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 guess you had to be there, I know it sounds ridiculous.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
People aren't just mourning Google Reader, they're mourning the Google that used to run products like Google Reader.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.