How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
openrss.org
openrss.org
RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.
Not LibreWolf. I’m also a fan of ungoogled-chromium, those are my two daily browsers.
What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.
I checked as I use the Feedbro extension in Firefox and Chrome family browsers for holding and updating a tree of RSS feeds and thought I'd missed a built in FF feature :/
Good, you might say, and I wouldn't disagree, but Google et al sure would.
Right here, that's how HN RSS feed works.
I only follow HN through the RSS feed. But it only gives the title and links to content and comments.
But for HN use case, that's ok IMO. Based on title I can decide if the comments might be worth it and follow the link.
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux, and haven't seen an ad in years. It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad. Javascript, in particular, has been constantly abused against the user ever since it was created.
Same setup and same experience. I've recently joined another company which only provided chrome with no extensions by default. I know the web is filled with ads but I'm shocked again and again when I get a glimpse into what it's like without an adblocker.
Blocking ads will also prevent malware scripts, unscrupulous information collection, and deceptive virus infection messages. I've got friends who've been infected because they believed the popup that told them their computer had a virus, and they needed to click the link to remove it.
Some demographics are heavy ad blockers, 90%+.
Manifest v3; Android
Another aspect of ads from the early 2000: they were individually made for particular places, rarely generating any controversy. For example, I used to be a moderator on a forum dedicated to ActionScript, and we had a sponsor, who, basically paid our hosting expenses, and that sponsor had a banner in the header of the forum advertising lessons in Web design / programming. The banner was designed to match the overall forum appearance, it didn't track anyone's browsing history, didn't collect cookies... it was simply a big and fancy button linking to the sponsor's Web site.
The problems really started with the "media buying" waterfalls, i.e. the automated ad delivery. Ad agencies automated their job by providing customers with (semi-, but increasingly fully-automatic) ways to design their ad campaigns. In order to make these campaigns at least somewhat effective, they needed to somehow automatically reproduce the situation similar to the one I described having in the ActionScript forum: they needed to find a good match between the audience and the ad, but they had to cut corners because of the automation and resort to the unsavory mechanisms of tracking users' behavior. The decrease in quality had to be compensated for by increase in quantity. And that's how we got here...
Firefox (the product) and Mozilla (the for-profit company) are lost causes. Firefox (the technology) is still there, for now.
I can probably turn it off somehow but I feel like it should be opt-in or at least live elsewhere.
LoneWolf and LobreWolf are still available ;)
Google pretty much declared war on those back then, providing reasonable-looking ad formats that could be integrated discreetly on the page (and as far as I remember, they had a limit of how many banners you could show). I really wish we could back to that. Now they serve animated/video ads.
I bet if you open YouTube, even with Adblock and sponsorblock, you'll see ads. "Tech" channels are nothing but ads because all they do is present products for people to buy.
Even channels that do legos are ad channels.
YouTube itself has become a platform for serving videos that are advertisement at their core. These videos are popular, get good engagement, pay the content creators and come in cheap for brands. This style of "journalism" extends to many other platforms.
Prior to Brave, ublock origin on Firefox provided a similar ad-free Youtube experience.
I don't consider ad content like the tech channels you mention to be a negative. Informing people about new products is a useful service. The ads that are negative are those that impose themselves over other content or mess with normal internet browsing experience.
It's a different story if it's a person that's used a device that they bought for a year. But these tech youtubers, they are extremely dependent on a good relationship with the brands because what brings them money is doing the "reviews" on day 1 (if not before) and they can only do that if they have a good standing with the brands. Meaning they will can only talk the product in a way that they know the brand is going to be okay with, mentioning obvious flaws that are easy to disregard ("it's not the best value for the money" is a classic).
This is bad because this type of journalism is constantly moving the window of what's acceptable. Channels that are truly critical (for example gamersnexus) don't get any support from brands. Channels like that are rare, of course, they do exist.
So, to reiterate my point, these channels are not informing: they're selling. There's a really good documentary with Noam Chomsky called "manufacturing consent" that really gives a good overview of this topic. Well, it's about politics, but the same applies for marketing.
Also, adding `Before: YEAR` in search takes you back to a more wholesome time.
No you don't need Mullvad VPN to use Mullvad Browser.
Now everyone can create content, without any of the friction of hosting it. The vast majority of it is crap, but that was always the case.
