Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh
jwz.org
jwz.org
Besides its somewhat quirky UI, the main problem I have with feedly is that it seems predicated on the assumption that you will more or less read through all articles, one by one, in order, and finish them.
That's not how I use reader at all. I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category. Yadayada.
Feedly basically flattens and linearizes everything, and doesn't give any summary information, so I constantly feel unsure what's available without looking, and once I look, I quickly get lost in the undifferentiated flow of articles.
Of course Google reader also allows a more "feedly-style" one-big-stream mode of operation via its summary feeds. Except that it does a better job of it by allowing multiple different views, and provides summary information for all of them too.
And despite all that flexibility and power, Google reader's interface seems far simpler than feedly's... it's really just a tree-list-view thingy like we're all used to from a zillion apps, and everything just sort of works like you expect it.
It does all that, and because it's web-based, everything's always in sync no matter where you read. It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps, but it works pretty well on smartphone browsers (and even on dumbphone browsers, although it started to flake out during authentication a few months ago, presumably because Google wasn't keeping it updated).
So basically reader's about a zillion times better, with one glaring exception: it's going away... TT
[The closest free replacement I've found so far is "yoleoreader", which kinda gets the vibe right, although it's a bit rough in places...]
I was seriously starting to think I am only one who wants this from web-based rss-reader. Most of the native rss clients are built around this behaviour and I really cannot understand why web readers don't. Maybe A/B testing with bad test cases (or without enough diverse user population) or maybe we are just crazy.
> It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps
Android at least has. It was/is really nicely hidden under all unofficial, privacy violating rip-offs in the Google store.
So.. if they were smart they'd do something that's impossible, you're saying.
I switched to Newsblur, and apart from some small issues with the UI (which is getting better), I've been really happy. The iOS app is also nice. The downside is of course that it costs money, but it really isn't that much IMHO.
I've not felt the need to try any others since switching
It should probably default to being locked...
One of my favorite things about Newsblur is how minutely configurable it is, but I think all of that is probably throwing off new users.
Today I see it's just (a) email address and (b) know who you are on Google. Glad to see they changed it.
They aren't charging anything, maybe they should make an app...
I've been juggling between that and YoleoReader to get better acquainted with them and will settle for one after getting properly used to one of them.
I believe i came across it the other day and brushed off because I didn't see a Register link (not signing up with Google or Facebook anywhere). But I logged in today and was fairly surprised to see the number of features available to the readers.
The key to any good Reader is the availability of the customizing features for the end-users, plus of course the speed and scalability. As soon as I plugged in HN feed to inoreader, I saw thousands of feeds fetched ready for me to scroll quickly. That's a first good sign.
(1) confusing vertical scrolls with horizontal swipes;
(2) going back to the top of a story after rotating the screen;
(3) limited ability to manage feeds;
(4) an annoying delay when switching between screens;
(5) failure to follow the Jelly Bean "up" convention
(6) pictures would not be automatically scaled to fit the screen
it wasn't _terrible_ either. I'm sad to see Reader go, but there was plenty of room for improvement. I'm now happily using (and paying for) Newsblur.
That iPhone-focused mobile view served me well for many years. I vastly preferred it to all iterations of the Android app and often use it on my desktop too. Showing only 15 items and being able to mark just them as read was a great workflow for me.
Do any of the alternatives to Reader have a good app for Android ?
Personally, I want a centralized solution, not a standalone daemon running on a private server. I switched to reader from a Gnome feed reader after losing all of my subscriptions due to losing access to a home directory. From there (in 2004 I think) I've built a massive collection of diverse sources covering every position, philosophy, point of view, etc. I can. I have so many feeds that I cannot possible read all of them, and so many that the Feedly mobile UI on Android won't even display the entire list.
Feedly appears to have imported everything I want from Reader, including the tags that I have created over the years, and the folder structure. None of this appears to be in a simple OPML export. (But thanks Dave for standardizing that.)
I think everything is preserved in Feedly, and now that the pressure of Normandy is off I hope that they will work to address those people that brought them all of these new accounts, and all of the press surrounding this mass migration. The Reader theme is a start but doesn't go far enough.
