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Comment by notheguyouthink | Hacker News Reader

On a sidenote, what exactly did Google Reader do that was so great? I'm not knocking it, it's a real question.

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?

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My favorite feature of reader was:

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

Couldn't you (gently) use the wayback machine for this? Or just start crawling feeds with something like scrapy? There isn't enough RSS, I feel, to make this prohibitive.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-tipatom2/x-tipat...

> 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.

Feedly does this, it's what I have used after Reader was shut down.

It's a cloud-based RSS and ATOM reader that frequently updates, has unlimited storage duration, is cloud-based, and free. The UI is also a plus - GMail-style, you can read a thread, read by time, see all unread fairly easily.

In the 5 years or so since Google Reader's demise I'm yet to come across a decent feed aggregator. I'm currently using Feedly but it sucks compared to GR.

I use Feedly too, but the lack of other decent feed readers or aggregators suggests that there really isn't a user demand for RSS. OTOH, many sites and news organizations post to Twitter as a rudimentary RSS feed. Google probably could have adapted Reader into the social platform they wanted.

RSS (in the sense of using a reader to track a personally curated set of RSS feeds) is pretty niche these days. One audience is journalists who really do want to discover news from a variety of sources faster than someone else does.

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.

Try bazqux.com

You want theoldreader.com. Very similar to GR without the social features.

I use it to, it's nice and clear.

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.

I use NewsBlur. It also isn't as good as GR, but it gets me by.

Try inoreader.com. I think it came closest to what GR was.

I've been using Digg Reader. I have never used Digg for anything (is it more than a news aggregator), but the Reader replacement is really good.

There are already quite a few replacements around that are better in my opinion (like inoreader), but people seem to like complaining about Reader as if Google killed off their firstborn for some reason.

Plain decentral RSS is being used and has been all the time since like 1999-2001.

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).

I'm one of the people who really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the hassle-free nature of it, and it basically did what I expected to in a decent interface.

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.

check out TheOldReader.com its just like the old Google Reader :)

Google Reader was Gmail for blog feeds.

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.

Why not simply run an RSS reader application?

Application. It has to be a cloud service, so you have access to it from home, from work, from transit on the phone.

1. Social aspect of it - I would find "human filters" that shared very high quality content on different topics - art, programming, medicine, architecture - and that was very transparent for them - they just kept interesting articles for themselves, but I also had access to them. 2. Search 3. Archives

As of now I think HN/reddit/twitter serve the same purpose (poorly - twitter more and more tailored for person with thousands of subscriptions and not for someone who's carefully organizes his "human filter" collection; and none of services provides subscription for content - hell, I have dilbert as email subscription now)

It was a one-stop shop that had all your content in an easy to read format sans ads and tracking. I think Google realized that if everyone went with Reader their cash cows of ads and tracking would disappear, so they killed it.

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 disagree that RSS wasn't/isn't popular. However, RSS's use case intersects with that of news aggregators such as HN which are even more popular.

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