The main difference between now and 30 years ago is that the Internet is vastly more diverse. It isn't just other CS majors any more. Now everyone gets to wade in the vast crap pool looking for the smidge of things that appeal to them. Meanwhile the CS majors still host their own stuff, because they can, and you find out about it via the same word of mouth.
the most charitable interpretation is that the internet used to more exclusively cater to your interests specifically, which i’m sure is true.
try asking most women about the internet then vs now. there are still scumbags, and one could reasonably argue that they’ve gotten worse, but at least theres more to do now.
Compared to the torrent of AI slop today, it was.
Hey, that's not fair! It also had nine year olds who bought a book about HTML and made shitty sites on Geocities!
It was more special, to us specifically. But I'm claiming that the amount of crap just for us is still there. It's just easy to be distracted by the billions of content producers that are easier to find.
Note that I wasn't talking about slop, which does indeed risk a true Dead Internet. But people were pining for Geocities long before AI.
What's funny is that back in the day if you mistyped a URL it'd go nowhere. Then for a while domain squatters took over, and they'd lead you to dead end traps slinging porn or pyramid schemes. Those dead end traps were on the fringes however, where nobody really ventured. Nowadays everywhere is designed like that, except instead of porn it's corporate ads, and the pyramid schemes are run by people making videos those corporate ads play over.
The OP is talking about the “Web 1.5” era, and it seems like you have the requisite patina to remember it too. It really was an entirely different world. Server side technologies just became common, allowing for dynamic websites and user submitted content, which was the birth of forums and aggregators of user content. They tended to cater to special interests and had their own culture, inside jokes, and standards (if any). It was common to be a member of a half dozen or more forums or interest sites, and it was more rare to already know a friend that was part of them. Instead you interacted and became friends with strangers, rather than upload your contacts list and send out friend requests.
There was Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Fark, Something Awful, Albino Blacksheep, eBaum’s World, Slashdot, Homestar Runner, YTMND, DeviantArt, Worth 1000, Maddox, Stile Project, Consumption Junction, Snopes, The Smoking Gun, Stick Death, The Perry Bible Fellowship, Penny Arcade, Threadless, Newgrounds, Zombo.com, Weebl's Stuff, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, Badger Badger Badger, Fenslerfilm, Break.com, Stupid.com, Ogrish, Hot or Not, RateMyProfessors, Rate My Face, Stupidvideos, Questionable Content, How Stuff Works, Something Positive, IGN, Daily Kos, DeadJournal, LiveJournal, IRC, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Trillian… even of those that still “exist”, they don’t still exist.
I’m not saying those sites were necessarily better, but the personality and environment that created them no longer exists. Websites were created just because of an inside joke on a forum somewhere, which then became cultural memes that were talked about at work and school. It was the era of “Have you seen this website?!” and “Joined: 2002” bragging, and that personality is gone.
We went from a bunch of open protocols and decentralized web to a full closed garden gatekeeped by a couple mega companies. It is a sad state of the world, but the MBAs and BigTech won.
Then later IE dominated the web and hurt interoperability, but we fought back through the Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox era anxiously following IE6 slowly losing market share.
Only to find that the war had shifted beyond clients and standards support to the sites and the power of their business models.
And parallel battles for the old standards based DIY freedom lost to hyperscaler clouds and now AI.
All in all compared to that, losing Google Reader seems small, but it was kinda the nexus point at the centre of it all.
StumbleUpon used to be an endlessly entertaining way to find new content on the internet.
That wasn't an option. And if it had been, they would've rolled out monetization through ads anyway. If you believe otherwise, there's too much we disagree on to sum it up here.
If you're using Rails it is basically free to add RSS feeds w/ the 'feed' or 'rss' gems[2]. Because of this we provide RSS feeds for everything, including customer orders and their tracking.
If you want to support the Open Web Initiative[3], I'd also encourage you to support alternative representations[4] of your content (markdown, CSVs, etc), add support for ActivityPub / Fediverse directly and webhooks to your site/app.
Stay open!
1. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/help/atom-feeds 2. https://github.com/ruby/rss 3. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/open-web 4. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v5.0/layouts_and_rendering.ht...
But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.
Tom Anderson liked one of my landscape photos, which briefly made me popular with the crew who'd roll into gallery showings for the wine and cheese.
(This was back before Instagram got acquired by Facebook and Obama let Putin take Crimea and Xi Jingping scoop up rare earth mineral rights in Africa.)
Granted: historically they have often been the smartest person in the room (collectively speaking)
But a consequence of this is that an organization (a) doesn't develop pre-release "listening to user needs" skills & (b) can't post-release pivot in response to user feedback. Microsoft and Apple do much better jobs at both.
