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Comment by andyl | Hacker News Reader

How long before Google discontinues the service? I'll stick with EverNote.

+1 For $50/year I feel like Evernote is focused on me as a customer.

I just blogged about this: Google has cancelled 5 services that I used for work projects. I have just switched to using my own domain email as primary, moving my blog from Blogger to one of my own servers (Wordpress is actually pretty cool), and I am using Dropbox as my primary photo and music repository (now using Google's and Apple's services as just backups).

I really like being a paying customer for services that are important to me. I like Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's free offerings, but I use them without depending on them.

I wonder different Google's, Facebook's, and Twitter's businesses would be if they had a modest fee (like $25/year) for users, and made users customers instead of products?

Reader wasn't killed because it couldn't generate revenue. Reader was killed because someone at Google thought they could make everyone use plus instead.

How do you read RSS feeds in Google+?

Plus competes with RSS feeds, not with RSS readers.

You don't. You don't use RSS in FB or Twitter either. All of the social networks see themselves as competitors to RSS.

Or to put it their way, RSS limits their profitability.

Nothing in this world is forever. Get over it, you'll be happier. Take advantage of what's new and innovative, stop living in the past. It takes less than a minute to transfer your Google reader content over to the two dozen or so, very capable, replacements that are more than eager to take you on. If Google note decides to shut down in a decade, be assured that your content will be with you no matter where you decide to go next. There will certainly be many more, perhaps even more innovative and capable replacements at the time.

While it's nice to not have to migrate your content every decade or so (Google Reader was introduced 8 years ago), it's certainly not that painful. As apps and services evolve at blistering pace, I love the fact that we can get some fresh air, and a wave of new innovations. I hope more companies do what Google does, discontinue products, for whatever reason, and give others a chance to grow.

This is not true. History does not come with your Reader export. Old archived stories will be lost forever.

Nothing is stopping you from backing them up yourself manually. At least you got a 3 month warning ... I certainly didn't when Yahoo decided to just close my @rocketmail email account.

The difficulty is not in migrating to a new service when the old one dies; it's in transferring all your old data across to the new one and updating all your other tools that reference it.

With Reader, (apart from historical read/unread/starred/etc) this is as simple as downloading an OPML file and uploading it somewhere else.

With Gmail, it's more tricky. Migrating emails is fairly trivial, migrating the address itself though (unless you own the domain) involves updating all your contacts and changing your settings for every site you use on the internet (auto mail forwarding of course makes this easier).

With Notes, I'm not sure there's a standardised format for exporting/importing from one service to another. Certainly, with different features between each product a lot of information would be lost when doing so.

If you're fine with that and/or don't keep really important notes in the service then it's not really an issue. If you want to ensure they stick around as long as possible, then you need to pick a service that is committed, or one that you control yourself.

Evernote managed to offer an import tool when Google Notebook shut down. I don't know how well it worked since I only had a few simple things in my Notebook account.

Reader lasted longer than almost all of the (major) RSS readers combined. What makes you think EverNote is going to be around forever?

Honestly, I don't understand the stance of using an inferior product (this assumes you believe Keep will be superior to EverNote, if not, then why even comment?) because you fear the superior one will be shut off. I rather use a product from a company that has a history of providing mechanisms to take out my data if/when they shut the product down instead of a startup/small company that will probably lose all my data when they go bankrupt or get acqui-hired.

> What makes you think EverNote is going to be around forever?

Because 99.99999% of EverNote's revenue does not come from some other part of business?

One thing is for sure: most users that did use Reader will skip this one :)

The issue for many people is that these ancillary services from Google may be found to not add value to Google's overall G+ strategy, and killed in the interest of staying "focused". Google is simply not "all-in" with some of these services. This just isn't the case for company's like Evernote.

Presumably a product conceived post-G+ will be explicitly designed to add value to the overall G+ strategy, so has less chance of getting to the point of being shut down. Google Reader on the other hand was conceived in 2005 when Google was all over the place and even then the management didn't like it.

G+ is a tricky dependency. There's little confidence in it outside Google and some factions in the tech press.

It's the old pig and chicken metaphor - Evernote is committed to note taking, Google, it's not so clear.

Obviously both might end up dropping it for one reason or another, it just feels like Evernote are likely to fight harder to stay in this market and to keep me happy.

There's no reasonable way to estimate how likely Evernote is to fail or be acqui-hired, but we can reasonably estimate how long an unpopular, non-core, free Google offering will last. All other things being equal, avoiding the Google offering is at least avoiding the devil we know. The success of the Reader replacements also suggests that there are business opportunities in simply being the alternative that exists when Google pulls the plug, so I would not expect Evernote to react to this news all that fearfully.

Of course we should still choose products based on their positive qualities and the freedom to use our data as we wish is an important one.

Yeah... if they can't make money off of Reader, how will they ever make money with a product like this? Thanks, but I'm good too.

Yeah, I have a sudden mistrust of anything Google creates after they fked us with Reader.

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