As Feedler 2.0 only showed up in the app store yesterday I assume the Pro version is stuck somewhere in the approvals process ...
I'm willing to overlook the bugs such as the same item appearing more than once in a feed (it's quite new), but the incredible slowness of it make it unusable for me.
For example, I loaded it before writing this comment, and as of this point, it still hasn't finished loading. I just get a spinny box and 'Loading...'
I also know from experience that if you click on something else, such as a folder, it won't override what it's currently loading, so the state of the UI will get out of sync.
You also can't read a list of items, you have to read one by one, incurring yet another AJAXy-load which doesn't necessarily ever respond, thus leaving in you in Loading... limbo.
Did you contact the developer? She seems quite eager to help.
I do wish the doubles would disappear, though.
The current layout make it too hard for me to move quickly through a large number of items.
I appreciate the effort but even if it did manage to import my feeds the UI just doesn't work for me.
A limitation is that a feed can't appear twice in the treeview (or it will be duplicated), but apart from that, it's mostly a clone of GReader.
Feedbin's web client acts pretty strangely sometimes, but it's the one that best fits my Reader workflow.
It's been heavily modified since the news of GReader going away was announced and it's easy to write plugins for it. I've got my version of it tweaked to the gills and it's even better than GReader was in my opinion.
It keeps losing the unread status, even on articles i haven't touched (yes i've disabled auto mark).
It's a mess.
The UI is bearable, but this....
"There's a list of articles, one per line, stacked vertically on the screen. After you've scanned your eyes to the bottom of the screen, how do you see more? You scroll it up, right? Ha ha ha. No. You swipe right. Madness."
Oh. THAT'S how you do it. I thought it was impossible to scroll down a list of articles. When you swipe down on an article list, feedly alternates between showing you a single article and a portion of the article list. I have no idea what the intended function is.
And do the different width bars on the homescreen mean anything?
I switched to newsblur which looks like it's from 2003 and has a terrible home page. But at least it doesn't surprise me.
Once made to show full items by default, Feedly became acceptable for how I use a feed reader. However, this option only appears to be available on the desktop site, and not on the Android app, and all the other options feel too weird; the cards and magazine layouts look pretty, but are completely unusable ("I just want to read my feeds!).
Yoleo almost does it for me, except I sorely miss the ability to scroll through a list of unread items (it forces us to hit J or click on the next entry in the third column to make the next item visible).
I find the NewsBlur UI awfully clunky, and I will admit that I can't bring myself to actually using it as the replacement. However, it exposes an API, and I built a much simpler UI for it: http://www.altfeedreader.com/ — it doesn't do everything that NewsBlur can, but it does 99% of what I want in a feed reader.
In the end, I haven't settled on what I will use, and there's still Digg Reader (to be released tomorrow) and AOL Reader (released, but buggy enough to prevent me from adding anything when I tried it).
I have a flaky experience using the cloud.feedly.com. Sometimes it logs in, sometimes it doesn't. Just tried and I am able to login. for now...
> I have no interest in reading my feeds through
> a web site (no more than I would tolerate reading
> my email that way, like an *animal*).
Who gives a shit about Google Reader the website? (Apparently, a whole lot of people... but not me.) I only care about the syncing.
Like Zawinski, I want a fast, awesome, native RSS reader on all my platforms that stays in sync across them. That's it.
I would love to get that for free, but aftern thinking on it a moment, I don't see why anybody would provide that to me for free. Thinking on it a moment more, I realized I would pay some reasonable fee for it.
However, non-free means 99% of people won't use it, and this in turn means that there is much less incentive for the makers of said fast, awesome, native newsreaders to support such a service in their app.
Except that an RSS newsreader that cannot sync is kind of like a dog turd in a bowtie.
An enterprising newsreader maker could bite the bullet and make sync a feature of their app -- but I don't think any of the good newsreader apps cover all the important platforms (for me, Mac, iOS, and Android, but for others Windows and Linux are probably in the mix, too).
So I don't know what the solution is.
