Whatever was said at the time, I’m convinced Google Reader was collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had social features (which I honestly never used) and anything social had to be G+.
Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.
In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how Google was perceived. There were grumblings before that but Google was still the darling of the web.
As you say, Google+ was consuming Google at that time. So when they killed Reader it was not just killing a beloved service. It also acted like a lightning rod for the discontent that had started to swell. A lot of people would never again view Google through a rose tinted lens.
I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google got a lot of early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of proprietary secrets), it certainly seemed like the slippery slope towards evil in the "extinguish" part of the triple-E "bad guy mentality" most often referenced when talking about 90s Microsoft.
Google Reader was built top to bottom on RSS and OPML (and Atom), which were open web standards. You could import an RSS feed from just about anywhere and read in in Reader. You could export your list of feeds back out as OPML which a bunch of other readers supported. Google+ was much more a walled garden with proprietary everything.
It happened in other areas too, such as Google moving away from the XMPP/Jabber-standardized (and federated!) Talk system to ones entirely proprietary. Wave was announced and designed to be XMPP-backed and federated as well. It seems like Wave died as much because they wanted to lock that down too. You can't just subscribe to Google Docs as a federated XMPP user and run a custom Google Docs frontend, Google Docs is just another proprietary walled garden now.
> I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now"
And when they removed the discussion filter from searches, so that looking for opinions on a product from blogs/forums suddenly became next to impossible without being inundated by results of shops advertising that product.
The technical cost of leaving that filter in place would have been zero, but apparently there were other priorities; that was the day everything cool I associated with Google ceased to exist.
Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known.
Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm not sure if learn-to-rank is still considered Ascorer, or its replacement. I left before Amit, but seeing the things that came out leading to his departure, I'm sure it's no longer called Ascorer.
(On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)
> (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)
Damnatio memoriae?
> Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC.
"Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication.
(for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)
> (for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping,
One thing I learned from poking around financial models (I was/am a maintainer for a domain-specific financial modeling language used by a Fortune 500 financial services company) is that some ships are capesize[0], meaning they're too big for either the Panama or Suez canal and must transit Cape Horn and/or Cape Agulhas.
In our language, Booleans are represented as IEEE-754 double-precision floating point numbers (0.0 is False, everything else is true, with the constant True being 1.0), so for a bit I was imagining gigantic container ships dressing up as superheroes and putting on capes, and going to parties out in the middle of the ocean. Digging a bit deeper, I discovered this particular field was being used as a Boolean, and a quick web search ruined the magic of what capesize really meant.
I presume this wound up in our financial models because whether a ship is capesize affects its value, which affects the value of corporate bonds (or other corporate debt instruments) partially backed by ships as collateral. I suppose it's also possible that at some point we entered into bespoke repurchase agreements involving ships. (To avoid various risks in bankruptcy courts, sometimes financing is arranged by selling some asset below market value with an agreement to buy it back at a fixed date at a fixed higher price. There might also be a rental agreement involved. The cash flows look like a secured loan, but in case the loan can't be repaid, a court order isn't necessary to seize assets... the collateral assets have already legally changed hands.)
It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the social media giants.
I realized later that it's Geocities v2; essentially. Still a fun thought that sort of service is still a thing. I think Medium.com is probably the best offspring that I can think of.
And it's not just the web. It's everything. Every company in our capitalist utopia just keeps growing and growing.
Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their offerings.
But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same. Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it.
And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former management's objectives for the site to run more closely to my interests than Microsoft's.
Not that many people who use Linux are clamoring for it, but it's interesting that GitHub does not provide an official desktop app for Linux -- even though it's a frickin Electron all. And that's totally GitHub's doing.
Meanwhile, at the parent company, Microsoft offets VS Code for Linux. And it's nice.
What I dislike about Linux in general is how often the mentality for an app is “you’re using Linux, just find the repository and figure out how to get the release to your system or build it yourself”.
Why would I need an "official desktop app" for anything, if I got a perfectly good git, and with git being perfectly integrated in modern IDEs (should I need a more GUI approach?)
I found active bookmarks in Firefox to meet my needs before they removed that feature. I don't remember Google Reader all that well and I'm wondering how it was different than other RSS readers. For example, Akregator is commonly available today. (I remember that Google Reader could aggregate more than just RSS feeds, but I don't remember exactly what.)
It wasn't the fastest, but I think that now browser (and CPU) tech has moved on since then, it'd probably be a lot smoother. I remember using it once to coordinate specs on a small contract job and it worked pretty well for that.
But they didn't even try very hard.
G+ didn't event have a way to create events.
Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar.
But no, you could only post stories and pictures.
That made for a rather bare-bones social network.
This is a great illustration of the problem G+ had; events in g+ were amazing but nobody (apparently) knew. Setting them up was easy, inviting people was easy, privacy for events made sense from the UI, etc. If you set things up correctly, everyone who was invited would have a shared photo album that they would be able to share pictures to with one click.
