Google Petitioned By Fans Of Google Reader To Reconsider Shutdown | Hacker News Reader

Google Petitioned By Fans Of Google Reader To Reconsider Shutdown

fastcompany.com

93 pointsForFreedom55 comments

Whats incredible to me is that google co-opted RSS in chrome and practically forced us to use their Reader product via Chrome's defaults. So we all gave up on our stand-alone readers and readers built into other browsers. And now they pull this crap?

I just wish they'd leave well enough alone. I greatly prefer Firefox's RSS integration. Heck, RSS is more or less dying and I blame google and Chrome for this. Shifting the reader from the browser to a webapp isn't helping anyone and just means more backend infrastructure to maintain. Now they don't want to maintain it. Typical cloud fail.

Are they going to toss in a built-in RSS reader into Chrome now? Is the "cloudify everything" fad finally over? Simcity working yet?

Your comment generally frustrated me as another "cloud basher" of which we've heard a million times before but then I saw your last sentence, burst out laughing and had to give you some props for it. The cloud is completely pointless and hindering in some situations. Thank you for reminding me of that. -- A Serial Cloud App User

With Google Reader I can read my feeds on my phone.

It is not just fans of Google Reader who are shocked, the fans of Google would be too. It goes against their "Don't be Evil" mantra which, as many would interpret, puts common good before sheer commercial interests.

Google might be able to prove that Reader usage has been dropping. However it was still the leading web based solution for reading feeds without any marketing or updates for a long time. As we notice now, people don't even know the alternatives!

A really bad move for the Google brand.

I'm pretty sure the Google brand is already heavily associated with killing products whenever they feel like it, as they did to Code Search, Google Search API (twice), Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets), Google Pack, Image Labeller, Google Dictionary and now Google Reader.

No, I expect Google to offer free services that serve my every whim until they go bankrupt.

Nobody forced Google to start up all those loss making services -- which they did to gain positive PR or attempt to stifle competition in those markets -- or buy those companies and shut down their existing products.

Stifle competiton? Are you serious? All what Google does is destroying other peoples's businesses for fun - see, we have shitload of money and nothing to do, why we just offer that what you offer, but for free - haha looser.

The fact that google may not be doing doesn't mean this is isn't a known practice, which is actually punished by the law in some places.

Offering your product for free (which smaller competitors will often not be able to do) can drive the competition out of business and be anti-competitve (i.e. evil).

This is not some absurd thing to say. The only question is whether that happened. (I sort of believe it did, at least on some level.)

That doesn’t make Google super-evil in my eyes, but it’s a mark against them.

That's essentially saying that being too competitive is anti-competitive, and frankly, I think it's ridiculous. So what if smaller competitors aren't able to provide the same solutions at the same price? Isn't that why it's called competition? The point is to benefit consumers, not to keep inefficient businesses alive by hurting them.

That said, I think there's some sense in calling anti-competitive when a player lowers the price temporarily, in order to drive out competitors and jack up the prices afterwards. But that's clearly not what happened here.

Nah, reducing the price and bringing it back up is not necessary.

It’s anti-competitive if Google Reader on its own wasn’t profitable and Google nevertheless kept it alive (funding it with money from elsewhere in the company), thus killing competitors.

Then, does that make Hacker News an anti-competitive move by YCombinator? Does it make Free Software anti-competitive?

Maybe it is, but then I say, hurray for the anti-competitives!

No, it doesn’t.

This isn’t a black and white problem.

Agreed -- anti-competitive law is pretty clear on the fact that scale and market dominance in one market cannot be leveraged to gain significant market share in another market for this exact reason

The fact that they have market dominance on another market is immaterial here, they didn't need it to keep Google Reader free. Lots of companies have free online services subsidized by their endeavors, without being dominant. You're posting in one of them right now, for example.

It is absolutely material in competitive and antitrust law. It's not an issue of interpretation or opinion here -- it's applying the same principles that got Microsoft in trouble in the 90's.

>which they did to gain positive PR or attempt to stifle competition in those markets -- or buy those companies and shut down their existing products

or, less cynically, to try them out and see what interest they would generate; shutting them down when the interest was not sufficiently great.

I think I would rather that companies try things out and then shut them down, rather than never trying anything remotely new or different in extreme fear that they might fail.

Luckily, at their current profitability that's unlikely to happen until well after your grandchildren are retired.

Is reader really a money drain? The bulk of it is crawling and serving cached text, which is core to google's search anyway.

> No, I expect Google to offer free services that serve my every whim until they go bankrupt.

Because that was anyone's argument?

And Google Knol!

To be fair, Google didn't kill Writely. It now lives as Google Docs. There may be other services in your list that are not entirely dead.

What the hell is "evil" about shutting down a website?

Thank you, the day "inconvenience" becomes synonymous with "evil" you'll know you've lost all perspective.

While it's frustrating for users of the service, I think this Reader shutdown provides a great opportunity for so many smaller developers to spruik their product or build another option in the space.

