RIP Google Reader
ripgooglereader.com
ripgooglereader.com
Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.
Google Reader was the first RSS client to incorporate social features with RSS. To that it added an extremely fast web client (I can't think of any web client that even existed before), and syncing across devices.
A LOT of software in the RSS ecosystem relied on Google Reader for their syncing capabilities. It had basically become the defacto backend for the majority of RSS readers. As an example, I used NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and while I rarely (never?) used the Google Reader interface, NNN relied on my Google Reader account to backup and sync my feeds.
Google Reader had basically become essential infrastructure in the RSS ecosystem.
RSS was awesome in late 2000s during the Web 2.0 mania and it was common to see entire site's contents reproduced in their feed. By 2013 I'd argue many sites had realized giving their full text content away with no ads in the RSS feed wasn't exactly helping their bottom lines and started delivering ads and content snippets instead. The intent of course was to drive you back to the site where ads can be served more reliably. When these practices became widespread RSS quickly lost its shine for me and others I'm sure.
All of the RSS readers I used at the time other than the Reader web app also had the option of fetching full text or loading the feed in a browser frame to avoid the fragment problem. Some of that was simply performance: a busy site publishing full text could generate some massive XML files which take time to transfer and parse.
Also, why is it a problem to show ads in feeds? Annoying ones, sure, but I'd be happy to have ads (or pay for a subscription) if that meant that places could pay journalists.
I wasn't a Google Reader user, but I'd be interesting in understanding what I was missing.
Also, just want to add: Google killed the “discussions” search filter, which let you limit your search results to forums, around the same time, IIRC. Screw Google.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582491
What I forgot to mention in that comment was that Google Reader was tied to your Gmail account. The only people who were in "your" network by default were other people on Gmail where Google had somehow determined that you knew each other (presumably whether you were in each other's address book). This is opposite of HN or Reddit, where everyone can sign up and it's basically all strangers in a public popularity contest.
Google Reader had reshares, not upvotes. The only indication you had for "is this an article worth reading?" beyond the actual headline was the number of friends who reshared the same article. However, unlike any other social network, Google Reader wouldn't show me who reshared an article first, nor would you get any imaginary points for sharing something interesting. As such, there was no gamified hunt for "karma" or "upvotes" or whatever. There was no incentive for resharing other than "I read/watched this and think it's interesting", and the result was a much more sincere curation of topics that interested your friends.
Similarly, there were no downvotes or upvotes on the discussions.
NewsBlur copied that set-up, but out of roughly 40 close friends from college who intensely used Google Reader, only five made the switch to NewsBlur. The rest ended up scattered among chat apps and other social networks.
It might be nice if there were a way to filter by number of comments.
I like reddit and this site enough to visit almost daily, and it's important to get opinions from strangers which is why I value these sites, but the signal / noise ratio is awful. Being able to see a list of news I've explicitly catered to myself _and_ commentary from people I explicitly care to hear from was excellent.
Then again the internet "crowd" was much different back then. It may just be an artifact of its own time by this point.
After Google Reader got plugged off, I haven't stuck with any of the alternatives, as the community wasn't there.
Wishfully thinking, if enough VIPs would turn to a similarly structured platform, we could have our feed back.
I would check it in the morning, while in washroom, in bus, waiting & any time.
The reason people are so bitter is that Google Reader was the kind of thing that if you liked it, it became part of your daily routine. It became the thing you checked in the morning over coffee, the thing you checked when you were procrastinating at work. Today that is social media, but Google Reader really felt like your own little curated space in a way (say) Twitter does not: with Twitter, you always feel at the mercy of The Algorithm. It also was essentially totally free of the toxic stuff you see on social media today.
They took this cool and personal service, ripped all social features out, did zero development on it for years, and then unceremoniously killed it in some insane attempt to make Google+ into the next Facebook. I'm still pissed about it, and it was the last time I've ever made myself rely on a Google Service like this.
Instead of having higher ranking posts climb to the top, a hotness bar and a popular bar to the left of links is ideal. The bigger the bars, the more activity an article is generating.
Are there any feedreaders that I can use to 1) score but not rank articles, and 2) set a threshold to hide everything below a score 3) deduplicate stories from multiple sources, and aggregate+/average their scores together?
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
If you like Tweetdeck you should try it with the browser extension Better Tweetdeck.
Combined with the training features of Newsblur you can curate twitter feeds even more. Don't want to see re-tweets by a specific user, thumbs down. Don't want to see replies by another user, thumbs down. Want to percolate a specific keyword to the top, thumbs up.
I don't think I've looked at my native twitter feed in months.
As you say, Google+ was consuming Google at that time. So when they killed Reader it was not just killing a beloved service. It also acted like a lightning rod for the discontent that had started to swell. A lot of people would never again view Google through a rose tinted lens.
