Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

That was the new reality a decade ago. Social media apps was how you found blog posts, not RSS feeds.

I remember Reader dying and within a year finding a replacement but still moving on because the high noise-to-signal RSS simply wasn't doing it for me.

It's possible we all stopped using RSS because of Google but it's also possible we simply found replacements when prodded. Just like how us torrent obsessed pirates eventually moved on from harddrives full of MP3s to lazily curating Spotify accounts and from AVIs to Netflix. Google Reader was a far-too-early end of an era, but the fact we all didn't jump to a competitor like we did with Digg->Reddit was probably not just Google's fault.

They explained they were shutting it down due to declining usage and they are pouring all of their energy into fewer product, however, as Google had a reputation for building cool and free stuff back then, it seemed reasonable to me that they could have maintain it in a frozen state or provide a longer transition period. This invited alternative theories about intentionally killing RSS for Google+.

By interfering with that ecosystem I think Google received out-sized negative feedback. They would have been much better off just leaving it running.

I think I share the feeling. I feel more and more disconnect from their stuff every day. Same thing with their hardware. Original Google Wifi was great, the Google Nest Wifi Pro is not. You cannot listen Rage Against The Machine's Bullet in the Head in their Youtube Music Premium without popups, that you cannot disable. The only answer from their customer support seems to be: "please, unsubscribe". The search engine feels also worse and worse. If you put anything more specific, all the links lead to fake sites. Youtube is still quite good, mostly because of the content not found elsewhere. In general I care Google a lot less these days, and I feel it is a mutual feeling.

Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits.

It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.

This is too bad too, because I have used Google's Cloud offering for some hobby projects (specifically related to Gmail and spam filtering, because... why would Gmail's spam filtering function?) and it seems really good.

I had someone a few years previous say they had never seen a bigger Google fanboy.

With the death of Reader I pretty much slowly pulled away and barely use Google anything these days.

Another commentor mentioned, it was the reason. This was right in the middle of the push for Google+.

It was never explocitly stated as a reason, but Google+ Pages rolled out just before or after Reader qas killed and its clear that the intention qas to drive content producers to run Pages for their blogs and websites instead of just letting people use RSS. Also, they wanted to encourage users to go to Plus and Pages to get feeds, bot RSS.

Google had killed a lot of other products but this was the first that clearly felt incredibly malicious and was the start of the end of "Don't be evil."

I say "oddly enough" because I never really used Google Reader. I did (and still do) use RSS heavily, but I use a different reader for it. But Google's actions struck me because RSS was such a fundamental aspect of the way things worked that axing Reader without offering a replacement seem to me like them axing search itself without offering a replacement.

If Reader can suffer such a fate, anything Google does can as well.

2013 They delete everyone's subscriptions AND everyone's subscribers. Blogs come and go every day in large numbers. No more subscribers means it is time to let it go and go do something else. After years building an audience google moved in to embrace, extend, and extinguish. At the time I had many thousands of RSS subscriptions (in my own aggregator), I could see the post frequency decline and the comments dry up by the thousands.

2011 They killed blog search.

2007-2009 They hired Kevin Marks, Technorati's lead architect. And in 2014 Technorati died.

2005, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo created an initiative to help kill the eco system of organic links in comment. They chose to promote the Nofollow attribute to portray everyone and their references as spam. Spam is defined here as not obeying their webdesign orders. We might have gone a bit over the top with etiquette and "rules of civility" say 200 years ago but instruction to treat your guests as spammers??? Punishment if you don't comply!

You may link to a limited number of things from your article/blog post but it must be approved materials following their instructions. Sometimes one needs to point out others are wrong on the internet. It is arguably what we do online? I write down my thoughts, you tell me I'm wrong? The idea one should not link to the "wrong" publication is not constructive to the dialog.

But you can still post your articles to google wave and knol and to your google pages (joking) How about under that amateurish cookie banner defacing blogspot or google groups? usenet?

They are endlessly tinkering with the search algorithm trying to find worthy results, dictating how we should shoot web (or else!), but everyone and their mum already gave up making websites for fun. Even developers who could put something together in a few hours at best have websites with just their resume on it.

Its like.. Google talk > google hangout > google chat. Ahh, they finally stopped talking.

For real, go back to HN posts, just 5 years ago, a whole chunk of them are parked domains and 404s.

My 10 year old macbook, 5 year old iPhone, no support, no parts.

It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.

Not everything is numbers and loss centers. Don't lie and do the right thing. Treat people with honesty and respect. It's not that difficult.

