Google Reader lived on borrowed time: creator Chris Wetherell reflects | Hacker News Reader

Google Reader lived on borrowed time: creator Chris Wetherell reflects

gigaom.com

86 pointsshrikant27 comments

I would have thought that Google would keep Reader running. Not because there would be a strong business case, but because pissing of both bloggers for fucking with their channels (who in aggregate is a huge influencer) and information omnivores (many of who love to share opinions of companies and products with their social circle) is a huge PR hit to take for saving peanuts. They couldn't have done worse by buying full-page attack ads against themselves in NYT.

I went to Newsblur last year, because I like to support the little sites when they're filling my need, but Reader was the Google product I used most by a mile, I'll miss it. I accept that Google doesn't make things for me anymore, I'll look elsewhere for exciting products.

The article hints that it's the recommendation system that is hard and use a lot of resources.

Funny as it is exactly the part of the product I didn't care about.

Right. I don't recall ever subscribing to one of its recommendations.

Mostly what I got were suggestions for crap pseudo-blogs from the Gawker content farms.

"Reader is (was?) for information junkies; not just tech nerds. This market totally exists and is weirdly under-served (and is possibly affluent)."

This is what I don't understand about the death of the RSS ecosystem. A whole class of professionals spend their days reading text -- in government, in finance, in specialist journalism. Many would pay for a decent reader; it's a tool of their trade, after all. You don't need mass adoption; a few thousand people at $20/month would keep you ticking over. So why haven't there been more companies in this space.

I have seen companies tried, and worked for a strategic consulting firm at one time who was heavily reliant on RSS feeds for sending information (we were basicly human parsers on very topic-specific items). And they used NewsGator. I get the impression NewGator is not doing that well, and the "I will pay good money" sector you suggest exists does not; very few people are willing to pay for good interface, despite a strong use case. I say the same about movies and television. There is a self-serving expectation of free, and few buck this trend unless they really need it and the pay-for services are not worth it, or do just enough. Maybe others can tell me their experiences.

I am definitely someone affected by this, and continue to look into better RSS management every year or so for this reason. It appears building my own solution is by far the best approach, and that is true for a whole bunch of software anyway. Oh well.

I considered building my own too, but it seems like a lot of work for something I can sort of do without. Are there any open source web-based feed readers that are worth setting up and running?

Tiny Tiny RSS maybe? http://tt-rss.org/

Selfoss [1] looks pretty cool (imo more usable than TT RSS) but is missing OPML import. GPL v3.

[1] http://selfoss.aditu.de/

It is time consuming. I have been working on my own open source reader and it takes a lot of effort to get right.

Even worse, I am having a hard time to get people to try it out so I can get feedback to improve it. I keep working on it just because I rely on it for my daily news/podcast.

This is a great opportunity to get a few testers/users, if you'd like to continue developing it.

I do however understand that this can be quite overwhelming - so I'd recommend you'd only take in people manually (ie. no automatic signup - that'll probably be quite the load..)

It's Android client based http://goo.gl/kShgp so it has no server limitation and it is actively being developed https://github.com/dodyg/AndroidRivers

I am helping out Cartulary as well https://github.com/daveajones/cartulary that will provide S3 based RSS aggregation functionality.

maybe because people used google reader ... i'm sure there wil be a lot more people interested in your project , a good rss reader is just an invaluable tool for my organisation and some exec may be willing to pay good money for a perfect google reader clone.

The bigger issue is that we are relying more and more to few centralized services on the Web, which doesn't really interop well with each other and does not respect continuity in terms of data or API.

Take a look at Twitter API 1.1 changes, etc. There are more examples of this. At least Google Reader support export subscription list using OPML format.

People were not willing to switch or to pay because Google Reader offered a very decent alternative for free. Now that this is changing, the landscape may shift. Will be interesting to see what happens.

Why don't they just use local apps? Why does this have to be a web service in the first place?

Google Reader is probably the only place that even has an archive of many defunct blogs. Are they going to archive them somewhere or just throw that trove of web history away?

Most likely the later, sounds like we should take care of preserving them ourselves.

Brainstorming session on irc://efnet/#archiveteam

Edit: wrong channel d'oh

I'm assuming the Internet Wayback Machine [1] would have them indexed, if they were up for any length of time?

[1] http://archive.org/web/web.php

Wayback Machine coverage is pretty spotty, especially for less-popular sites like blogs. I wouldn't depend on it.

Interesting that apparently the data generated by Reader was not valuable enough for Google. +1 are sufficient for Google to understand people's interests? Seems to me information junkies could have been an important source of information.

But then the SEO spammers probably also just created Google Reader profiles with fake reading lists?

How is the situation on G+, is it easy for SEO spammers to game it or is it harder, for example because of the real name policy?

So Reader was a red-headed stepchild from the inception.

I mostly abandoned Reader for Twitter when Google made it clear that the one true path was Google+. My team used the share/comment features in Reader constantly, and got alot of value from it. And not just for blogs -- we'd subscribe to Google Alert RSS feeds and use Reader to annotate.

Google+ Hangouts are amazing. It's Facebook cloning is ok. But it is weak for the core workflow that Reader gave you. Twitter is close, but it's 100% public nature limits it utility for me.

At the end of the day, I lost a functionality that was valuable to me. It's too bad, but I'll live.

Apple had Mapgate. Google has Readergate.

This is a great example of trials faced by both companies if you have suffered a head injury and can only remember the lady six months.

thanks, autocorrect- of course I meant "last"

Google now more focus on those products which gives more profitability and revenue either direct or through advertising.http://leadsrain.com/

Can the mods kill this account? It is clearly a spammer.

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