But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.
I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album created this way; to this day they swear that if it had been marketed better g+ events would have put wedding photographers out of business...
That was such a good idea compared to Google Plus. Your content, your comments, just aggregated.
They could have pulled it off, too, I am sure. They just didn't want to.
Does anyone have a link to a video of it actually being in use?
Those who want and for whom $5 is pocket change is encouraged to make a paid account to support it.
(Happy supporter, otherwise unaffiliated.)
Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their offerings.
But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same. Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it.
And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former management's objectives for the site to run more closely to my interests than Microsoft's.
Meanwhile, at the parent company, Microsoft offets VS Code for Linux. And it's nice.
What I dislike about Linux in general is how often the mentality for an app is “you’re using Linux, just find the repository and figure out how to get the release to your system or build it yourself”.
It had all the potential to become the basis of Google+, but Google just prioritises building products from scratch instead of improving existing ones (hence 50 or so IM / video call apps).
I'm cautiously optimistic that Google is slowly recognizing the error prioritizing hot new projects over continuous maintenance and improvement of existing ones. Google Chat seems like it might finally be a proper successor to Google Talk after dozens of half-baked services: Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Duo, Messages, etc. etc. etc.
The search engine I can't disagree with.
The email service... email is email to me, Google doesn't offer any features that Thunderbird doesn't already have && that I want. If you mean the search function inside of gmail, then yes, but that's kinda also just search. Or if you mean deliverability, that's not a function of skill but a function of being huge and if my mail server does something wrong then nobody is going to believe me if I say it's google's fault and google definitely isn't going to fix it. Or if you mean spam filtering, that's again because they just throw you out (into the spambox, but because google users rarely look there, that's out) and force you to use some (other) bigcorp for delivering just to them. The power that comes with being super huge.
Google Reader was built top to bottom on RSS and OPML (and Atom), which were open web standards. You could import an RSS feed from just about anywhere and read in in Reader. You could export your list of feeds back out as OPML which a bunch of other readers supported. Google+ was much more a walled garden with proprietary everything.
It happened in other areas too, such as Google moving away from the XMPP/Jabber-standardized (and federated!) Talk system to ones entirely proprietary. Wave was announced and designed to be XMPP-backed and federated as well. It seems like Wave died as much because they wanted to lock that down too. You can't just subscribe to Google Docs as a federated XMPP user and run a custom Google Docs frontend, Google Docs is just another proprietary walled garden now.
This and when GTalk moved off XMPP.
Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm not sure if learn-to-rank is still considered Ascorer, or its replacement. I left before Amit, but seeing the things that came out leading to his departure, I'm sure it's no longer called Ascorer.
(On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)
Damnatio memoriae?
> Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC.
(The term, not the quoted Wikipedia text.)
I would learn about it from brilliant https://acoup.blog/ - I think that it was mentioned there somewhere.
I think this specific case I have seen first mentioned in work by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%...
"Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication.
(for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)
One thing I learned from poking around financial models (I was/am a maintainer for a domain-specific financial modeling language used by a Fortune 500 financial services company) is that some ships are capesize[0], meaning they're too big for either the Panama or Suez canal and must transit Cape Horn and/or Cape Agulhas.
In our language, Booleans are represented as IEEE-754 double-precision floating point numbers (0.0 is False, everything else is true, with the constant True being 1.0), so for a bit I was imagining gigantic container ships dressing up as superheroes and putting on capes, and going to parties out in the middle of the ocean. Digging a bit deeper, I discovered this particular field was being used as a Boolean, and a quick web search ruined the magic of what capesize really meant.
I presume this wound up in our financial models because whether a ship is capesize affects its value, which affects the value of corporate bonds (or other corporate debt instruments) partially backed by ships as collateral. I suppose it's also possible that at some point we entered into bespoke repurchase agreements involving ships. (To avoid various risks in bankruptcy courts, sometimes financing is arranged by selling some asset below market value with an agreement to buy it back at a fixed date at a fixed higher price. There might also be a rental agreement involved. The cash flows look like a secured loan, but in case the loan can't be repaid, a court order isn't necessary to seize assets... the collateral assets have already legally changed hands.)
Yep. That was the point for me wehere Google went from startup I would like to work for sometime in the future to the ranks of IBM and Oracle
That's a feature, not a bug. It was close to perfect, no pointless UI re-designs required. Fast, lightweight, no bs.
When they killed it I switched to NetNewsWire and didn't miss the previous product.
What was so special about Google Reader?
The costs of storage and bandwidth of something as popular as Google Reader probably weren't negligible.
The newsblur dev is in this thread and he runs a good reader and could probably say what the storage and bandwidth was.