The web community seems disinterested in developing standards other than presentational ones (HTML/CSS), I guess largely for commercial reasons: the creators of services want to lock you into their specific (magic hip RESTful JSON) API.
Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself. -- Anil Dash [1]
Like you say, though, the proverbial "community" doesn't seem any closer to building that then they were when Google Reader was created in 2005.
I had hoped that the demise of the proprietary Google Reader would finally inspire the creation of such an open standard, but so far all it seems to have inspired is more crap like Google Reader...
(But, lacking the good solution, I would still pay for another crappy proprietary solution in the meantime.)
There's no facility for updating items, that was about the only thing really wrong with it from the end user perspective, assuming you are okay with storing the full text of tens of thousands of items when you will only read 2% of them.
But I don't see anything wrong with that in an era where even our phones have 64GB of storage...
EDIT (my touch device over zealously submitted): but IMAP isn't the right solution, even though it could work, and work better than google reader even. A RSS sync system really shouldn't require the user to download all the items and then sync against their own copies of them---it should be able to sync what has been read[1] based on the canonical URI of the item, with some intelligence to grok the mod dates to track updated items. Storage isn't a problem anymore for mostly-textual content, but mobile latency and data caps are.
[1]: and, in my opinion, notnjust what has been read, but what has been flagged, labeled, tagged, reposted, liked, hated, and／おr assigned whatever other arbitrary metadata
But if you mean a provider providing IMAP access to RSS feeds, that could work great. I don't know how to deal with updated items, but there is probably a way, especially if you had a custom client for key platforms. And 2nd tier platforms could still use an IMAP mail client.
Ok! Great idea, so... Somebody: go!!
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_RSS_Basics
Edit: Also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939742
> Yes, Others May Offer “Real time” RSS To Email or RSS Readers for Free. But They Do NOT Fetch The Full Articles Content. They Do NOT Send Full Content but Only The Titles with Ads. They Do Not Fetch The Content in Real Time, They Call 15-minutes Real Time. We Check Your Sources Every 30 Seconds. That IS Real Time. They Do NOT Turn Shortened RSS Feeds Into Full Text RSS Feeds. They Do NOT Support other RSS Reader , We Support ALL RSS Reader Clients And You Do NOT Need Yet Another RSS Reader When Using Our RSS to Email Feature. You Do Not Need to Signin To Yet Another RSS Reader to Read Your Favourite News Articles, Feeds And Blogs, We Bring Them To You.
Real-time isn't something I'm really worried about, RSS feeds aren't something I read in real-time, they're something I let accumulate until I have some downtime.
That said, your service is pretty useful, but not for my usage. I prefer something that doesn't clutter my inbox and just sits there with tens of unread items until I get to it. I would love it if you provided an actual IMAP mailbox I could connect to and read RSS with my email client.
You can actually do that, all you need to do is set a filter+label in your email client or server. Works really well is you use Gmail but also works very good with the other email servers.
Personal cloud. You have a domain name and you host the sync on cheap hardware in your home. For a single application this seems wildly expensive, but if you had a decent ecosystem of apps it'd suddenly be a bargain. This also has secondary benefits like not sending your data to shady 3rd parties.
The implied parenthetical there is "(Without your permission)", encrypted backups would be miles ahead of where we're at now in terms of security.
The problem I want to solve is having proper ownership of my stuff without having to do that much more admin. I'd use the cloud as just storage. We're not necessarily that far ahead from having this now as services like tarsnap [1] offer part of what I'm after. I think the missing piece is that no-one's strung the, together into a overall product-offering.
>At the present time, Tarsnap does not support Windows (except via Cygwin) and does not have a graphical user interface.
This basically means it's for a couple percentage points of the population at best. Ideally I'd like to see more personal cloud users than that.
As far as the keys/encryption thing, I was saying it was a good idea. For the vast majority of people, encrypted backups would be miles ahead of where we are now.
I haven't tried it out yet.
See also https://github.com/owncloud/News-Qt-App and https://github.com/owncloud/News-Android-App
Syncing and many different clients are available automagically.
It supports OPML import, although not for folders.
