Hacker News Reader

Comment by flyinRyan | Hacker News Reader

Obviously not. If they had left the space alone it would be fine now. Instead they "googled" it: came in and undercut everyone else, got a monopoly or near-monopoly position in the space and just canned the product. It would be like Walmart coming to your 2k-person town, opening a super center and then closing it down a few weeks after the last mom-n-pop owners shut down and moved away.

View on HN

That's a fair point. That being said, a feed reader seems like a relatively simple product to build and there seems to be a lot of alternatives out there. What made Google Reader so special? (I'm asking genuinely, I have never used it before)

If it were simple, I wouldn't have had such a hard time replacing it. Google Reader did two things for me (1) correctly display the content of the RSS feeds I care about, (2) sync, so I could read from my home and work computers, and from my tablet without loosing my place. I read math blogs that use some WordPress plugin that generates images for formulas from LaTeX source and very few feed readers render the formulas at all (I also read several programming blogs and a small number of feed readers remove code blocks from the posts). In the end I gave up on sync, found an Android app that displays posts correctly and use that now.

The main thing for me wasn't the simple feed-reader aspect of it; it was the syncing.

I could use my choice of clients on different platforms and as Reader was effectively a monopoly, all the clients would sync with it, allowing me to view the same list of feeds whereever I was - and more importantly, keep those lists up to date with new feeds, and which articles I had read.

The major feature, at least for me, that the replacement services still cannot provide was full text search. It's something you'd expect from Google without thinking, but it involves indexing every article of every feed any user is subscribed to, allowing searching of the text within articles. For anybody who isn't a search engine, that's a huge undertaking and was an awesome feature.

First of all, it seemed to be the only choice left apart from two self-hosted services (tt-rss and selfoss/rsslounge). But it was also a good reader, it didn't cost anything, as a google product it seemed future proof, feed update was fast and the design simple and nice enough. Before its last update, it also had nice share-features.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com