Although the 80/20 rule is in effect, and when I query the DB I find that 80% of feeds have only a single active subscriber and 20% of feeds have 2+ active subscribers (activity in the past 30 days). But that's still quite a bit one-to-many fetching savings. And the majority of fetches are 304s.
Saying “it’s expensive to maintain” and killing it because it competed with, and was better than Google+ without giving them control, was such BS. That so many smart people built and run clones as one man shows proves that Google could have maintained it for next to nothing.
I hope they never kill Google scholar.
So in the context of the times (I joined Google roughly around when this all went down, but this is not insider information, I'm just speculating) I can imagine how it happened -- it likely became hard to staff the project. It probably became hard to "demonstrate impact" by doing incremental changes on it, and little desire on the company's part to put a major push on launching new features or migrating it to new tech stack etc. etc. People working on it could have transferred to any number of higher impact projects and done better for themselves in the corporate career success game.
No manager would have the "power" to demand that the people involved stay working on the project.
So if it needed technical work, and no product managers saw a future for it, and few if any engineers wanted to work on it, and Google was in the middle of pushing its energies behind G+... It seems inevitable for a project like that to die. It was likely dying internally long before it was killed externally. That's my educated guess anyways.
It was free and web-based.
I just opened up NetNewsWire and, yup, 99% of my subscriptions are a few sentences and then a "Read more" link which kinda defeats some of the major upsides of an RSS reader. I don't just want a notification service, I want to completely cache the content locally so that I don't need to depend on an internet connection nor the fragility of the web.
Social imposed upon Google substantial new costs under-the-hood in terms of infrastructure and time to implement. You wouldn't think a Facebook competitor would require a lot of compute and storage resources, or a lot of engineering hours, but Google had high hopes regarding what the platform would become, and they definitely didn't want to get blocked by lack of resources. In addition, a massive internal infrastructure overhaul to the accounts system that was coupled with the social initiative required a re-architecting of every app that had an "account" concept attached to it.
On the grand balance sheet, Reader was a product with a non-growing userbase, didn't align with Google's long-term strategy goals, took resources to maintain, consumed storage and compute resources that could be used for more valuable bets, and was on track for a software re-architecting (which faced Google with the alternative of saving the eng-hour cost by just killing it instead of re-architecting it). Those facets combined put it on the chopping block.
IMO, what really happened was that a lot of the sorts of people who are active on social media really liked having their own curated RSS feeds and when explicitly using RSS--and providing feeds--fell out of fashion (not that it was ever really in fashion for the mainstream) [1], it felt good to blame Google Reader as the case rather than it being an effect.
[1] Sort of. Of course, RSS still gets used behind the scenes in a lot of places, not least of which are podcasts.
Therefore it feels like it dying is way more of a deal than it actually is, since what is talked about with journalists feels like is what everyone actually cares about, even if it isn't.
Personally I still miss it, nothing was quite as fast or robust in reading RSS queues. RSS feed updates were fast & reliable, the UI was fast, keyboard shortcuts made it fast to use, it didn't have basic bugs that current alternatives have at times and the few alternatives don't quite approach how good it was.
I've skimmed everything in 15 minutes, mark/star/whatever anything with unprecedented speed.
It was the ultimate user-curated feed, without all the cruft of today's feed. It was mine, tailored for me, by me.
...and whole thing was keyboard-drivable.
Google reader was nice because it was simple and it just worked.
Roughly fifty friends and I shared articles and had long comment threads.
Think of it as a private reddit where there's no barrier to joining a conversation with people you know.
In retrospect Google should have doubled down to monetize Reader. I'm pretty damn sure we'd be consming far less of our news directly from Facebook and Reddit had they done so.
1. Google Reader is launched, built on internal Google technologies (the distributed database and filesystem technologies available at the time, like GFS).
2. Headcount is not allocated to Google Reader to do ongoing engineering work. Headcount is instead allocated to projects like Google+.
3. The technologies underneath Google Reader (like GFS) are shut down. Without the engineering headcount to migrate, Google Reader is shut down.
Google+ was reportedly shut down for the same reasons (but different technologies). The internal tech stack at Google is always changing, and projects without sufficient headcount for ongoing engineering will eventually get shut down. The timing of the Google Reader and Google+ shutdown reflect the timing of changes in Googles tech stack more than it reflects any strategic direction by Google.
[Edit: Just to be clear, this doesn't explain the reason why these projects get shut down. It just explains the timing.]
What I take away is that just because they’re not paying customers doesn’t mean they won’t remember and judge you. And clearly people hold grudges for a long time (witness the number people who still maintain “Micro$oft is evil” from their 90s experiences).
Also the real question is why google didn’t assign an Eng team for this product used by millions, not why products without engineers die..