Even though I don't actually read 15,000 articles a month, I definitely download that many to browse through.
Personally, I would pay maybe a tenth of that.
I too tried the Feedly iOS app and found it didn't suit my workflow and stylistic preferences. But I didn't need it. My favorite way of consuming news over the past couple years has been with Newsify, with Google Reader as back end. Now my favorite way continues to be Newsify, but with Feedly as back end. The transition was seamless.
My only 2 complaints are:
1) I was only able to import 1000 starred items into Feedly.
2) No search - but that's coming.
So - I wish I hadn't had to spend a dozen or two hours over the past few months evaluating alternatives to Google Reader. But I'm quite happy that Feedly stepped up to take Google Reader's place.
Both Press and gReader decided to support Feedly, so that was simple enough. There were a few hiccups in the transition (initial bugs, creating my Feedly account in-app was confusing), but now everything is working as smoothing as it did with Google Reader. I can even directly compare that, since I've switched to Feedly on my phone but not on my tablet (yet).
http://allyourfeed.ludios.org:8080/
http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader
We've saved about 30M feeds (6TB gzip'ed text) so far, and ~44K unique feeds from a few hundred uploaded OPMLs that we didn't find in the billion of URLs we've crawled.
We're also looking for
(1) massive URL lists we can grep, in case you have access to one
(2) query lists of just about anything that we can use to search for feeds using Reader's Feed Directory.
(3) some assistance in writing a few crawlers to discover more URLs on specific sites
(I'll try this submit this to the homepage tomorrow as well.)
It's a list of the feeds you follow.
Yes. In your OWN blog. This one is retro styling for the intended audience, and we won't have it any other way.
"Eye-burning"? Maybe lower your brightness? I have -3.00 diopters myopia and can read it just fine.
Not to mention people worked for 15+ hours on green on black displays and you didn't see them complaining -- and that was with phosphor displays, with an electron gun blazing, and tons of others issues, from flickering to v-sync.
E.g., the green model of the H19/Z19 (super popular), various IBM synchronous terminals (the ones I remember from the system/34 had a particularly saturated green phosphor), the later H29 (a very pleasant bright whitish-green), various cheapo Wyse models from the final days of dedicated terminals (though usually these were pretty adjustable), the original PC monochrome monitor (adjustable, but typically quite bright and saturated green), etc.
[Not that I actually like jwz's blog style, mind you...]
Just for the record, all the people complaining about jwz's green text have no idea what they're talking about. It might be old-fashioned and out of style, but it's totally readable. There are way worse websites, even among designers who should know better. What's funny is that it never fails that someone criticizes the green color, and says something about not taking the content seriously, every time jwz's posts get hackernewsed.
"which is why Google shut down Reader in the first place" - nope, Google wants to stuff us all into their walled Google+ crap and feed us ads. Notice the lack of RSS feeds for updates.
"You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority" - this is a discussion that involves Google's cack handed behaviour with Reader, what do you expect. If you don't use RSS then why the hell do you care, stay out of the discussion.
24-36m people is a vocal minority?
I have never watched much TV, skip most movies, and am unable to play any first shooter from Doom onwards without getting motion sick. Plus I think that I should respect copyrights.
Let me turn it around. What true nerd would consider consumption of mass market media a defining characteristic of nerdom? As opposed to, say, burying your nose in a math text for fun?
Wow, I thought this was just me! This prevents me from playing even the good stuff like Portal, which is a terrible pity.
It was clear to me that increasing the field of view would not help.
Shame about your respect for copyright in the digital age; I'm in full agreement with you otherwise.
Additionally, RSS feeds just seem pointless to me; I visit web sites when I want to consume information from them. I dislike the idea of turning my computer into a television.
Very, very painful.
His blog's color scheme also has no bearing on evaluating actual products' UX.
They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes, we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone else to fill the vacuum.
