Why I'm quitting Google Reader: Google is sharing me to death | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm quitting Google Reader: Google is sharing me to death

itworld.com

48 pointsabennett40 comments

I would rather deactivate Buzz completely than letting it spoil the Reader.

I deactivated Buzz. It seems Google's so desperate to enter the social advertising market that they're inconveniencing their users so much, so I refuse to use Buzz for this simple reason. Google doesn't know what's best for me. I do. They need to stop forcing me to use things I don't want. If I want to use them, I'll turn them on, or request them.

I'm content with facebook, that by the time I'd heard about Buzz I'd already heard about problems (like this one) that would drive me away from using it. So, currently at least, I've decided to avoid Buzz. If I never experience Buzz during its existence, so be it. I use Docs, Analytics, Gmail and Reader, I'm a rather loyal Google user and Buzz just seems to be aimed at screwing all that up.

Yeah, all the last Google products have been firmly in the 'miss' category, but no matter how much Buzz or Wave suck, Reader and Gmail too awesome to stop using.

But - I did turn off every single sharing feature in all Google apps I do use, I don't have a public profile, etc. Better safe than sorry.

I don't see how Wave can suck when it's not even implemented completely yet. It would be like complaining that Email sucked back in '73 because no one used it.

Email did suck in 73, I'm sure.

Saving Wave sucks now is true.

This isn't a forecast.

Wave sucks not entirely because of its implementation but because its adoption is not as widespread. Wave in itself is an excellent web app that have changed the way I collaborate with others. Its biggest mistake is how they rolled it out. They should have polished it more, both in terms of speed and stability and made it all out access just like Buzz (minus the buzz mistakes).

Wave is a very solid app. It doesn't suck. IMO YMMV.

Yeah, I still see it as more of a tech demo. The underlying infrastructure for distributed real-time editing is pretty amazing (at least, as far as I can glean from what they've written about it), but the particular webapp they built on top of it at wave.google.com is somewhat underwhelming.

Thanks for the reminder. I just torched Buzz as well.

Message to Google: Not MORE data. LESS data that's MORE useful.

I don't want more crap buzzing in my inbox. I want you to help me find just the most important stuff.

I don't want more crap shared to me on Google Reader. I want you to notice that I'm getting over 100 new articles a day, but only 5 of them have any relevance to my work.

Just as your search pages showed fewer (but more useful) results than your competitors and gmail showed less spam, I'd like you to help me get less data everywhere else online.

Tip: Have a separate Google account for Reader. I don't use any of Google's social stuff anyway, but my Reader is nice and clean with none of this stuff going on.

I have an old Gmail and direct @gmail.com account from back in the day, but use Google Apps For My Domain with its domain specific account for everything "serious." Being logged in with two accounts at once isn't really a problem as long as you only use one login per Google service, I've found.

I have a dedicated account for Reader, and I use it from within a Mozilla Prism appliance. External links open in my regular Firefox instance.

This is a simple setup that works adequately well for me.

I tried that, but I'm constantly logged into my main google account and having a few browsers open was a pain.

Chrome Incognito windows or Firefox private browsing are also useful for multiple logins.

A fantastic console newsreader is newsbeuter.

http://newsbeuter.org/

Highly configurable, and you can set vi keybindings.

I worked on a project once where this one person always posed the question, "But what if google just copied us?" I always mentally ignored the question, because I never considered it an issue. Just cause Google "can" doesn't mean they will "succeed". Buzz is a perfect case in point, and it's not the only one in Google's long history.

He has to spend 5 to 15 minutes everyday hiding followers? Does he follow that many new people in buzz everyday (automatically or implicitly) or are they not staying hidden? That estimate seems large.

I don't understand the problem. Why can't you minimize the "People you follow" pane and just ignore it? Is it that shared items appear in the "All items" view? An easy solution is to just drop all your subscriptions into a single folder, and then view it through the subscriptions pane. Same content as all items except nothing shared.

One of the rare cases where "normal" people would benefit from knowing how to program? Should be easy to automate the hiding with a Greasemonkey script.

Not suggesting this as a solution to everyone, just saying...

Yeah I think it must have to do with the number of people you follow. Hiding has worked fine for me. Though I only follow about 150 people. Surprisingly not that many people I know use Buzz, even though most use GMail.

Anyways, if you're looking for alternatives, I used Bloglines before I was a GReader fan. Might want to try that out again, or a desktop app might be up your alley too.