This works as long as Google releases exactly what users need the first time (e.g. original Google search or Gmail), but flounders when opinionated, artistic product design with long-term vision is needed (Reader, YouTube, Stadia) or when people outside Google have better ideas (Chrome, GCP, messengers, Docs/Drive, AI dev harnesses).
At this point, I've decided it's less about revenue (the common finger point) and more about organizational prioritization and decision-making. It's just not in Google's DNA.
Nothing short of a Bezos-style API memo is going to change it... and Pichai doesn't seem like he's willing/able to rock the boat that much.
Google pretends to be data driven. What that means is that Google would rather creepily spy on you using all kinds of underhanded means that they invented themselves, tell itself it cares about privacy because it doesn't "sell" that raw data to third parties, and then mine said data for the only signals that matter--how they are going to make more money off advertising to you.
And god forbid some machine-learning system goes wrong and classifies you as a scammer. If they think you're a scammer, you're dead to them, and they will ghost you without a second thought, with no recourse on your part.
Google thinks anything below a billion users is not worth even pursuing.
When I worked there it was always about 10X and moonshots and more magic moments. There was a mantra "focus on the user and all else will follow". The users who matter are advertisers. So they did that, and advertisers keep forking over their cash. End users do not fork over cash, so screw them. Leeches.
Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to interact more with their readers (if they chose to.)
I think it would have been an interesting way to bootstrap things.
Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.
We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.
Oh there were many post on HN about the politics of G+ at the time, how meta ( Facebook ) are going to crush them with social graph etc. And G+ was effectively its own little organisation within Google. I remember there were something about RSS they didn't want. But I guess I have to dig up my bookmarks to find it.
The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
[2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-wort...
And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it.
But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.
Probably you could set up a homelab server and there are tools/apps for streaming it to your own devices, but I havent bothered yet.
AND discovery part -- I'm feeling lucky let me listen to new music. If I liked it I bought it. But it's hard to find new music, get out of your bubble.
The same happened with Google Podcasts. Merged into Youtube Music, not even separate Youtube Podcasts, and it sucks.
YouTube Music still has this feature and it even uses the die icon, just like always.
> you could upload your library to it.
You can also do this in YouTube Music.
> But they killed it
They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.
It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.
This is actually completely false. (Source: I worked at Google at the time this transition was made, though not on GPM or YTM).
Two completely different codebases and teams and in fact YTM launched missing a boatload of features that Play Music had. Including annoyingly the ability to use our own Chromecast features on the desktop/browser version. (I worked on the Cast team). There were quite a few angry internal buganizer tickets.
(Degoogled not long after that, actually. Fool me twice...)
I don't care that nobody else on YouTube would ever have wanted to hear them. I don't even really care that the band members themselves would probably be embarrassed that I still had a copy. The point of buying the disk (and uploading it in the first place) was so that I word continue to have access to it.
What's obviously fake about that?
And then the commenter provides a parallel to how willing they were to put money into Google+, i.e. they appear willing to put money into a relatively low usage product when they feel like doing it.
Reader had no such strategic leverage, at least to Google execs' understanding.
A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.
“Solving the problem” is only one aspect of the reason something becomes popular in the mainstream.
I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.
I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed.
If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.
There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles"
There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them.
The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it
Technically, that’s true. But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular just like SQLite isn’t the reason why XYZ app is popular.
Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
My whole point about TikTok as a comparison is that the centralization is part of the convenience and feature set of TikTok for the layperson. The interactivity provided by having a centralized platform is above and beyond RSS. Namely, commenting, posting your own content, etc. Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
I don't understand the relevance of this point. RSS is infrastructure so why would end users need to know about it? They don't know about IP addresses when they type a domain name into a browser, but you wouldn't argue that it isn't mainstream tech.
> Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
This is a quibble and beside the point, but neither of these platforms have podcasts. I can't subscribe to their audio tracks in a podcast player.
But again, I don't see the releavnce. Some platforms not using RSS doesn't detract from the usage that RSS does have.
> Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
This was not a recent occurence. ActivityPub is descended from a long line of work (Ostatus, pump.io, etc) some of which used Atom. Dave Winer (one of the developers of RSS) is experimenting with building a full social network on top of RSS. Podcasting 2.0 (https://podcasting2.org) is working on adding chat/commenting to podcasts. Your original assertion was that RSS can't be used to build something like TikTok, but there have been multiple projects built with either RSS or a close enough analog that show it can be done
A lot of people were using Google Reader without ever knowing what RSS was all about. And when Google reader was gone, they stopped using it, Facebook then taken the newsfeed over.