“‘There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,’ he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/
Had there been interest, revenues were easy to find: a college student trying their first project would at least have slapped some Google text ads on there. Given Google's other projects, they could have just made Reader a service with a $5/year charge, bundled it with Google Drive subscriptions, etc. The Google+ integration was a hopeless botch full of obvious opportunities to make both services more valuable but they simply did not try and succeeded only in making a strong, active, influential community use their services less and distrust their executives‘ vision and competency.
If you don't even understand that, that's why you can't be trusted.
Bottom line is if there is a real market for something and someone makes a better product.
Google killed Reader and trust.
That's a factually incorrect statement. I'm sorry, but people who make factual claims are supposed to care when they're proven wrong.
http://pinterest.com/googlegraveyard/google-graveyard/
People say they would buy things, all the time.
I set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've written and then some, but it seems the momentum just isn't there yet.
API: http://www.newsblur.com/api
Open Source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
Also, cheers for not including a link to your Kickstarter.
Reader itself had a whole bunch of stuff which got in the way. One time I tried mocking it up with most of that stuff gone and I liked what I found. That's the sort of ideal I went for with my own thing: enough of a bar so people know it's a feed reader and not some scuzzy content thievery site (since they arrive when they see it in their referrer logs), and a way to flip through the posts.
The Kickstarter was an attempt to try something really "out there" for me and see if it would work. It looks like it will not.
Open sourced mine here: https://github.com/swanson/stringer - it's <10 minutes to deploy an instance to Heroku and be on your way. All the data is in your own database - do whatever the hell you want with it.
It probably goes without saying that, perhaps despite appearances, Kickstarter projects require a massive amount of marketing to have any hope of success.
You could also, you know, just release what you have as open source without asking people to pay $30,000 for the privilege?
Protip? Getting people to talk to you is another form of sales.
Also, don't ask questions in public for which the answers that could cause them to get blacklisted in their field of choice. That's a pretty good way not to get an answer.
Rachel tends to be a drive-by participant in this community. Look at the comment/post history and the profile which is exceedingly well tuned.
Lastly, why do you care what IT people that used to work for Google think of the Triumvirate?
At some point I used RSSBandit (Open source desktop RSS reader for Windows), and I set up its %appdata% directory to be a subdirectory in the Dropbox folder. This can be done by modifying one of the config.xml files in the program's files. It worked. The whole state of the application was shared between computers.
Desktop app, synchronization between home and work, that was all I needed.
But I 100% agree that Reeder is (was) the awesomest client and all I need to be happy is a backend replacement that just Makes Reeder Work. I don't have to care about Feedly's UI if it's just a backend.
There was a press release at the beginning of the month about Feedy & Reeder collaborating.. what's the ETA? We're really down to the wire here. http://www.macstories.net/news/reeder-to-add-support-for-fee...
Oh, and F U Google. Thanks for the 4 months heads up, dick.
Reeder is now asking for $5 per month so that is can be sustainable, so isn't the solution just to pay the $5 per month rather than asking one of the free products to imitate what you get from a paid product?
You will just be at square one again anyway since even if Feedly does implement all of these changes, you still have a free product that at some point will need to compromise itself through advertising, become a paid product, or shutdown.
I really thought the punchline to this post would be 'and this is why its worth paying $5 per month for Reeder.
Ranting at Feedly to fix their free product seems to miss the point of why we are all in this situation with the Reader shutdown in the first place.
Buying into a service, either through time or money means risk on the part of a user, no matter free or paid.
Something remains open or something closes. Who knows.
I hate to sound like a god damned schmuck, but there are no guarantees in life, not the least of which when it comes to such frivolities as rss feeds.
The complaint about iPhone is also only short term, since the team is working on adapting the other apps to use Feedbin as well before the shutdown date.
I think Feedbin was $5 per month and have discounted the price because of all the refugees being anticipated.
In short, OP can continue what he was previously doing, only now it would cost $2 per month rather than free. He wanted them to store the sync information somewhere free, like Dropbox, rather than Feedbin
Relevant links:
I think I am just going to signup for Feedbin, I haven't really been able to adapt to using Feedly
I'm willing to pay up front for software that runs on my phone, but I'm not sure I'd pay 60$ for reeder, and making it a subscription, for a non-hosted service, would be a deal breaker for me.
