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.
It seems like idiotic management making idiotic decisions completely out of touch with the userbase has been with us since the dawn of the web. Just this week, Spotify are turning the mobile app into a stinking pile of TikTok.
Don't be evil. Just be stupid I guess.
They were believing google plus would be popular. So, having a closed social network, where they could control everything and put ads without any complains makes sense.
Besides, Reader was not that popular among the general public.
I don't think the idea was to convince bloggers to switch, but rather to stop one good distribution channel from potentially competing with social media. Google kept Blogger alive, because people can still publish there AND distribute links via social media.
Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do that migration and solve some of the underlying problems.
Nobody wanted to work on it because there wasn't anything in it you could use for promo. "Kept Reader running" on your perf packet would get you a Meets Expectations at best. It might be seen negatively by some. To get a promo you needed big sexy new features. And at the time there was a promo factory that was sucking up all of the prime engineers (cough Google+ cough). It was also popular among employees, and there was a "Save Reader" campaign, but nobody cared enough to actually try to transfer in.
No director wanted it either. It wasn't profitable. It wasn't driving traffic to other Google properties. It was basically a money sink and nobody wanted to be tied to it as a failure.
Source: I was on Google+ (it was a promo factory). My team worked on a number of features that were meant to be used by third parties to tie into Plus. One of those was the comments system. Before the Google+ YouTube comment debacle there were plans to offer that comment system directly to third parties (similar to Disqus). We pitched Google+ taking over Reader and using it as a proving ground for that comment system. As a side bonus, blogs that signed on would already have a (hopefully) vibrant comment history. Management didn't see the value. Google+ comments rolled out to YouTube, it was a disaster, and all those lines of code were lost in time, like tears in rain.
It wasn't driving measurable traffic. If the choice is A) people loving one of your products or B) people hating your brand. Behind which door is the money?
It's always seemed strange to me how singularly obsessed Google culture seems to be with the idea of promotions. All the weird things Google does seem to come down to "that's what gets people promoted". But... why? It doesn't seem like Googlers are systematically underpaid, so why is promotion such a focus?
Maybe this is part of the reason my own stint at Google didn't work out so well.
1.) I was L5, and while there were a ton of great L6s, there were not an insignificant number of ones who were terrible. I think L6 would have been the right level for me; L7 was beyond me at the time. People at higher levels don't really seem to work any harder. That translates to the feeling that I'm getting less pay than I deserve. This is why I ultimately left, and I immediately found a job at L6 equivalency.
2.) My manager pushed me towards promotion. My manager was L6, going for L7, and he had way too many direct reports (more than 20). His plan was to move up and have me fill in the vacuum behind him. Without someone to take on that role he was getting denied his promotion.
3.) I wasn't a Google lifer. I wanted to work for a smaller company where I have more of an impact on the bottom line, and I cared about what I was working on, maybe a startup. Unfortunately I have the three deadly "M"s for startup founders (Marriage, Mortgage, and Munchkins). My plan is to wait until the kids are out (1 "M" down). I could get the house paid off by that point with the extra equity that comes in a promotion (2 "M"s down). And I supported my spouse when she started her own business; she wants to support me in mine (that's all 3 "M"s). TL;DR - A promotion would have allowed me to close out all of my debts, freeing me up to not work at Google.
But I think on top of all of that, you have to get people to want to work on your project. Some projects are fun or have social clout, but come with no chance of promotion (I worked on Memegen for 4 years because it was fun). Some projects suck, but they come with promo opportunities. Projects that suck and don't come with a promise of promo don't get engineers applying to transfer in (this is what killed Reader).
(1) Contribution-driven people build successful company.
(2) Successful company attracts money.
(3) Money attracts social-status-driven people.
(4) Social-status-driven people take over company.
(5) Company ceases to be successful.
Moral of the story: Filter out the social-status-driven people who destroy ALL tribes.
So unlike Twitter and Facebook, I couldn't just set up my Wordpress site to feed all my posts to Google Plus. I had to go and manually post them.
They also had the real names policy still, so I have to post as my real name instead of the name I post online with everywhere else.
Plus was so poorly mishandled because Google does not understand people at all. You can't boul everyone down to a handful of easy categories to make it easier for alogrythms to manage.
Only two good things came out of the Google+ era: consolidated login across all Google apps, and Photos.
This makes great business sense for Google. Personally though, it's the reason I decided to de-Google. I was running some dev stuff from my personal account, - just messing around and too lazy to set up a separate dev account. Then I started to hear stories of people getting locked out of their google account because they did... Something. Something totally unknowable that triggered some flagging system and boom, everything is gone. So I started looking alternative services, one company per service. The last things I use Google for are Maps, Photos, Android backup. The only data I care about are my contacts and photos, and I keep a separate backup of both.
I was satisfied with this, but a few months ago I set up a new gmail account for a business. I hadn't set up the real business email yet so I used this email so sign up a bunch of other services that our business needed. Tripadvisor, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Google maps (registered with our actual verifiable business address), Google webmaster/SEO stuff with our actual real website. I spent a full day doing this. Then I was busy for a week on other stuff and when I went back to use this account it was permanently locked. No recourse, just a message saying the account violated something and was permanently locked - with a text box to write a complaint if I felt this way unfair.
Of course, I did write the complaint, as politely as possible, including my business details and personal email. But I never heard back and I assume no one actually reads those.
