The RSS Apocalypse
macsparky.com
macsparky.com
Very interesting point. I think free is good when it comes to code, apps, etc... things that can be copied and distributed. It creates a good shared base of stuff on which to build.
But when it comes to services, totally free can sometimes be bad. That's because there's no such thing as a service that's free to run, so the money has to come from somewhere. Either the service is being monetized through some backdoor method -- usually something involving privacy intrusion or data mining -- or it's what economists call "dumping."
Dumping is when you flood a market with free or below-cost goods to kill competitors, and then jack up the price or even kill the market when the competitors are gone. The best example in software is Internet Explorer, which (prematurely) killed the market for browsers and led to the horrible age of total IE dominance of the web.
Google Reader may well have been -- whether intentionally or not -- dumping. If it was intentional, it might be an effort to kill RSS entirely. The big players -- Google, Facebook, etc. (are there more?) -- all have a vested interest in killing independent less centralized ways of aggregating knowledge in order to steer all traffic to them.
I still use a Mac reader called NewsFire. It hasn't been updated in a long time though. I don't even remember if I paid for it, but if it's free I would certainly be willing to pay. Maybe the authors of such apps can capitalize on this.
every blog publisher then points to the poll as addendum to each post going fwds, informing readers to choose one in order to keep reading via rss.
can include some directions on exporting GR feeds for any of the GR subs that don't already help the reader do so.
granted requires some work, and we still will lose some users, but overall isn't something like this (or a better idea?) required to ensure blogs/rss ecosystem don't lose readers that don't know there are good alternatives and won't necessarily seek alternatives on their own?
Free is good when it comes to code and apps, as you say, because our interests are aligned: I want to use this, and you want me to use this.
Free is bad when you give away a scarce resource and design systems to thwart all but the least common denominator of users:
http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stora...
I've been reposting this for almost four years now and I hope that this meme can stick. It's not about dumping, per se, or about sour grapes or different competition philosophies - it's about recognizing when the interests of a provider are NOT the same as your interests.
I dunno, I was told this once a long time ago and I don't know anything about Rockefeller. I see no flaws with the tactic though (aside from the ethical ones).
When RSS gained popularity I got myself a decent RSS reader and subscribed to a lot of feeds. What happened was that after a short period of time I had +1000 unread posts. At this point I stopped using RSS for a while because it was just too much noise. A few months back I discovered RSS again for myself but this time I did not subscribe to every site I found interesting. There are a lot of news sites which I visit often and they also have a feed in most cases. I do not subscribe to them because I visit them anyway and they are most of the time high volume feeds. Instead I only subscribe to sites (almost always interesting blogs from fellow developers) who write a new post maybe three times a year or so and I only subscribe to blogs from developers/people who only post if they have something very important to say. This made RSS useful to me again because I would never every remember to visit all those sites twice a year… If I see a unread item in my RSS reader I know that I have to read this post soon because it will blow my mind again.
Who of you is doing it in a similar way?
To put it in perspective:
> Since March 20, 2007 you have read a total of 9,085 items.
I'm a heavy user. 3300 in the past month and that's well down on what it used to be.
I found that kind of funny. They were clearly deriving value from the reader, or they wouldn't've joined or kept adding feeds in the first place; but if they were feeling burdened or oppressed by their reader, why didn't they just stop adding feeds? Or if they had to keep finding new feeds, prune back the old feeds a bit. Why load up on feeds until you need to do a burst of spring cleaning or quit entirely?
Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has that).
I dunno about Bloglines then or now (whoever bought it threw out all the old code and started over), but at least in Google Reader, there is an option to, in the sidebar, omit feeds with no updates. I checked that option. It saves a lot of space for me.
I'd read the feeds I most care about and once in awhile visit the ones I less cared about.
I loved Bloglines and only reluctantly switched to Reader. Like you I mostly used it as a way to check less prolific blogs including blogs by friends and family.
Which is possibly one of the reasons Google Reader was so successful, it sort of looked like it had categories and stuff and satisfied people who thought that was important, but it was really river-of-news at its heart.
How about we be consistent and say to the developers of paid RSS aggregators -- who built their products on free content in the first place -- that if they don't like innovation or hopeful investments driving prices to zero, they are in the wrong business. Somehow I think if Google had offered any one of them a ton of money to buy their reader and make it free they'd have jumped at the chance. Instead Google built an excellent offering of their own and people are whining.
"I remember back when RSS was amazing and something you paid for. I also remember when Google Reader showed up and very quickly started taking over. It was free. It was Google (back before we were all scared of Google) and it wrecked the market for all of the paid RSS services."
His last sentence:
"This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad."
I see what you're saying, that he thinks users are part of the mechanism, but the bottom line is he thinks this apocalypse can be traced back to Google Reader being free.
I'm calling it "embrace, give away, and extinguish."
(For most non-techies, RSS is now history.)
--
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
--
Edit: added "(For most non-techies..."
And Google never really "extended" either. They didn't add new fields to RSS or made it incompatible in any way. The proof is that I was able to move to Tiny in 5 minutes using Google's own export tool.
Techies on the other hand will migrate to other products, and RSS will keep chugging along as a techie-only protocol.
