ favor.

Journalists and other professional nerds are angry that Google is snuffing out its moribund RSS software, Reader. But as Quartz’s Zach Seward points out, plain old normal folks in Iran used Reader quite a bit to get around internet censorship. And those users won’t be helped by the Reader clones popping up in its wake, because Google Reader’s unintended power as an anti-censorship interface flows from its “Google” pedigree, not its “Reader” functionality.