Hopefully this report is inaccurate/mistaken in some way.
All Google services are likely to be shut down. Being paid or not doesn't seem to make nearly as big a difference as you seem to think; see my analysis of the topic: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
Feedly is documented. Type "feedly keyboard shortcuts" or "feedly tutorial" into google and you'll get all kinds of good (and concise) information. The fact that you didn't try to find any documentation doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Um...
People who used/use Reader digest information. A lot of information and quickly (at least if you are using it correctly).
They are often the hubs in social/meme networks. I find cool stories all the time and propagate those stories out. It is hard to value that, if there is value there at all.
When the demise of Reader had been announced, bluntly feedly sucked. It looked like Pintrest (is that bad?) It was missing the key feature in a reader... the reading part. Pictures are nice and layout is ok, but seriously I just want to read really quick.
Feedly has gotten better or maybe I just have figured out the correct way to use it? Hard to say.
What I have really learned from google closing reader is that you cannot trust someone you are not paying with your data. And maybe you cannot even trust someone you are paying... how depressing.
- Sparrow and all the other companies who were acquired and saw products killed
- the countless other companies that just went out of business
- the problems you run into when hiring people to develop custom software
- and so on
There is no substitute for individually (and regularly) assessing the risks and benefits associated with all the software and services you use. And even then, you will make mistakes.
The mobile options for Tiny Tiny RSS looks like it's going to take some legwork to set up so that will be interesting.
It's such a waste since Google already has a decent app that hooks into their API (on Android at least). All of this work by them that makes me very happy only to be ended. Such a shame. I'm really going to miss it.
While it's great that all these new projects have been springing up, I didn't want to entrust my feed reading so something that has been written at the eleventh hour, so have only been looking at options that have been around for a while. (Also, ruling out ones without an Android app, which may or may not be a consideration for others.)
Tried TinyRSS which was okay. If I had a better server to run it on it probably would have done the job for me (long story that is probably not germane.)
I ended up going with Newsblur. It has an interface similar in behaviour to Reader which is what I like, and although it does have some rough edges it's getting the job done and is established. I figured I'd spring the $24 for a year, and then see what the landscape looks like then.
As of this writing, only one iOS app (Newsify) is ready while two Android apps (Press and gReader) and a widget (Pure News) are. See: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/19/feedly-cloud/
This will presumably be sorted out soon. Perhaps the combination of Feedly's late deployment and Apple's approval process have complicated things for some developers. I did notice that both Press and gReader had to bugfix their initial Feedly support. I can certainly imagine an iOS developer having a harder time dealing with a late-breaking issue like that.
No iOS app yet :-( but I hear they are coming.
NetNewsWire might have have a new version soon so keep an eye on that as well.
Else we end up with various shitty software that we end up thinking are the gold standard.
I realized that I would be as happy with something that just sent me a filterable email for every entry in all of my fields, since I already have good interfaces for reading and culling mail on all of my platforms.
So I found one. http://blogtrottr.com/ It seemed nice and had an easy import. If something happens to it, I'm sure I can find another.
For now I'm filtering it all into its own folder, though I try to keep my feeds pretty low-volume, so it wouldn't even be a huge deal if they all landed in my already-pretty-noisy inbox.
I just did that this weekend, but so far I'm quite happy
No web version was a dealbreaker for me (until they fixed it). http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/tech/web/feedly-google-reader
I don't want an app of your website. I don't want to give you permission to access every I/O and stored file on my phone. I don't want to help you track me as I drive around town, not using your app, because you're curious why I'm not using it more often. I don't want your program to break if I have to use another machine or borrow a device from a friend (not that you ever should). I don't want your program to break if some company invents a better way to do computing than anything we've ever seen before, but your developers didn't anticipate the architecture, so they won't have an app out the door until that thing is killed off by the next wave. I don't want your program to break because my devices are different than the name brand most people use. I don't want to feed the illusion that a launcher in front of a webapp somehow makes it different, as if it's 1999 and applications are fast and stuff on the internet is slow.