The decision to deallocate headcount and stop ongoing engineering effort on a project will eventually cause that project to get shut down, no matter what company you work at. However, at many of the software companies I've worked at, projects that run on "industry-standard" or at least mundane tech stacks can run for a very long time with a relatively low amount of effort. At Google, the timeline is shorter.
For example, if you have a web app that runs on Rails or PHP, or something that runs on the JVM, maybe with a Postgres, MySQL, or MS SQL backend, you might be able to shove it onto different machines or VMs for years, only making occasional / minor changes to the code base. If, in 2008, you had a JVM app which used PostgreSQL and ran in Apache Tomcat, there's a good chance you could still run it today with minor changes.
At Google, the internal tech stack--filesystems, databases, monitoring, etc... has changes that are large enough and frequent enough that the situation is different, and projects are shut down on stricter timelines.
Meh, maybe that's inaccurate, but that's how I have felt ever since.
In other words, in hindsight I'm not sad it's gone. If I really valued it then I should have valued the clone but I didn't
Killing it was bad for users, and bad for RSS, but it was also a very visible marker of a shift towards a more closed, proprietary web.
So it's not just "having Google Reader was better than not having it, I'm mad", but more about regret for what might have been if we'd all gone down a different path. The Google that, rather than killing Reader, had invested resources in it might have done other things.
Example: Right at the same time they were killing off Reader, they were removing XMPP/Jabber support from Google Talk. Is it plausible Google might have continued backing open standards like XMPP and RSS? And if they had...what would the internet be like now? It's certainly clear that RSS is much less popular than it was; could Google's support for the standard have prevented some of that?
In short: People are upset about Google Reader as such (I use bazqux.com, it's just as good as Google Reader ever was) but what it implied and represented.
A world where Google cares about Reader is a world where RSS remains a first class citizen on the web. So it's not Reader the product so much as what abandoning it said about Google's broader ambitions (and their hostility towards the open web).
Reader was a signal that RSS mattered. Google killing Reader sent the opposite signal. If Google cares about something, site owners have to care also (look at AMP) - and by not caring about RSS, they gave site owners permission to abandon their feeds.
In retrospect it's easy to see that the "death of Reader" wasn't some specific inflection point - Google had already stopped caring about RSS or the open web (if they ever even had). But this marked the first time a lot of us really saw and understood that Google had no interest in using its clout to protect us from the walled gardens, and instead it had ambitions to become just another walled garden itself (as became even more evident with the all-in Google+ strategy).
Thank you for pouring salt on that wound, too. Good grief.
Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I'd heard the news. That was a difficult month as I scaled (and wrote about scaling[0]), since by then Google Reader had 10 million active users. After Reader was sunset, about 5 million found their homes on the news readers that remained.
It's strange to think that naively competing with one of the big platforms paid off, but there's plenty of companies that did well in the wake of a giant choosing to ignore the ecosystem near their feet.
[0]: https://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-s...
It's a solid product, and the amount of work you've put into it shows and I plan to remain a customer for years to come.
Thanks!
I recommend NewsBlur to everybody: super uptime, great API, integrated with IFTTT, and supported by a lot of good mobile reader apps
I just downloaded and tried newsblur and it's pretty much perfect for my taste and needs. Going to try it for a few days then will likely become a paid user. This comment is coming from a place of relative ignorance, but have you considered investing in a bit of marketing, or a bit more if you have? For how good this app is among rss readers, it doesn't seem as discoverable as it deserves to be.
Make sure you run the messaging past a bunch of existing users to make sure you pique their interest but don't alienate them in the process.
More seriously, if you follow this advice, your own users might be the best place to find someone like this.
It's possible that you were adding the "for android" context in your searches, and it might not do well in that case (because of people seeing it as primarily web-based or cross-platform, and not emphasising the Android part).
If anybody else wants a good cloud RSS service, take a look at newsblur.
I cried when I read this. Beautiful.
Despite everyone saying that "RSS is dead", it's very rare for me to find a blog I'm interested in that doesn't have an RSS feed.
You’re also super responsive on Twitter / support channels too whenever I’ve needed, thanks for putting together a great service and being such a strong face of it.
It just isn't a Google-scale problem that requires the kind of resources Google has to offer, it makes no sense for them to maintain something than small independent developers like you can handle just fine.
It turns out that Reader's UI assets were stand alone enough that you could just implement the backend API and it all would work.
I saw this originally in a project for viewing your Reader Takeout data[1], and just built on that idea to make my own personal Google Reader experience.
[1]: https://crxcavator.io/report/cemddjmmnfebpkpkonmbkdmakilpkci...
There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, some of which have the branding of "it's just like Google Reader", so what am I missing here?
