At its peak, Google Reader had 30M users but no executive support | Hacker News Reader

At its peak, Google Reader had 30M users but no executive support

9to5google.com

What killed reader (from original Verge story)

- Company’s leadership began to wonder whether Reader was ever going to hit Google scale. Almost nothing ever hits Google scale, which is why Google kills almost everything.

- Marissa Mayer didn’t like it.

- Google+ sucked away all the engineers and resources.

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...

What about the simple fact that if I’m not going to the blog’s website directly, I’m not seeing or clicking on the Google adsense ads they were displaying?

Or that you weren’t typing the name of the blog into Google to find it each time, and potentially clicking a sponsored link?

The whole idea of reader hurt Google’s business model.

Or, it’s a highly customized list of websites and interests that is tied to an individual user, and therefore can be advertised against.

Google could have put ads in Reader if they wanted to.

> - Marissa Mayer didn’t like it.

Its safe to say with her track record as a visionary, Google Reader on its own could have been spun off, floated and the company would have been so wildly sucessful that we would call them FANGR stocks.

That and every messaging app they release. You know it has about a 2 year shelf life, so don't bother picking it up.

GNARF roll a little better off the tongue.

Silent G I assume. Not sure how google would feel about being a silent letter.

There is an amazing alternative with far more features and thoughtfully designed in https://feedly.com/

+1 Been a happy user for years.

I'm happy with https://feedbin.com/

Looks nice, but the value proposition sucks for 5 bucks a month

As a customer of theirs for probably around two years, I could not disagree more.

As far as online services go, Feedbin is absolute perfection.

They offer a clearly defined service. I give them money and they provide said service. It is rock-solid. One invoice email every month, and _absolutely nothing else_.

No changes. No feature creep. No upselling. No customer satisfaction surveys. Zero bullshit, zero annoyances. None. Zip. Zilch.

I used to pay for it but it there was slow response to bugs and no appetite for new features. You might call it feature creep, but there were feeds I wanted to read that it couldn't render, and OSS that could.

I would call that maintenance, not feature creep. And sure, I would expect those problems to be resolved, too.

It's just something I have not encountered myself.

Why would I want to pay monthly for a feed reader? What's the added value? Why feedbin? I was building something similar for newsletters with newsletterify.com. The value proposition was simple: clean inbox, help with information overload. I also wanted to add summaries and recommendations. Help me out with all the information overload. It would've been similarly priced. And I probably would've thrown in an RSS reader later. (I want to continue the project later this year, but now I'm drowned)

I don't have much to add to the discussion about feed readers, but I think you're seeing a good lesson on the value of actually shipping. It is harder than it seems.

Their value, for now, is that they managed to push it through and actually deliver a solid product (apparently, from what the commenter said), with a sensible form of self-sustaining, so users can rely on it still existing in 3 years time. That's also itself part of the value proposition, for lots of users.

I see that! But I also shipped 2markdown.com and I have a main gig where I also ship. I shipped newsletterify as well, it's up and running but didn't attract any users at all. So I'll do a second run later this year, with a rewrite and a different pricing model (adding a free tier).

Woah you have a good amount of products going on, no wonder you're swamped. Congrats on all those, and wish you good luck with them and future launches!

Thank you so much! It's a lot, but it's fun most of the times!

This is likely why no exec supported google reader and it shut down: people aren't willing to pay for it.

Feedbin can extract the full content of an article for feeds that only offer partial-content. This way you can keep reading without leaving.

How does this work? Is it client-side, like FF Reader View? Or does it request an archived article from Feedbin servers?

There have been tons of alternatives and they all sucked in different ways - either they were bloated (no, a news reader does not need "far more features") or they weren't free.

If a product sucks only because it isn’t free, then the product itself is literally worthless. How do people expect someone to provide them something worthwhile for free.

If I had to pay for every worthy free product I use every day...

That's the thing. I think people forget just how much FOSS software, tools, assets and knowledge is out there that we all benefit from enormously every single day. Even if you're not a dev, most of the websites we visit, the apps we use, the technology underpinning our phones and computers relies in part or in whole on Free and Open Source Software.