Here's an alternative: Google throws a credit card form in front of Google Reader and people can pay for the service.

Never happen. At best, Google could spin the service off in to a separate company, but as Google exists today the product makes no sense. The income from a paid Google Reader service wouldn't register a blip on Google's financials, but would detract from their focus.

>but would detract from their focus.

Why not just stop the development on it and let the service to continue?

I never had any problems with Google Reader, nor do I want a particular feature to be added to it. It's fine as it is.

It's fine as it is?

It's fine, as long as it crawls every feed, merges the contents, archives them, serves up the bandwidth, allows people to write custom front-ends that prohibit Google from even showing you any extra data like say an ad?

As opposed to gmail, which I visited in a browser (with AdBlock) once, to set up two-phase auth during that loud security push?

Remember the recent Google Reader outage? There's no such thing as a zero-touch web service. There's always some resource commitment, and sometimes running a successful business means making the hard decisions, like shutting down services that are used, but don't generate revenue, and don't contribute to your core business.

Google Reader made quite a lot of sense for Google but they castrated the service so far that it became a standalone product with no relevant connection to remaining Google environment.

So, I agree, after all those bad decisions it would have been very difficult to make Google Reader a relevant revenue source. However, long-term support of such a core service is part of Google's reputation, it was even so important to the users Google could at least have been able to cover the costs.

I'm skeptical that it would be enough to even come close to pay the engineers working on the project, never mind supporting the data storage for all the users

I refuse to build anything that uses Google API's for this exact reason, They could pull the plug on gmail next week if they decided they were not getting enough metrics from it.

Look at what happened to the translate API. How about the licencing changes to Google maps API. They build something like this and if they can't find a way to generate more money (maps API) it gets shut down(translate, now reader.), even if a bunch of people use it. And by a bunch I mean a small collective of tech people.

I would not be surprised to see Google Groups get munched once they finish adding a few more features into the communities bag.

I do use gmail, I have multiple accounts in fact, but I backup everything locally that I think might be valuable to me in the future...just in case.

I have to agree with you here. For both customer work and some of my own projects I need a search API and a translate API. I went with the Microsoft APIs because I thought Microsoft would be less likely to "pull the rug."

I'd also like to add: Google Web Search REST, Google Web Search JSON, Image Search, Code Search, Feedburner's API, and some 30+ others that I _don't_ have a personal interest in, but I'm sure were used by many others.

While it's great to have all this stuff in one place when it's all supported, it quickly turns bitter once Google becomes the only player in a market only to pull out suddenly.

FWIW Google Reader never had an official API, just a hacked up reverse-engineered unofficial API which everyone took to using.

> I would not be surprised to see Google Groups get munched once they finish adding a few more features into the communities bag.

I would say that this is probably firmly in motion. I doubt that many users enjoy using the Groups interface. For instance, I can't remember if there was ever a time that the groups webpage correctly rendered on any of my Android devices' browsers (it always thinks I'm using an old version of Safari?!?), or was actually useful outside of a desktop (where it is merely annoying, but usable). I think this is a good indicator that they are divesting from any work there probably in preparation of dropping it.

> I backup everything locally that I think might be valuable to me in the future...just in case.

One thing I absolutely trust Google to do is provide a mechanism to get my data out of one of their services, particularly if the service is going to be discontinued.

Considering Marissa Mayer green lit the project back at google. It'd be nice to see yahoo step in to fill the void.

or Amazon? Cloud service, like Google Reader, plus Kindle support would be nice

I used to be a heavy Google Reader user and I'm actually happy they are shutting it down. This will force innovation in this field by removing the biggest player in the market.

This is just like when they cancelled Firefly...

... or Futurama...

People who think there is going to be a reaction remember that the public's reaction to this is probably going to be...

"Google Reader? What's that?"

"Google Reader? Is that like Google Wave or something?"

"Google had a product that would read to me?"

Exactly -- it's a product with a loyal following, but not necessarily significant... and when you work on the scale of Google, a few million people (or even a few dozen) does not move the needle for them

You know, I haven't seen anyone yet mention the obvious. I'd pay something per month to keep using Google Reader. Is there some reason they don't want my money?

We keep complaining that they are killing this free service. How about keeping it up, charging me something, and terminating only the "free" part?

(Disclaimer: I have no idea about Google's code base) Why don't they opensource Google reader? Sure someone could build a small nice business out of hosting it. It's no loss for them, and gathers lots of goodwill in the nerd community.

I've read that Google reader is deeply integrated with Google Search so that's probably the reason.

Here's the link: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/

Given the scale at which it operates, Reader is undoubtedly very dependent on Google's infrastructure (BigTable etc.), none of which is publicly available.

Keep it for the goodwill. I can't imagine it's a huge hassle to keep it going.. nobody is asking for them to continuously update and evolve the product.

when the rest of the infrastructure around it is changing all the time, it's hard not to end up spending a considerable amount of time and effort just to keep the service up and running

Google cant change its mind like that. It wod project a badly on them.

I like how that blogs links are the same colors has static text.

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