I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album created this way; to this day they swear that if it had been marketed better g+ events would have put wedding photographers out of business...
Did people have to have G+ accounts to receive invites? I know Facebook requires it, but if they just used standard calendaring events (maybe with an info link to g+?) that would seem a winner
Maybe they added it later?
When it launched there was no such feature, I think they added events after a year or so, but by then all the hype had already died down.
First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with that material design, and it all was very confusing
G+ had events, I used to use them all the time. And then they removed them from communities, which was a large portion of how people (in my circles at least) used them. So that made it a lot less useful.
Yeah, I noticed this too: I think Google Reader was heavily used by the right sort of people (devs, bloggers and media types) that, when Google killed it, it created a lot of bad will with the people who shape opinions.
Interesting perspective. I had long tended towards the viewpoint of, "Jeez guys, it's just an RSS reader, there's 50 better ones now, why do we have to whine about Reader getting cancelled every 5 minutes?". This is the first good explanation I've found for why it could be considered a bigger deal.
Yes, for me that's when I started to develop a negative opinion if Google. I still use Android but aside from that my life has drastically been de-googled since then.
Though very disappointed, it is not surprising in retrospect. Google doesn't want to make a niche application for a handful (relatively) of nerds. They want to make unduplicatable AI/big-data services for billion+ users. Anyone can make a feed reader. No one else has been able to create a search engine, translation service, or email service (spam filtering, auto-complete) nearly as good.
Your information is a few years out of date, there is a new translation engine on the market that seems to be objectively better (deepl.com) as well as more GDPR-friendly ;)
The search engine I can't disagree with.
The email service... email is email to me, Google doesn't offer any features that Thunderbird doesn't already have && that I want. If you mean the search function inside of gmail, then yes, but that's kinda also just search. Or if you mean deliverability, that's not a function of skill but a function of being huge and if my mail server does something wrong then nobody is going to believe me if I say it's google's fault and google definitely isn't going to fix it. Or if you mean spam filtering, that's again because they just throw you out (into the spambox, but because google users rarely look there, that's out) and force you to use some (other) bigcorp for delivering just to them. The power that comes with being super huge.
The problem with “email is email” is that people can’t easily change email addresses, so once in gmail they can’t leave, no matter how egregiously google abuses the data.
We might be better off with an email address portability law similar to what exists for mobile phone numbers, but even without that GMail offers POP and IMAP access as well as forwarding to external addresses.
I mean they could've easily sprinkled in some AI to decide which specific unread items to prioritise, and turned the homepage into a social media feed with sharing and commenting, while presenting RSS feeds similarly to Facebook's pages.
It had all the potential to become the basis of Google+, but Google just prioritises building products from scratch instead of improving existing ones (hence 50 or so IM / video call apps).
That would've been a good way to go. It's a shame they haven't gotten social to catch in any of their many attempts (Buzz, Plus, YouTube, Reader, etc.) because I'd prefer anything from Google over Facebook.
I'm cautiously optimistic that Google is slowly recognizing the error prioritizing hot new projects over continuous maintenance and improvement of existing ones. Google Chat seems like it might finally be a proper successor to Google Talk after dozens of half-baked services: Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Duo, Messages, etc. etc. etc.
Sites will not let you crawl unless you are Google or maybe Microsoft. They might have, if it looked like you were likely going to become much better than Google and would be competitive. But you will never look like that because they will not let you crawl. Is this true? I don't know, but it is one story. And gets to why there's a more fundamental economic mechanism to Google's monopoly, over Amazon's or Microsoft's.
Is it really? Gmail is pretty good at spam blocking and searching through your email. I haven't found a better alternative, although I'm open to other options
Is there evidence that Google+ caused the demise of Google Reader? Couldn't a simpler explanation be that the VP in charge of this product wanted to put headcount toward something more profitable? One problem with talking about a large company is that decisions, even major ones, are often made without other functions having much of a say, and yet every decision is attributed to the company as a whole. And just because Google+ was happening at the same time as the Reader shutdown doesn't mean you can create a causal link between the two.
The social features were actually killed off before the product itself: a few years earlier they did a redesign which removed all of the social features. The social features were cool, I remember following a couple of journalists i really like who commented on the articles and discussed it with each other, it was a really nice thing.
The reason people are so bitter is that Google Reader was the kind of thing that if you liked it, it became part of your daily routine. It became the thing you checked in the morning over coffee, the thing you checked when you were procrastinating at work. Today that is social media, but Google Reader really felt like your own little curated space in a way (say) Twitter does not: with Twitter, you always feel at the mercy of The Algorithm. It also was essentially totally free of the toxic stuff you see on social media today.
They took this cool and personal service, ripped all social features out, did zero development on it for years, and then unceremoniously killed it in some insane attempt to make Google+ into the next Facebook. I'm still pissed about it, and it was the last time I've ever made myself rely on a Google Service like this.
