I wonder what terrible things were averted by killing off Google Reader.
I ask because a lot of things Google has killed is hard for us to replace. Eg, i don't want to try and build Wave, or continue with Apache Wave, etc. It's a big, complex problem. But a personal content aggregator like what i thought Google Reader was seems quite easy to implement.
In other words, why haven't we (public or startups) built the core functionality of Google Reader that so many appear to love? It seems like an eager and easy to reach market. What am i missing?
Most other solutions that I've found make some assumptions about what I'll be reading or how I'll read it and try to force me into that, claiming it's for my own benefit.
In the end, I ended up self-hosting "Selfoss". I have to keep it up to date and occasionally fix a bug when it won't read a stream properly, but it basically does what I want otherwise.
Its probably trivial to replicate, but RSS/Atom wasn't very popular to begin with and this move just motivated others to give up on it. Webmasters didn't want to have that weird RSS icon that no one understood and designers probably didn't like that their hard would went away with RSS.
On the flip-side ad blockers and things like Firefox's and Safari's reader mode help a lot. I think its not a big coincidence Chrome is late to the reader mode game either. Google wants you to load that ad tracking .js file because that's their bread and butter.
I used to follow the feeds of over 100 blogs. I know follow about a dozen or so and I have to click bookmarks or manual enter URLs to read them.
You go and add a feed, and then you don't just get the latest 20 posts. Instead you get all the posts since the beginning of the feed, since google saw it then during a crawl and decided to watch it ever since.
That is something that is a fair bit harder to provide by any competitors
> 10 April 2007
> As feeds move beyond merely announcing new content on somebody's blog and into organizing data, you can easily find situations where you don't want your feed to include all of the available data. This tip shows you how to create an Atom feed that lets users page through it using "next" and "previous" links or button.
[..]
> Creating this functionality in PHP doesn't require any special skills or modules, just a methodical approach.
Nuff said?
edit: why downvote? It'd be trivial for most site to make ALL past items available, without having to offer one huge feed with all those items in it, and any reader would be free to read all those items when subscribing to a feed. There, done.
Most people are fine though with just using social. If it's noteworthy enough they figure they'll learn about it soon enough. Personally, I do have Feedly configured but I confess I don't use it systematically any longer.
I'm still a bit puzzled about Google shooting Reader. Keeping it would have been a tiny effort and it doesn't seem much removed from a mission of selling ads (excuse me, organizing information). But, then, Google has largely walked back/de-emphasized pretty much all their information curation projects other than straight search.
They nearly collapsed under the load a few years back when Google cut GR, nearly shutting down. But now it's solid, and they seems to have got financial backing.
There are few limitations (100 feeds max) with a free account, but for me, it's enough.
If you're missing a big-time "disruptive" announcement on HN, let's run a story about RSS so that it becomes a thing again in people's minds. We can pepper it up with JSON support and call it RSS 3.0 (but please let's not go down the Atom rabbit hole).
The lack of business model had it floating on air. And the because it never went mainstream it removed all excitement from the product.
Otherwise, it could have had great vision ... Google Media, Inc., similar to the company that owns Digg.