Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.