I eventually got away from subscribing to like 50 webcomics (all I used RSS for... most other stuff was too high-volume, and I liked reading everything in my feed, iirc) though and stopped using an RSS feed altogether.
> First thing: don’t send money. This app is written for love, not money. :)
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
But two things can be true at the same time. I'm still bitter about Google removing a great webapp from the internet so unceremoniously.
That's not a dig, to be clear. I was one of those kids writing shitty HTML for Geocities.
I don't hate the modern internet, but I feel like there's roughly now about ~10 sites that I visit frequently, whereas when I was a teenager there were lots more. Maybe it's just my "old man yells at cloud" moment.
https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...
But, thankfully, you can have almost the same thing with Livemarks extension.
Some of the people behind Opera has built Vivaldi, which also contains an RSS reader. I haven't used it myself, but it looks promising.
I use for the last many years NetNewsWire and have never had any problems reading the news I want to read.
While it was definitely possible to use alternatives, it effectively became king of the mountain which gave it the power to deal a punishing blow to RSS once they pulled the plug.
I will just say it was a very different time and at the time I didn't regard Google as a place that didn't make credible commitments to new products. But big picture I think you're right.
Perhaps they’re expecting people to subscribe to social media accounts or via email, but those both cost money to reach users. RSS is free.
That said, stuff like BBC actually does maintain an RSS feed: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml
Also, can't the ads be a part of the feed just as nicely as the articles? What's stopping publishers from inserting ads as items in the feed?
Secondly, that just leads back to my first point. The ads (even targeted ads) are already on the final content.
I just can't view this as a failing of RSS. It wasn't intended to help publishers advertise, it was intended to help end users track the sites they wanted to track. I understand these are some of the reasons Google and other publishers disincentivized the usage of RSS but RSS works great for its intended purpose. I want more technology like RSS, not tech that helps publishers exploit us
This needs to be said louder and more often whenever this "average person" argument is trotted out.
Except for the very largest technology businesses, like the FAANGs of this world, relatively few technology companies are offering products and services aimed at the "average person".
No business I've ever worked for has had the "average person" as their customer. They're all aiming for particular market segments and positioning their products and services to meet the needs of those market segments. I spent a lot of time working on software developer tools that were only of interest to software developers working on the Microsoft stack, for example. Java, C++, and Python developers wouldn't have known or cared about these tools and that was just fine.
So, like you, I couldn't give two hoots what the "average person" thinks of RSS, whether they find it useful, whether they understand it, or whether they've even heard of it.
Whereas there are in fact loads of people who aren't sat on the average (whatever that means) who do find RSS incredibly useful.
I stopped using it not long after. Think the problem is people don't care enough to put in the time curating a feed.
Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one...
Here's @realcountbinface's feed: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UClAxTtZ...
I know I will probably just migrate them to RSSHub when the time calls, but YouTube's channel and playlist feeds have been such a great way to follow a large number of creators. I'm still holding my breath for the day they unceremoniously stop working.
I download RSS from gogol: youtube channel information. Why, because the real evil of gogol and its friends: the whatwg cartel. Their web engines are technical abominations they pushed down the throat of the whole planet, because they actually control all (including the SDK then the computer language). How? They break on purpose interop with small tech web engines, aka noscript/basic HTML.
What's really annoying are major authorities unable to regulate that, namely force interop with small tech (network protocols/file formats)... like they know but are careful not to do anything with a significant impact. Well, In my EU country, this is decided at the top level: prime minister and president and that's it: this is a sorta proof that matter is actually really important. Everything started to go wrong from my EU country gov of 2015/2016 since they 'forgot'(ooopsie!) small tech web engines in the 'master document'.
There is still hope, once small tech is added again to this 'master document' (web engines, currated subset of network protocols and file formats), interop with small tech web engines (most are EU) will have to be added, in 3 years.
We blame the RSS aggregators for the death, which is very fair. But I don't know if blog writers ever supported RSS, either.
With RSS, your words are read, which is great. But you lose the ability to control the feel of the post... the best blogs have a vibe where the medium is at least large portion of the message. A pg essay would feel wrong in a chunk serif font, and I've read blogs that have used interactivity to great effect. RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads or push users to sign up.