I use Newsblur as a replacement (thanks conesus!) but Google could have used their influence to promote RSS and make the web much more consumer-friendly, now without that everyone crawled off into their own walled garden like Facebook, etc. A number of people I read ended up only on Facebook unfortunately. RSS, while still around, never really took off to its full potential, and the G+ fiasco contributed to that.
> There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now,
Sure, but Reader was basically the first.
If you've never lost something you've loved it's impossible to understand.
Other notable cancellations before Google Reader were Google Buzz, Google Code search, Google Desktop, and Google Labs. There were dozens of others.
They have always been as focused as a squirrel on drugs.
My little circle of friends just caught the thing right at the right time, and we loved it hard!
Web Accelerator, Wave, Google Video immediately spring to mind, but there's a few dozen smaller services that were all cancelled before Reader was.
Together with reshared count, it implemented a very effective peer review mechanism.
Having high adoption, it provided me very good feeds - nothing comes close now.
I guess you had to be there, I know it sounds ridiculous.
I'm sure you know the meme that any new Google product that's launched is basically on borrowed time, because it'll get cancelled soon enough. Well, Reader was the first one to get that treatment.
2. It was, by far, the dominant reader. Nobody other big corporation† decided to make a top-level project that surfaced feed reading like this. So people remember it fondly, because it was the heyday of RSS, before Twitter and Facebook took over news delivery.
†OK, fine, I think Apple did a thing where you could read RSS feeds in Mail.
I think it's the ripple effect of ending that service. It meants RSS was dead. It probably was dying a slow death but that was the final straw.
Websites stop supporting RSS feeds more and more so we are left with nothing else than following them through facebook or twitter or whatever new thing comes on.
That's my take on it.
Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
This has been claimed for years, but it's simply not true:
> Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
I thought it was just an RSS reader.
Were there forums or commenting on posts or something? I don't remember anything at all like that.
People aren't just mourning Google Reader, they're mourning the Google that used to run products like Google Reader.
My guess is that the death of Google Reader was one of the last domino pieces to fall in the change from the multi-website internet to the Reddit aggregator internet. The replacement apps don't work because the internet model where RSS was useful died a decade ago.
This whole thing might be like the death of a popular BBS client for someone born in the 1980s. But then again... it's been 8 years. It's time to let go.
If your favorite website went away, you could still read and search all of the articles in the cached feed. I don't think there was an expiry time on it (other long-term users, feel free to correct me).
These days there is no equivalent. If someone you follow decides to take down their website, you have to hope that someone archived some of their content on the popular archive sites.
You are right when you say that there are many alternatives to Google Reader, even better ones you could say. I am fond not just of Google Reader but also I am fond of the times of better news consumption of back then.
When Google Reader disappeared, it left some sort of hole in news consumption that got filled up with Google+, Twitter and Facebook. The media outlets became obsessed about sharing news articles in social media, fighting for "likes", "+1s" and "retweets".
Google Reader provided a simple of way of having your news centralized on a snappy service, with good UI, without any ads or "smart suggestions" and without all of your social graph embedded in there. It was the way of consuming news for people that actually wanted to be informed.
And the best part, you could actually subscribe to other's people favorite feeds. It was kind of hidden, there was no dedicated "find friends" button or anything like that, you had to go out of your way and ask to someone "Can I have the link to you RSS feed for your saved items?" in order to "add them" to Google Read. And you could actually comment on their saved items.
I miss these times, I was actually a news junky back then because of Google Reader. I was shown what I wanted to be shown with no social crap or "hot articles" thrown to my face. I slowly lost interest in consuming news after that.
Imagine your favorite coffee shop, bar, church or social club ceased to be. You’d still see some of the previous members at other places, but the community as it existed is gone.
I thought it was just an RSS reader. This is the first I've ever heard of a Reader "community".
I'm looking it up and it doesn't appear there were forums or anything. What was the community aspect?
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/reader-and-talk-are...
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-control-over-c...
I had several real professional friendships start this way, and quite a few others that I followed just to see the thoughts/opinions of people in different life stages & life styles. It was a very different vibe from other “social” sites even then, and I haven’t found anywhere else that had ability to have conversations about a large breadth of topics while also going deep into them if one wanted.
It had a BarCamp kind of feel to me, more like the discussions that happen at a party with a lot of people who are confident in themselves but aren’t looking to prove it to other attendees.
Note that this is almost certainly some bit of romanticizing, and the communities would of course have a lot of variance but mine was dope. Fashion designers, artists, historians, a couple chefs, computer scientists, theologians, and others came together for great conversations and lots of perspectives.
I didn't have a large following, but I would see people liking my shared feed items from time to time, and they could subscribe to your feed (IIRC).
It really did create a community atmosphere that I've only seen at cocktail/dinner parties, where everyone knows someone but you meet new friends-of-friends and maybe become friends yourselves.