It's not that Reader or RSS have no potential value to anyone who isn't "good with computers." It's that Google never bothered to tell anyone it existed! And why should they? Modern Google doesn't give a shit about the open web or decentralized culture, they want to "own social" and keep everything contained within their cancerous Facebook clone.
A lot of people just didn't know you could have a service like Google Reader.
Following any more than a couple sites without this type of service, where you have to bookmark and visit the sites daily or periodically, makes it feel like you're changing channels on a TV without a TV guide view. Which is one reason why sites like this and reddit are so prominent.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Only where Microsoft at least still cared about keeping it's (corporate) customers happy (and therefor providing some long term certainty), the only customers Google cares about are advertisers. They will ruthlessly kill off whatever doesn't suit them.
Being the product in Google's universe will suck worse than being the reluctant consumer in Microsoft's universe.
A free product enters the paid marketspace, kills all 3rd party competition, then became the defacto standard.
Then it languished for years, but in RSS's case, the product with overwhelming market share gets killed rather than having 3rd parties slowly catch up.
Fortunately RSS aggregation is simpler to replace than an entire browser...
There are also plenty of paid apps in the mobile space that sync with Google Reader.
Browsing history and a bunch of other features are still being added to the UI but search already works.
In an unhealthy market that's not growing any more (like RSS), things get a lot more stagnant because folks aren't actively making product choices any more and there's not a lot of incentive for new entrants.
I'm betting there's not a ton of innovation in the Gopher market, either.
I just realized something... RSS is the new Gopher.
No, it's not. Paid services are cancelled all the time.
- RSS is a thing from the past. It has no "new and shiny" aspect.
- RSS is less used than email, so people are focusing on improving emails, not RSS.
- Reader was great, and did everything geeks want. Why try to improve something perfect?
- + "it is Google, Google will never kill it, because Google guys are geeks too, like us" myth.
And email is in the same class. Rich text formatted letters between individuals. I don't see how you want to "improve" that either, because it does its job right.
I do agree Reader did the job and therefor didn't have room to improve. Then again, I don't like all the social parts of feeds, I just want my content in a time ordered list of chunks that I can consume at my leisure. RSS does that just fine.
Press (on Android) updates its app, saying that it will not go down.
It's a double problem: Google Reader was good, AND was also a good API. At least, Google Takeout is working, and giving us all our data.
When a paid product dies, it's (often) because the product wasn't doing well in the market. When a free product dies, it's because the company couldn't support it through their secondary revenue streams. The product may be the Best Thing EVARRR, but it's a casualty of failures elsewhere. The "bad" comment is likely because it's a lot easier to measure direct risks (i.e., risks associated with your product) than indirect ones (risks associated with your secondary business model, which likely isn't your area of expertise; if it was, you should be in business there).
Whether this applies to Google, I'm on the fence.
But where does the original claim get its support? Are paid services less likely to shut down? We read on HN all the time about post-mortems of, yes, paid services. If we don't know that, then it's just a misleading post hoc argument (and in the counterfactual universe where Reader was a paid service, all the naysayers are now chorusing 'It's a Google service! You can't trust Google! We-told-you-so!').
http://unicornfree.com/2013/why-we-shut-down-charm-on-the-ev...
EDIT: Although I agree that it's a much bigger problem with free services.
I find that hard, because I'm not a business person nor do I usually make the money-for-time tradeoff; hence I mostly only use free services and am mostly affected by free service shutdowns - in other words, selection bias makes my personal experiences unrepresentative. (Is this similar to other techies - like Hacker News users? I think it is.)
However, we can make the general observation that services only sometimes survive the business running them, and businesses shut down all the time. To give two personal examples of paid services I used that have stopped or will be stopping in the near future: Intrade has halted all trading during an investigation, and probably will wind up shutting down; Zeo Inc is shutting down as it looks for buyers of its assets, and while the web interface I've always used to export my data is not yet down, I don't give very high odds for it staying up for more than the next year.
In both cases, I paid good money to use them; it didn't save them.
Hand scraping all these sites would be an exercise in insanity so now building an intelligent crawler is already something I have to do much earlier than I wanted. RSS really matters for the open web.
This same method works for category specific feeds: http://danieru.com/category/life/feed/
/feed gets you an RSS feed on WordPress.
/feed/atom gets you the Atom feed on WordPress.
/feeds/posts/default gets you the Atom feed on BlogSpot blogs (no RSS there, AFAIK).
/rss gets RSS on Tumblr (no Atom there, AFAIK).
Edit: trying to fix broken formatting.
If not for the Google Reader, I wouldn't use RSS at all.
The ones whom really read your RSS? Or maybe you will gain 10000 twitter followers on July 2? On maybe double your daily visitors?
Visitors who care will still be there. And it's the visitors who matters.
If, like you or me, use GReader to read 200 feeds, you will find an alternative that suits your needs. Or code it, be it a full RSS parser, or just a greasemonkey addon to change feedly appearance.
Because you care about reading your news, one way or another.
Edit: one thing is special in this case: GReader users are more "power users" than usual. So we are not talking about TMZ site going down. That's why I think that people who really care will try to find an alternative.
I'm just worried about an Android app that can fill Readers roll. I use it for reading webcomics since I can swipe left or right to move through my subscriptions, which is much more efficient than any other means to browse them on mobile.