I permanently lost access to the TikTok account (no big deal except that I had got a good name. But I made the account under duress from my business partner anyway). I was able to gain access to the Facebook easily. Tripadvisor took me most of a day to regain access. Google maps still, several months later, has the wrong name for our business.
Moral of the story: if you're using Google as a primary service for anything without keeping backups elsewhere, maybe... Don't.
There are plenty of anti-patterns to follow in RSS. We just didn't see them because only techies were using feeds.
The point is that RSS was/less overrun by advertising than the web because of cultural reasons, not thanks to something inherent to the technology.
Right now, there’s no iOS RSS readers that will filter duplicate stories. I can’t imagine how adblocking would get implemented.
But IIRC there were also sites that let you pay for a full feed and I think something good could have come out of it.
The original point is simply that RSS would have gone the way of the web, in terms of the presence of advertising, had it become mainstream.
There being workarounds or other models possible doesn't change that and it also applies to the web today. As another commentor pointed out, RSS would have unique difficulties for adblockers as well.
But lets stick to the technology, first things first, how are you going to get me to subscribe to your feed? I just don't see it happening. Finding subscribers is incredibly hard.
You might be able to get one feed into my aggregator but I just press delete?
If it has as many postings as this one...
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
...they all vanish when I press delete.
It isn't like you only have to obtain my email address. But if it was it would be easy for google to copy paste the gmail filter.
I jumped to Feedly, then I switched to Inoreader for a UI closer to Google Reader.
However... the vast majority of them have tons of "features" that just make their service slow and bloated.
I now just run Miniflux on a mini PC in my house, and that works really well.
The communities that spring up around things like GReader are like lightning in a bottle. Perhaps the companies that can afford to build things like that have concluded that other forms of social media are more profitable.
There still are niches of the internet that operate like a book club for excitable nerds, but they can be short-lived. Most eventually succumb to politics, lecturers, eternal September, and/or a zero-sum debate-team mentality.
Personally I would have welcomed that.
Google Reader did essentially become a social media product over time. By the end it was the primary social network for many of the people in my research area. I was mystified when they shut it down to redirect resources to yet another Facebook clone rather on building on a successful foundation that was already present.
By now most people realize that this is just how Google operates, by shuffling resources around in a blind panic. But many people can point to the first product shutdown that crystalized the realization for them. Google Reader was mine, and judging by the comments in this thread it served the same purpose for others as well.
Perhaps, but they were one more thing to log into, and the Reader/Gmail integration was unparalleled. Also, for those of us who really liked the simple Reader UI, nothing really ever replaced it. Not even the explicit attempts to mimic it.
The problem isn't making things, it's all of the barriers to entry. For example, say it takes 2 weeks to make something. Since most of us have to work, that means a 1 year commitment to save enough to do it over a vacation. Which is really a 2 year commitment until a vacation, or 1 year of grinding, or the sacrifice of vacations altogether, or nights and weekends for an indeterminate amount of time. On top of that, most people struggle to save 10% of their income. So if a project has even a $10,000 budget, that requires $100,000 of income. The numbers quickly become so insurmountable that an adult will almost never find the time that they had as a teenager. A decade may pass in the blink of an eye with no forward progress on life goals (that's happened to me twice now). And most projects take 6 months to 2 years or more..
So major projects can only really happen through a corporate structure or with outside funding. Then the problem becomes organizational, or founders spend most of their time fundraising. Sure, occasionally someone makes something. But traditionally there are 100 failures we never hear about. Today that number might be more like 1,000 or 10,000.
Google axing projects on a whim is power imbalance. They hold all of the cards, have almost unbounded potential, but are so hyper-focused on profit today that they can't seem to innovate on anything. Major corporations today are basically black holes sucking up all available capital and talent, performing no better than small 2-5 person teams would if they had adequate resources.
I'm sure someone will react vehemently against what I'm saying. But we're discussing this on Y Combinator's website, a startup accelerator founded on the idea that small teams can pivot faster than the biggest companies. After writing this out, it seems that only startups can save us. Are any working on a Reader alternative, I wonder.
Also I dream of the day when the musical chairs of competition stop and we move to a post-scarcity society. I thought that was going to happen around the year 2000, but if anything we've slid backwards since wealth inequality is the highest it's been in human history.
I looked at aggregation options for news recently, and discovered that walled gardens and the use of custom CMS's by news organisations have made RSS aggregation of say breaking news all but impossible.
Sure, you can still get blogs, reddit, hacker news etc. But the days of essentially every website having an RSS feed are gone.
(citation needed)
This really feels like your (and a popular) reading of the situation, but isn’t as unequivocal as you make it seem.
To me it’s more like the iMac not having a floppy drive or no USBA ports on the newer MacBooks. Google saw that the web was trending away from blogs and written content. They removed one of the tools that people used to keep up with blogs and written content and accelerated the decline of blogs and written content.
People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right.
Only part that might be slightly confusing is:
> People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right.
"They" in that sentence refers to Google, which should make it more clear. But it is still all in active voice.
And yet here we are, discussing things on a platform that is very akin to the web that Reader advanced. There was always going to be a market for non-Web 2.0 social media junk, albeit smaller. And frankly, trying to copy already successful iterations almost always fails (Google+). The resources that would have been required to maintain or even update Reader were minimal-- they were already wasting money on far more expensive dead end projects that were never going to make money.