What I do miss from the Reader days, though, is widespread RSS support. I wonder if the death of such a prominent RSS reader gave sites "permission" to stop supporting RSS, and pushed RSS into further obscurity. Anecdotally, it feels like RSS is a feature often not carried over after a site redesign.
But... those ten million users are incredibly influential. Today they are in positions where they make cloud computing purchasing decisions on behalf of huge organizations. And they haven't forgotten.
I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent loss of trust and sales.
Such thought processes has already saved me from wasting my time on AMP.
- They will break your API contracts, and break them often.
- They will likely be end-of-lifed, usually 2 to 5 years after implementation (perfect timing for the devs at your company that did the original implementation to have mostly moved on to a different company, so lots of domain knowledge loss right before a major product shift)
- They often look shiny but run like absolute fucking dogshit. I don't know if you've loaded GCP console (or hell, even just gmail)_recently, but prepare to spend 30+ seconds waiting for the initial pageload to finish.
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I have influence on which products we purchase and use. We do not use Google for anything in production (with the exception of our Android app, for fairly obvious reasons).
Again, reader didn't break the camel's back, but it sure added some weight.
But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue to fray. At the time Google felt like an important part of the open web, and RSS was part of the glue that held it together. Discontinuing Google Reader felt like an admission that Google did not stand for those values anymore.
That's really the thing. People lash out at Google because it's a concrete target. And probably one of the worse examples of Google killing something that seemed clearly in the purview of an early mission to organize information. I'm often a bit surprised that Blogger has survived.
But it's also emblematic of the fact that a fairly niche open web activity was becoming even more niche.
That being said, I have a found NewsBlur a great replacement.
The organic, 'bootstrapped' way forward for Google would have been to carefully expand the social features of Reader, which had a large loyal following. Instead they forced it to stagnate then sacrificed it upon their stupid G+ altar trying to copy Facebook years late. SO lame.
I'm using newsblur (no affiliation) and it's working quite well, I no longer need to poll the websites, or wait for posts to appear here or on Twitter.
The nicest side effect is that checking newsblur before HN/Twitter limited my mindless scrolling, although this comment proves it didn't eliminate it.
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I've found that the above statement works for a very large set of values for {Feed Based Service}.
One really great example was when I setup Redmine (open source Jira alternative) for my company's project management needs. Instead of having it email me notifications, having them in the Reader was amazing.
Also, does any RSS reader have some kind of regex filtering option? "I want all the items from this RSS feed that match the following regex".
While I'm at it, how about getting the output of an arbitrary program? (Use case: websites that have a page with what I want—e.g. every article published by a certain author—but have no built-in RSS functionality. Ideally I would specify the program as "curl [URL] | egrep -o [stuff]", and it would generate new RSS entries anytime that output changed.) I know I can kludge together a cron job that runs such a program and generates a file, and point my RSS reader at the URL "file://path/to/output.xml", but is there anything with built-in functionality like that?
From the channel's URL like this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0Xe2bvq_2uucE2IRALSR_Q
Ah well, I will continue subscribing in Thunderbird until whomever keeps RSS alive at youtube (thank you, if you are reading this) moves on to better things.
Then I will watch it sunset just as I did with google music, G+, Google reader and all the rest Google has killed over the years.
https://blog.newsblur.com/post/117767869761/a-real-solution-...
I have about 20 youtube channels in Newsblur and watch them almost always within Newsblur itself, so it works well enough.
For regex filtering, Newsblur has training features. You can curate a feed based off specific attributes, like author, topic, keywords, etc.
In my experience, when you get fed up and quit things like Facebook and Twitter (also, pruning other things like YouTube channels that try too hard for 'engagement'), you magically return to a time when you can log off without missing anything.
It's nice.
I get that it's scary, but it seems worth mentioning that it is possible. I'm not at all sure that I'm suffering for the decision. If I was, that would imply that there's a give-and-take and that being wired to that addictive armature had a chance of giving you meaningful attention. I no longer believe there's significance in attaining the attention of folks who are there because they're glued to the machine. It's the activity of twitter-scrolling or what have you, that they're pursuing, not you. If they're deeply enough sunk into it, they've got nothing left for any real connection with anybody.
Seems like Google Reader was a bit like 'real connections with people', at a manageable pace.
Back then, people would have shot it dead for tech-astroturfing.
Today, people wouldn't see the point since AMP is more convenient anyway. /s
> Now that AMP is gone
Why do you say that?
Recently it was reported that Google will no longer give search-result priority to AMP pages. Which means any incentive for publishers to support them is gone.
There’s no business value or harm but it’s a good symbol. Old Microsoft would have complained how they had to prioritize engineering resources and open sourcing calc.exe was bad (like Google needed to prioritize engineers away from Reader).