I would love to see a platform (mobile would be great for this) that let the creator control the design and maybe even levels of monetization. (Some could argue I'm somewhat describing Medium or Substack, although I don't think they quite hit it for me.)
I could never get into RSS. I theoretically loved it as a concept, but I missed "feeling" the vibe the author was going for.
Agreed, rss was popular with people who wanted to decrease noise.
> RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads
This was the killer and the dumb part, because it could, but monetization sofar means integration with all the bad parts of the Internet that desire to track people.
Most people who use RSS, use it because they don't want to go to a website (filled with ads) and they want content 100% for free.
Perhaps it is time to revisit a distribution model, where the full content of the article is available for paid users inside the reader itself. The RSS reader would require a subscription and pay RSS feed providers a share of the subscription price. A sort of distributed spotify model.
But until that happens, ads fill a middle ground: users don't want to pay and creators want to be paid.
The recent @patio11 Complex Systems podcast lays out how it works:
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/justin-kuiper...
But RSS made tracking very hard. And while I know that's your point (not wanting to be tracked), one reason it works in YouTube videos is there's a lot of analytics that can be used to advocate for rates (and track what's skipped, what's watched, etc).
I run my own RSS reader product (feedgrab.net) and one thing I’ve learned is that there are plenty of sites that serve RSS yet block bots from reading it (ie. RSS crawlers!!).
Not sure what needs to happen to make RSS more popular again - there are loads of feed readers and most blog/news sites support it. Maybe it’s just too complicated for the masses? I tried to address this in Feedgrab with a “Discover” approach which I think could help, but I need to put more effort into the directory.
Also, let’s not forget social media’s role in killing it.
[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=rss%2520reader&date=all&...
Let's say you want to post about 'best way to clean your car windshield'. Why would you post it on a blog when nobody will read it when the TikTok algo will at least give you a pity test to a few hundred people
So all that's left is Reddit and social media and the short form video apps (and Youtube)
The other part of course is Google itself won't rank mypersonalblog .com/i-found-a-cool-way-to-clean-windshields
So there's a doom loop... the supply of potential independent sites can't connect to audience demand, the audience is not being funneled to indie sites anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And now Reddit gets to make much dinero out of selling access for AI training cause that's the only place organic discussion happens at scale
IndieWeb blogging products are alive and well. Google definitely scrapes and ranks (my blog gets good juice) and there are and increasing number of aggregators like Kagi small web, bubbles.town, ooh.directory.
It just seems too useful and un-derived to remain a Google-maintained feature for the long term.
Seems RSS was on Google‘s life support all the time.
For instance the Google killing its RSS extension should be such big problem
Amongst these maybe Email newsletters are more friendly to publishers at least in terms of capturing first party data, so that you can be retargeted easily
https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds
often using my crawling server because rss are often protected against bots
It was Chrome mobile only afaik. And yeah it was also silently killed.
I guess the author didn't follow Google enough.
https://paavandesign.com/blog/how-to-use-chrome-s-new-follow...
You don't need social networks with their AI filtering any more if you have that. That stuff just became obsolete. People just haven't figured that out yet. Including most people that actually do use RSS readers.
Google has not destroyed adoption of RSS feeds at all.
RSS (and Atom) were too nerdy and the mainstream did and does not care for it. Google did not „destroy“ it
John Mashey would pipe in with old_systems_guy@yahoo.com (John Mashey) "I repeat the old proverb:"Money can buy bandwidth, but latency is forever.""
https://yarchive.net/comp/latency.html
Terge Mathiesen with brilliant asides like<Terje.Mathisen "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching" and with surprising insights into bisection bandwidth.
Intelligent discussions now happen on closed forums. My people have moved to mailing lists like arch-general@lists.archlinux.org, or behind authentication firewalls in professional societies.
The public internet is now populated by the sort of people I devotedly avoid in real life...
These days most of the high quality material I read is on Anna's Archive.
The only point the author made that fits the title is what they did to FeedBurner.
I've vomited better things.
The spec is a horrible mash up and seriously needed refinement. It made it easy to kill
That's my intellectually considered response.
Fuck Google.
Time goes on, things evolve, or are not monetizable so they're soon forgotten, or replaced, or improved, or... look a new shiny thing!
Whatever it touches, it destroys - excluding adMoney. That's its only soul.
What I have also noticed is that people are no longer happy to say "I worked at Google". It's now more a career killer (to some extent) than an accelerator.
Anyone remember Google+? Nobody used it but Google tried to force-abuse people into using it.