What about browser plugins? There are a bunch out for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tags/display/RSS?so...). I used Sage several years ago and was relatively happy with it; surely they've improved on it since then.

I use http://feedafever.com/ and I love it :)

I bought a license for Fever, and I hated it. It's a lovely UI and a great concept, but in practice it ended up requiring a ton of fiddling to essentially end up with Techmeme (that is, it only floats content to the top based on inbound links, which is a pretty dim signal of what's going to be important to you if you read about esoteric topics).

The author of the article is hiding people's names in the people panel without actually changing the setting to ignore their shares.

The author needs to go into the sharing settings menu and click 'ignore' on the users he doesn't want to see content from.

So... alternatives?

I don't use Buzz, so the problems mentioned in the article aren't an issue for me, but I was getting frustrated with Google Reader for plain usability reasons, and also have unrelated privacy concerns with it, in the sense that at some point I assume Google is going to start doing user tracking to see what you read, how long you look at particular items, and so forth (not for any malicious reason but purely because they can probably somehow make money from it (ala http://www.newsweek.com/id/233773)).

I tried a bunch of different RSS readers for Linux and disliked all of them, so I ended up writing a RSS to email script that pulls down my feeds and sends me mail for new entries. I actually find this much more usable than Reader or any standalone reader - mutt (or sup if you prefer) is already is built for handling lots of information, and especially handy for sites like hacker news where I can just scan titles in the index and delete-delete-delete and pull up the occasional interesting story. Also reduces random 'wonder if anything good is new on reddit/hn' polling, so I'm finding it to be a big productivity win.

My script is at http://www.randombit.net/code/grab_rss/

And there is of course also rss2email which is basically the same thing - http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/

I would strongly NOT recommand bloglines. There is no way to suppress your account, I mailed the team twice and never get any answer.

It's stated on the website they will answer in a few business days but they don't. I also found the blog post of someone having the same problem...

The RSS reader built into opera is great. I have been using it for a couple years and would not switch to anything else. I used to use reader but it is far to slow in comparison.

a friend recently launched feedingo.com - which is exactly that, a better google reader.

The trouble with that is that Reader is the Twitter of RSS readers. Why do I say that? Look at iPhone feed readers. Pretty much all of them use your Google Reader account to synchronize unread/read etc. so you don't have to read just on your phone. It's the API and data store for synchronized feed reading.

How many devices do you need to read your RSS feed on anyway? For me it's only my desktop machines and occasionally my phone. That's a pretty low barrier to entry for a new feed reader.

I'm not buying the huge ecosystem argument at all. The problem with the direction Google is taking—not to mention Twitter—is that there is a huge fad fun factor at work here. It's fun to play around with this stuff, but how much useful information can you get out of it? Sure, Twitter is some people's bread and butter (pro bloggers...), RSS is much more powerful for domain experts, for some people all they can really make use of is email.

Personally I think Google Buzz is too late to cash in on the Twitter fad. It's solving Google's business problem, not users'. It'll probably settle into its niche like the rest of Google's stuff, but they'll have to fix this heavy-handed integration stuff.

My favorite thing ever is the Google Reader "next" bookmarklet. It lets me use a RSS reader without ever needing to actually go to Google Reader.

tried out netvibes recently. it's designed to be more of a polished igoogle but you can use it only for feeds and it works well.

It is interesting that Google is acting like a start-up company - I give them credit for pushing this stuff out, but it's easy to see why beasts like Microsoft stagnated for so long considering the litany of issues you run into as a mature business with tens-of-millions of users . . .

What am I missing? I don't share anything in my Google Reader. So where's the problem?

If your Google Reader account is linked to a Google Account that's on Buzz, you get all this sharing whether you want it or not. The solutions seem to be: 1) disable Buzz; or 2) create a separate Google Account specifically to use with Reader.

But what exactly is being shared by me without my knowledge? I don't get it.

I am not sharing the feeds I read in my Google Reader, nor do I click any individual feed story to share.

I think he's complaining about the other direction--- other people's feeds being shared with him, polluting the "All Items" view with items shared by his Buzz contacts, while he'd rather just see his own subscribed feeds there. Apparently you can't turn that off without disabling Buzz entirely.

Okay, thanks. I still find it an odd reason to leave Google Reader. There's just no better alternative out there.

Not a problem in my case; everyone I have as a contact in Buzz is someone I was already following in Reader.

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