I take it for granted but it's important to remember what an amazing thing that is.

Because of the existence of really incredible FOSS? Lots of incredibly useful software from Linux to web browsers and more are free.

Linux is good primarily because of enterprise support which brings in millions in funding. Enterprises are willing to pay for it.

I loved reader. It was the tipping point for me that made me view every new google product with pessimism and scepticism. It's also amplified by the fact that several products I got invested in (google, youtube, google talk, etc) became significantly worse.

The tech goodwill burned from Google Reader will likely haunt google for the rest of existence, and probably prevents a good chunk of GCloud/Workspace adoption.

Toward the end, many people working on the Reader team, which was a dozen people at its height, were poached for the now defunct Google+.

Also Reader was a competitor to google+ as it had the feature of finding and reading content, but in a much more user pleasing way and that made google way less money.

A lot happened around the time of Google+. Whether because of it I cannot say, but it was in nothing but a pipe dream a substite for:

Google Wave chaos collaboration brilliance vs the conventional Google+ was killed prior to Google+.

Free GMail/limited apps for Domains. This was killed for new domains in 2012, and merging/destroying through failed merge via single sign on to YouTube/other services. Generic services weren't a good substitute for 'owning' a name via domain.

XMPP was killed by G+ Hangouts in 2013.

Reader, of course.

It seemed like G+ killed anything that it could, in any fractional way, be deemed a substitute for. The memory I have of these products were of functional things. The memory I have of G+ is a large whitespace screen with an avatar and exceptionally mediocre half solutions. G+ was not fun, it wasn't social, it wasn't even average.

I could never get my head around G+. It felt like almost every decision and element of it was sociopathic rather than social.

Hangouts, in the original form of "Real time, unstructured video call" was pretty cool. The rest was insane.

I thought circles was a great way to interact socially.

Yep, that was a wonderful design. I wish it took off, and I wish it hadn't been a harbinger of the downfall of so many other wonderful Google products.

Yeah someone made a clone of the circles UI to put your Facebook contacts into Friend Lists which I used for a while, always wondered why Facebook didn't just steal that to get around people being worried about their parents seeing their party pix (back before the youth had 100% abandoned Facebook)

Twitter has Twitter Circles which I think it similar. I'm not really sure how many people actually use it. I remember the G+ circles at least had the novelty factor but it still felt like an effort to manage.

I still don't get it, it wasn't as if there weren't, aren't, plenty of RSS readers to chose from.

At the time when it happened, I tried over 15 of them, and they were all terrible and had one or more deal breakers. I finally found a replacement in TinyTinyRSS. Prickly developer, but well-made. I'm still using it self-hosted.

I'm sure the alternatives are better now, but back then it looked dire.

In what sense?

All of them allowed to provide a set of feeds, update, and display them, it is not likely one needs an office suite to display RSS feeds.

Why don't people forget Google Reader once and for all?

There must be some unique feature which, to this day, is either too costly to access by the masses in others or not yet implemented by others.

Had there bean feature parity with google reader, and say Bing or DDG picks that up, would we still be missing Google reader?

I'm always asking myself:

- why hasnt someone just build a pure/full copycat?

- originally looking just like Google Reader back then

- marketing would be "a real Google Reader clone" (or similar BS)

any idea?

Am I the only one who misses Google Reader precisely because you didn't have to deal with any UI? It came with a bookmarklet, I think it looked like ">>" that you put into your browser address bar. Click that and it just loaded the next article in your feed, natively, from its own site. No Google UI at all, no extra web page to load.

30M, is that a lot?

TFA says no.

With an annual revenue per account of…zero, right?

by that logic whatsapp has no value for most of its existence.

IM apps seem like a good example of something that generates no profit and seems pretty worthless other than an addition to boost the value of some other product. I can’t see how Google Reader could have ever been profitable.

A user's interest graph. Very valuable.

How much revenue does gmail contribute?

A lot, through Google Workspaces.

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