I think there was a trend for content providers to share content on multiple platforms directly instead of with RSS, that's what people may not like.
Google, with their monopol-ish resources, created a free reader app that was so good that it was hard for other RSS readers to match them (on features, and certainly on price). As a result they consolidated most of the market around RSS readers (even though RSS remained an open protocol). So when they killed Reader, it may have made it possible for other RSS readers to finally compete openly, but it also shook things up so much that many Reader users may have just dropped RSS entirely, shrinking the RSS community and the audiences of RSS-based blogging.
Sure, in an efficient market customers would simply flow from the large and killed product to the new alternatives. But in our inefficient world, it’s possible that the barrier of having to export and import feeds was too high for a lot of users (even with things like Reader Takeout).
One might argue that if that’s the case, then perhaps all those RSS audiences weren’t actually all that engaged in the first place. But I’d argue that it’s actually quite possible for genuinely good things to be very fragile.
[0]: https://fraidyc.at
RSS is alive and well if you want it to be. I've switched to theoldreader.com when Google pulled the plug, imported my feeds and have been there ever since.
I'm subscribed to 125 feeds, 72% of which had new posts in the last year (following super low volume things is one of the many advantages of RSS). Most of the inactive ones have simply atrophied or ceased to exist entirely rather than turn off their RSS feeds.
I never log into YouTube but follow many channels via RSS instead. There's also Twitter gateways, although the one I've used stopped working and most everyone I care about has moved on to Mastodon anyways, so I haven't bothered with finding another.
I still regularly subscribe to new blogs, Youtube channels and other stuff via RSS and don't really know any other sane way to follow such things. I'll certainly not go and bookmark a bunch of sites and then click on them to see if they have posted something new or not - that would be insanity.
So yes, Google took a big dump on RSS, but then that's what Bigcorp does. Get on with it - RSS is fine. Build more feeds into your webthings because if it doesn't have RSS the grumpy old nerds like me will probably not look at it twice! :-P
Not only do you have to click on a tiny link to discover what the premium brings, but there is no information on how much the premium plan costs. That's a really bad UX.
> Description: $25 per year - Up to 500 feeds
The closest I'm finding now, strangely, is Outlook, and MS Todo. Through a combination of flagged emails and the archive function. Though it's still in multiple places and not one. SparkMail app helps as well with slightly advanced snoozing, but nowhere near the Inbox experience. I'm bitter now, thanks
I never got used to Outlook, though I don't recall why, and now I'm back to what macOS has, even though it feels so basic and I sometimes end up unprepared for meetings or have them in the wrong time zone because I add them through Mail but can't edit them in Calendar.
Inbox without Google would be such a great product, if I had a team to work with I would take on this problem (I'm a PM happy to contribute what I can if anyone is interested):
- The main useful features don't have that many "smart" parts, I think it would take some translation layer into all the different protocols to appear seamless. That's probably the hardest part to implement given how ancient e-mail, calendar, tasks are (at least from a user perspective, I must admit, I don't know much about the protocols).
- The "smart" features, such as trips could be implemented as plugins.
- Add an interface for custom plug-ins and this would integrate so well both in individual workflows of power users and teams.
Twitter chews up the time I used to spend on blogs, and I don't even get through the emailed newsletters that I used to check on daily.
Migrated to Feedly & Feedly has been OK but recently, soured on Feedly as they capped the number of feeds. And I've written my own RSS readers, pre-Google-Reader & now in 2021 (though it a work in progress & starting to buckle with a 300MB sqlite DB file on a shared host ;)). Those limits might not rankle many subscribers but I don't view RSS as a "I must consume every item" but as a stream to wade in, and a filtered repository to query.
The technology of a RSS reader is banal & simple in the basics. But here is where the value is for me -- the history of all the stuff that scrolls off from the most recent 10, 25, 50 posts that are available on a RSS feed. Having a large collection of subscribed feeds is like having a filtered search window into only those web sources that you assign great relevance. Even in 2021, a even more pronounced chasm to Google (or DDG or $yourFavoriteSearchEngine) searches, given all the botification / content farm hijacking / general cruft / copied content / etc. -- to search in your own set of collected RSS feeds, that go back years, even if disappear off a site's current feed XML. Or even if the site goes poof, or worse, is reappropriated by a domain harvester to siphon ad generated revenue on boiler plate content.
Google Reader, if it was championed by Google, could have served this role masterfully. (There still is, oddly, in existence Google Custom Search Engine where you can specify a collection of URLs but it doesn't to seem to work as well as searching RSS history, in my experience at least).
Similarl to what I felt when Google Reader shut down, I was saddened when Mozilla removed RSS/Atom support from Firefox. I believe the decision had something to do with maintenance/performance/security concerns.