I doubt Reader was ever going to be a serious business but maybe there should be a much more explicit execption for the side products your customers love that also don't fit perfectly into the parent companies main business/product dev strategy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma?wprov=...

I still use my Android phone, and use maps for navigation and browse youtube online, but I use as little 'account' features as is necessary. If I wanted to switch to iPhone tomorrow, there'd be next to zero migration headaches.

For me Google+ was a lot like HN:

Peaceful, quiet and beautiful and lots Open Source content and smart people.

I still look once or twice a year but it seems everyone who are into building social media wants to copy not only the very limited functionality of Twitter, down to its dumb limitations, but also its UX and aestheti.

The exceptions I am aware of are Hubzilla (which lools seriously interesting but just confuses me and has no obvious way to enter - and yes, I can create my own instance but I cannot find anyone else), Diaspora (which I think copies Facebook and which is also confusing) and MeWe (which superficially look like Google+ but insist on repeating Googles mistake WRT real name policy).

Any decent human being would at least try to rectify things ASAP, except for Google. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution.

They're the most dysfunctional organization I've seen in my life. It's like communications between teams goes with a "none of my business" attitude.

Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...

They actually did start to integrate them. Google Reader had native sharing functionality for several years. Then in 2011 they suddenly removed it and replaced[1] it with sharing through Google+. My small network of Reader-using friends were split over wanting to join Google+, so that mostly killed our practice of regularly sharing links with each other.

[1]: https://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-in-reader-fres...

This absolutely was not a case of "the product was finished and did all it needed to do"... people were pissed at what was happening and didn't want to move over to Google Plus (which completely lacked the core feature of reading RSS feeds, despite Gundotra claiming they would eventually implement it (shocker! they never did)).

The story of Google Reader's demise is purely a power grab by a mad exec/product leader that ran his product to failure and eventually was forced out of the company under allegations of being a sex pest to employees. Google Reader died for no good reason other than getting that piece of garbage some bonuses.

An example of the perfect feed for me is https://ciechanow.ski/atom.xml.

A bit funny how Apple tried so hard with their Newsstand thing, and then later Apple News+ or whatever. The solution was RSS all along.

https://openrss.org/blog/youtube-feeds

There's almost as many good and different RSS reader clients as Todo list apps, so this somehow seems like seen through rose-tinted glasses.

I’m still pissed off about it.

For a long time there Google was a cool company that was more than just something to make money. It was doing all this other stuff that didn't make money but made the world better.

These days it does about the same amount of "good" as any other company in the Fortune 100.

Arguably it was The RSS Reader.

Killing Google Reader effectively killed RSS, shifting the gravity of the big tech companies from a fundamentally open & interoperable consumer web to a fundamentally closed silo.

And conversely, shutdown of the Reader was a wakeup call that big corporations exist to make money, and things that don't monetize well are not going to survive.

That was just past the peak of "Web 2.0" frenzy that used free public APIs for all kinds of "mashups". The APIs didn't even require developer keys and didn't have stringent rate limiting. Everyone was giving away their data for free! It's hard to believe now.

Around the time of Reader shutdown, Twitter locked down their API, significantly curbed 3rd party clients. Facebook and Google abandoned XMPP. Later Google Maps became serious about monetizing their API, and all those mashups and RSS feeds started dying down.

So in short, shutdown of Google Reader was the beginning of the end of Web 2.0.

To be fair, the sites I care about all still have RSS support though.

1. The retirement of Google Reader sort of signaled the death knell for RSS. No, every RSS feed didn't shut down immediately. Yes, there are still zillions of RSS feeds live today in 2023. But it was a sign that any RSS feed you cared about wasn't likely to be around forever.

2. Many did switch, but Google Reader had some basic (but nice) social features. I think about 99% of my friends never made the switch to something else. So I miss seeing what my friends starred.

However Reader was a useful, beloved, and rather… intimate product, it was one which closely held your interest and part of your daily workflow.

For its users, its closure sent a clear message: Google has stopped caring, it doesn’t matter how important something is to you, or to an ecosystem.

Personally, it’s the moment I stopped being comfortable using google products for anything essential.

There were other RSS clients, but Google Reader's web-based, infinitely-scrolling interface was unique. Imagine any utility software you use daily, now imagine it being gone and having to use some alternative you know is inferior.

Fortunately a number of alternatives were quickly developed with different levels of success. But few were available the day the shutdown was announced.