My thoughts regarding the death of the original #indieweb and #blogs, and the movement to feed providers that are general and monolithic (FB/Twitter):
Blog use and readership whet the appetites and millstones of consumers and producers for timely content. The means of presentation of such content were largely irrelevant to the content itself, and visiting each source provided more friction than it was worth (see: rise of #RSS).
@starbreaker I agree with both points and really like the latter, which I hadn't thought of. For the former, I don't think my thinking needs to explain the decision to kill off Reader, but that is an interesting thing to think about.
@starbreaker You've got me thinking about the question of why #GoogleReader was killed off.
I wonder if Reader was leading people away from websites where AdSense was being used (reading content in #RSS feeds rather than on source website), so killing it was a means of incentivized people to start reading from the sources again, driving up demand and supply for AdSense.
@bthall I don't thinks this explains why Google killed off Google Reader. Nor does it explain why none of major corporate social media silos ever allowed bloggers to hook up their own feeds for syndication.