Mostly, I don't want your fucking app: http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/
* There is no documentation
My code is not documented, then again I am using the principle idea behind __doc__: Code IS documentation, and I've decided to blend the difference between code, document, and even data.
* There is no desktop version
My road-map includes a core frame, which has Presentations for Terminal, GUI desktop, and webby version of it (html, css, js, ...)... um yeah... Presentations, Control, Model (model slice, inner model slice, perspectives, view-points): PCM (Present, Control, Model)
* There is no Next button!
The main web reader I plan to provide, has a Letterbox layout, with next: (chapter, page, etc.) prev: (...), bookmark-tags (alabala bla bla [: some name for the BM])
* + Sequential Layout-ing:
Instead of even touching the buttons or mouse, you let the "AI" helper (Wordy) to blurt it out on the terminal paragraph, by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, with tempo and optional "accenting"... Just like a kid listening to his father telling stories. You have the option of speeding up the tempo, or simply push it forward
* +Convo-trees
Trees of Conversations (Documents outputed and printed)
This is highly wondorous tool which I still conceptualize with the following scenario: You are a Weed Farmer with A blog, mail, etc. You want to communicate with your prospective buyers, but you don't want cops in your clientele. Therefore, you decided to place a mail on the site, and only after an interview, you decide whether the seeker is a sincere buyer or a cop (or interviewer) under cover.
So you have those repetitive tedious interviews with common answers and such, and you WANT to automagicate the process a bit.
What if you put Wordy behind the mail-server and make it redirect things it can't respond to, to your advanced intellect? Nice? may be. Depends on Wordy.
... The rest of the arguments OP presents are technical hiccups rather than poor user interface design mal-techniques (choice of paradigms)
http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/21/summary-of-the-last-100-da...
CommaFeed almost seems too good to be true: it's free; the code is open-source; you can run a self-hosted version. I made a $10 donation to the developer a few days ago and I've stopped looking for my Google Reader replacement.
While I haven't done any tinkering with it yet, I enjoy knowing that I can make whatever changes to it I like.
I understand that this offers greater convenience, but it also overlooks something people enjoy about the Internet. People like having different websites and services to check, with notifications unique to each one.
It's kind of like spreading out your Christmas presents instead of tearing them open all at once.
I ended up going back to bloglines. I did find a way of getting rid of the massive menu bar that kept appearing at the bottom of the screen, but the problem seems to be fixed now.
Getting your feeds into Bloglines is not quite so easy as Feedly, but once you have everything set up it seems to work really well. Still not as good as Google, but the closest I have managed to find so far.
Reeder for OS X is scheduled to get Feedbin support in the near future.
I change to that, but it seems to change back after a while. It's very annoying.
Personally, I prefer to read RSS items on the author's website, and Netvibes suits that. Plus they have a Twitter widget that works even though my work proxy blocks twitter.com.
http://bulletin.io is a fast, easy to use RSS reading service that has an open Google Reader lookalike API as well as our own OAuth implementation. Open to feedback from everyone.
DuckDuckGo is already becoming habit, and I'm pretty close to convincing others in my company that we need to switch off of Google Apps, because Google hides important messages from me and doesn't provide support [1]. What else does Google do? Drive? Dropbox is better. Plus? Haha. Google is putting all their effort behind things they're only mediocre at, chasing after the fashionable new kids on the block, and dropping the ball on their core competencies. Maps will keep me around for a while though. However, a maps app that cared about my privacy would win me over...
Every giant sees their peak and gradual decline. Google's just came very quickly. I hope they see a renaissance.
[1] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/aU4UUye3...
Maps, as I said, are different.
Even if you're not using Gmail's webapp, it's an entire email infrastructure serving as the backend for Mail.app or Mailbox or whatever you use. At this point, if someone doesn't have their own mail server, they're probably using Gmail.
How would Google know when it never tried to monetize them? (See above threads discussing this with quotes from people on the Reader team.)
Get coding. This sort of angst is the inspiration behind a ton of open source projects.
On the other hand, it is true that they have gone a little crazy with "innovations". But as long as they have an API, who cares.
User experience on his website is just fine.