It's strange to see the naivety around Reader.
If Facebook had created it, people would recognise the initiative to gate-keep, regulate and curate the Wild West of RSS. "They're trying to keep you inside their walled garden!"
If Facebook had created it, people would recognise the initiative to gate-keep, regulate and curate the Wild West of RSS. "They're trying to keep you inside their walled garden!"
It did not live long enough to become a villain (though it certainly would have — there is no reason why G wouldn’t have added recommendations, an algo feed, and all it brings). Therefore it’s remembered well.
Reader also had no vendor lock in at all. There’s no network effect like Facebook. There’s no massive infrastructure demands like Google. No corporate sales process like Oracle, Microsoft, etc.
You could very easily create a competitor and after it died, few even tried to replace it. I miss it but not enough to find another RSS reader.
You’re never really the villain if there are viable alternatives and next to no switching cost. It would have been hard to make that product evil.
Which especially sucks, because its friend-of-a-friend model for making comments visible on shared items was better for discovering interesting people, constructively limiting the social impact of popular posts, reducing the dangers of unintentionally poor posts, and disincentivizing trolling than any social network has implemented since.
For the few people who even knew Reader had a social network—a group which certainly didn't include Google—it was a better social network than any of the ones credited with killing it.
Now you have Substack and Medium and such, which are pretty decent.
Perhaps it could be that I’m seeing replies from people that others on my instance follow? Or perhaps there’s some other mechanism to fetch replies.
I use my own server with only me, so it only receives replies because I'm following the person who replied or their whole-server feed.
> It would have been hard to make that product evil.
You can just treat RSS data as content to bring in new users, while building your lock through other means. Sharing, recommendations, algo feeds, commenting, and, eventually, posting. Then apply demands to RSS feeds, leveraging your audience, and lock out new ones.
This is all very easy and the playbook is well understood at this point.
Reader had a massive social graph and strong network effects. There were social feeds that only existed in Reader and vanished when Reader shut down. I know I had friends that didn't blog but curated fascinating social feeds in Reader based on how widely they read. There were shared comments that only existed in Reader and entire discussions that happened in the margins of feeds that were lost.
Those social feeds were a discoverability joy. You'd find new feeds for yourself. You'd encourage friends to follow feeds you most recommended. None of the replacements have ever quite felt the same. (I love Newsblur, and it has versions of most of those social features, but it has never had the network effect, and probably never will.)
At one point too, the feeds in Reader included full histories up until the date someone first added the feed to Reader. You could scroll back through time "forever" on some feeds all the way to their first posts, sometimes posts that even the site itself had deleted since (and still read Reader-only comments on them). RSS feeds generally only provide the most recent dozen or so posts. Reader was tracking everything. That was a massive infrastructure demand in the Google scale that just about only Google could have done. None of the replacements try, and generally only keep about 45-90 days of feed activity.
Sure, it wasn't a completely walled garden, like Facebook, but it's still a case of Google killing the largest social network it had with the most beloved network effects for a marginal increase in vendor lock-in. They had good vendor lock-in that few could have competed with, and the replacements today are still scored on how much they can't compete with it, despite matching features.
It’s possible social media could have killed Reader.
But Reader died because Google killed anything that wasn’t directly contributing to Google+, and Reader was competition to Google+.
Also, I doubt Reader would have lost to social media. If Reader had stuck around it would most likely have been a Twitter alternative.
So I think a lot of nostalgia is not just for the reader but also for the company Google used to be.
I wonder if in 20 years time there will be the next generation of programmers sneering over vapour-ware Google products while middle managers still buy them products because "no-one ever got fired for buying Google".
As a more prolific blog writer at the time I also liked that their bot would include number of people who were subscribed to my blog in their User Agent.
Something I generally appreciate with Google: The level of craftsmanship and the amount of elegant designs like this they come up with. (There are also… other things, but their standards are high compared to many competitors.)
I never used the web interface.
Google Reader provided syncing for nearly every 3rd party RSS app.
It wasn’t just a walled garden. It was also critical infrastructure for most RSS apps at the time.