With Google Reader changing is there a competitor looming? | Hacker News Reader

With Google Reader changing is there a competitor looming?

alexkessinger.net

34 pointsvoidfiles19 comments

I wish a real competitor would have emerged earlier, honestly, if only to get the Google Reader team to do something interesting. The truth is that Reader has been the de facto standard, but ugly, clunky, and with a somewhat random and randomly expanding feature set.

I've tried everything else in the vain hope that it'd be better, but nothing ever is.

To me, this seems like the worst time to try to compete. Google's entering a user-focused phase, with changes that are largely better for most people. Are the obstinate change-hating refugees really the user base you want?

how do you rope up all the hardcore google reader users into one place, and get them to share with one another.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Even hardcore google reader users have, I imagine, very different interests. Why would you assume they automatically make up some sort of community?

G+ seems like a much better platform to make communities on top of, since you can easily direct your content.

Also, it seems like Google+ is becoming a platform. If Reader becomes an RSS wielding inteface for that, I imagine they'll release public APIs on top of which it would be easy to make an alternative UI.

Right, Google Reader won't ever be for the masses. That is exactly why another company can swoop in. Google is a company for the 90%, but 10% is still big enough to make a successful company.

If Google is a company for the 90%, then it's for the masses right?

Yea.

I've given up on hoping Google Reader would improve (where are my filters !, read later list, advanced search...).

There's a whole team at Google behind it, I wonder what the hell they are doing. Most of the Google Reader I know (and I was there almost since the beginning) is the same since 5 years.

I can't find any serious competitor, Newsblur is good but it's still too young...

There's always been a competitor that, IMHO, blows Reader out of the water, yet it doesn't have a behemoth behind it to support and push it to the masses.

It's called Newsblur, and I'm getting closer to paying for the premium version each time I use it.

NewsBlur is very cool, and it's a great UI. It hasn't always been around though. They are missing one thing though, the Human Curation part of Google Reader. There is no built in social core. That is a very big piece of what people will miss about Google Reader.

Social features are planned. The mobile app is juuuuust about done, and then Search, and a few customizations (mark as unread, oldest to newest, etc). Then I'm going to attack social and get some really wonderful and innovative community features built.

My biggest fear is that the community portion will be too popular and I'll have to find more time than the 1 hour a day I get to spend hacking on NewsBlur. I work on it only in my free time, you know.

Your work is very much appreciated, I really think NewsBlur is the only game in town when it comes to a competitor.

Hopefully clients like reader will begin to notice your stuff as well, and we can develop an ecosystem around NewsBlur.

Holy shit, I think the front page signinless-demo is using the css visited hack to figure out popular sites that I've visited, and showing them to me in the demo. Devious, but brilliant.

I see the same front page in an incognito window.

I think you just have similar favorite sites to the developers.

Heh, it seems that people who still use RSS or have an interest in it also share the same reading lists.

Newsblur should just convert to a blog aggregator. Then it could change its name, say, to Hacker News? :)

We just have the same taste. :-)

I made an account a while back, but don't remember any details. The forgot password link pops up a new email window. I have to try logging in to even get the forgot password link, and then it throws a window at me.

It's trying to be clever. Clever can be fun and interesting, but password recovery is a well-solved problem. Sending an email to the dev to get a password reset (when I'm not even sure which email I used) is a lot of trouble when I have no problem with Reader.

I don't think it's the lack of a behemoth that's hurting adoption. It's just doing a lot of weird stuff without explanation when existing feed readers work fine for most people.

It's just where I spend my time. It's not a huge priority. Also, many users, about 50%, don't have an email address. I made this choice to simplify signup, but the fact is that some folks just cannot recover their password automatically.

I'm planning to build a more automated method, but I have much more important features to build in the meantime.

It's also open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay. I'm very proud of the fact that I have taken in lots of input from the community and even some code.

The amount of RSS readers that support google reader is crazy. I use Feedly on the laptop and Reeder on iOS, they both support sharing with a couple dozen different services, have amazing interfaces, and feedly has great discovery tools for finding new blogs. I don't see the point of switching since I haven't logged into reader.google.com in ages (the last time was to export a couple folders and send it to some friends).

Yea, I am with you. But, like the point I made in the article. What is feedly going to do with the share button? Or, reeder for that matter.

I really think there is a space for someone to do a Google Reader like API, and publicly support it. Google Reader has yet to release an officially support API.

If they were to start as a drop in replacement they could be huge.

Exactly. Even if you think Reader is ugly as sin and difficult to use, there are plenty of clients out there that sync with Google Reader.

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