As usual, there are no WebExtensions which match the functionality of the original feature.
https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...
Luckily, Thunderbird (and, by extension, SeaMonkey) still allow you to subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds for the time being.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...
It didn't have to happen like that. I argue that Google unintentionally did an embrace and extinguish on RSS. That's what people were unhappy about.
So I could subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, then use a 3rd party app (like Reeder or any number of others) to view the feeds I was subscribed to, and it would provide all the tracking and syncing so to speak.
It fills the gap of services like Feedbin, Feedly, and others. Except it was "free" and now I have to pay $50/yr for Feedbin. While this isn't a big deal, I don't track that many feeds so it's kind of unpleasant to pay $50/yr for the 10 feeds I track.
I realize I am sounding a bit whiny here. I just didn't have these problems with Google Reader and it sucks that the free option that worked well disappeared. At the end of the day though, $50/yr isn't a big deal, it's just a combination of everything becoming a damn subscription and how I'm sort of tired of subscriptions. Subscription fatigue is real for me.
Can you explain what this means? What's involved here? How does it differ from dumping all your RSS feeds into an ordinary RSS reader?
lets use Twitter as an example.
Google Reader is Twitter with their API
Reeder (or your RSS reader with support for the API) is like Tweetbot.
This isn't a great example, because read status of feed items and all that is handled by Google Reader. But it's close.
Hilarious, as all replacements were trying to build a social interaction.
Then we get to the client and I don't know what I'm doing.
Now I work the best I can using IFTTT to pull news from the feeds that are still functional and then pushing results into an Evernote notebook I nostalgically named Reader.
source: https://twitter.com/ZackMaril/status/1365834285463257091
Seeing a new share was like getting a tiny intellectual present, filled with all the right connotations - "Here's this thing I think you would find interesting," "I care about your opinion, what are your thoughts on this," "It's not important, but it is entertaining," "not trying to share this with the world, just you, my friend."
Google Reader was our company's post-lunch ritual. A way to balance a mornings worth of engineering effort and soporific pad thai with a jolt of fresh news and virtual office banter.
RIP.
Most RSS readers/providers have been at least serviceable for me. On newsboat now, trying elfeed occasionally too.
It's almost anti-RSS.
It's like requiring an online application to browse the web.
An RSS reader is just a browsers that has a list of bookmarks. Those bookmarks point to specially formatted XML documents. It automatically refreshes those document and notices new items, which it presents somehow, perhaps an mail-inbox-like interface.
But anyway, there is nothing to miss about it, even if it was not clear at that time: having a news aggregator on the cloud owned by google itself, or any other company FWIW, it is not something we should aim for.
Why should we give all this information about our preferred readings or favorite news to anyone?
and also, what other options took its place / fill the void / RSS is not dead! etc
Maybe I need to write my own...
The killed RSS, then the reader. It's all on Google for demise of RSS.
I use Feedly + NetNewsWire. Great combo.
How hard can it be to just clone it if people love it so much?
It killed A LOT of goodwill.
Google is not your friend, don't praise gigacorps - especially when they kill stuff that works.
* {
letter-spacing: 1px;
}It's no different even if the (defunct) startup has a patent: IP law doesn't really matter when the IP doesn't have any money behind it.
Not true - VC's are scared of giving money to anything that directly infringes a patent. If the company ever does wildly well, you can be sure whoever bought that patent for cents will be trying to collect millions...
But that IP could end up owned by a patent troll that does have the money to enforce it in court, or at least threaten to do so.
Here’s a video for context:
I realise that I will be training the algorithms, and appending data to the already vast collection. It is a trade-off I am willing to accept. I have generally been using it to grab text from labels for ingredients and other products to create my own notes.
I was using it to sync into Roam for a while, but now I have it syncing into my markdown folder.
My current note taker is iA Writer. On the go markdown authoring, syncs with dropbox.
` "[markdown]": { // use the beautiful duospace font when available "editor.fontFamily": "iA Writer Duospace, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe WPC', 'Segoe UI', system-ui, 'Ubuntu', 'Droid Sans', sans-serif, monospace", `
I should mention that I use it on mobile and share article links to it if it's something I want for research. Then on desktop I read and take notes on that same page. It turns reading into a more active process of knowledge acquisition/retention/application.
And microsoft are waaay ahead of you ;)
[1] Caveat search engines? Who knows when that house of cards will finally collapse.
I also don't love the state we're in today, when useful things are hidden or just removed altogether. But man, I can appreciate how we got here.
Huh?! Can you point out a single UI element in that screenshot that doesn't serve a useful purpose?
Reader's UI was basically perfect. I believe that's what proved to be the end of it at Google. There was no more changes to be made to it. So Google had to shut it down, because they absolutely have to be doing new stuff.