The basic fact that it was a "reader" presumed that people would read the article before commenting, which made it so different from Twitter (and hacker news for that matter) where it seems the majority of people repost and comment based solely on the headline. Twitter was testing a feature recently that popped up a confirmation dialog asking if you had read the link you hadn't clicked on before you were able to retweet it.
Newsblur has support for twitter feeds alongside RSS. You need to setup an API key for it and it's a bit hidden in the settings, but once setup it works really well for consuming (not participating in) feeds.
Combined with the training features of Newsblur you can curate twitter feeds even more. Don't want to see re-tweets by a specific user, thumbs down. Don't want to see replies by another user, thumbs down. Want to percolate a specific keyword to the top, thumbs up.
I don't think I've looked at my native twitter feed in months.
As someone who prefers both chronological river (https://techmeme.com/river) AND a metric of popularity (upvotes) nothing beats https://hckrnews.com. I wish that design was more common.
Instead of having higher ranking posts climb to the top, a hotness bar and a popular bar to the left of links is ideal. The bigger the bars, the more activity an article is generating.
Are there any feedreaders that I can use to 1) score but not rank articles, and 2) set a threshold to hide everything below a score 3) deduplicate stories from multiple sources, and aggregate+/average their scores together?
I remember this happening on Facebook but it hasn't happened to me on Twitter that I can remember. I've had the setting on for at least a couple years without issues.
Because Google Reader was the social network for people who don't like talking about themselves but about things on the web that they find interesting, and nothing since has ever come close to it.
Also because killing Google Reader single handedly killed a bustling and fast growing RSS based ecosystem.
Google Reader was the first RSS client to incorporate social features with RSS. To that it added an extremely fast web client (I can't think of any web client that even existed before), and syncing across devices.
A LOT of software in the RSS ecosystem relied on Google Reader for their syncing capabilities. It had basically become the defacto backend for the majority of RSS readers. As an example, I used NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and while I rarely (never?) used the Google Reader interface, NNN relied on my Google Reader account to backup and sync my feeds.
Google Reader had basically become essential infrastructure in the RSS ecosystem.
While it can't have helped, I can't "single handedly" blame Google for the death of RSS. By 2013 RSS was already arguably dying all by itself.
RSS was awesome in late 2000s during the Web 2.0 mania and it was common to see entire site's contents reproduced in their feed. By 2013 I'd argue many sites had realized giving their full text content away with no ads in the RSS feed wasn't exactly helping their bottom lines and started delivering ads and content snippets instead. The intent of course was to drive you back to the site where ads can be served more reliably. When these practices became widespread RSS quickly lost its shine for me and others I'm sure.
This is very contrary to my experience: it was thriving up until the day Google pulled the switch. I knew a number of people who were expecting them not to go through with it because Reader was so important to their daily routine. The catastrophic failure Google made was not recognizing how disproportionately the Reader community were influencers — in particular, tons of journalists used it so they were pushing out an un-QAed Google+ and telling everyone that it was great right after taking away the service they liked. Even if Google+ had been well-designed or implemented that would have been a tough sell. Since it took something like 6 months for them to think about problems like privacy, spam, or notification overload the coverage of Google+ was overwhelmingly negative.
All of the RSS readers I used at the time other than the Reader web app also had the option of fetching full text or loading the feed in a browser frame to avoid the fragment problem. Some of that was simply performance: a busy site publishing full text could generate some massive XML files which take time to transfer and parse.
Also, why is it a problem to show ads in feeds? Annoying ones, sure, but I'd be happy to have ads (or pay for a subscription) if that meant that places could pay journalists.
The social aspect is the part I missed most. It was a good rss reader, to be sure, but plenty others exist. But the surrounding conversation was strictly with people who I followed. I may be misremembering it a bit, but I recall that most of the comments I saw under any article were by people I knew, which was ideal.
I like reddit and this site enough to visit almost daily, and it's important to get opinions from strangers which is why I value these sites, but the signal / noise ratio is awful. Being able to see a list of news I've explicitly catered to myself _and_ commentary from people I explicitly care to hear from was excellent.
Then again the internet "crowd" was much different back then. It may just be an artifact of its own time by this point.
This. The gReader feed was manually curated & annotated by sources we trusted and their friends. Less ramblings, no pushy algorithm suggestions. The UI was snappy but it was essentially about the community.
After Google Reader got plugged off, I haven't stuck with any of the alternatives, as the community wasn't there.
Wishfully thinking, if enough VIPs would turn to a similarly structured platform, we could have our feed back.
Maybe for you, in terms of linked articles. Other than that I'd hardly find the two comparable.
Google Reader had reshares, not upvotes. The only indication you had for "is this an article worth reading?" beyond the actual headline was the number of friends who reshared the same article. However, unlike any other social network, Google Reader wouldn't show me who reshared an article first, nor would you get any imaginary points for sharing something interesting. As such, there was no gamified hunt for "karma" or "upvotes" or whatever. There was no incentive for resharing other than "I read/watched this and think it's interesting", and the result was a much more sincere curation of topics that interested your friends.
Similarly, there were no downvotes or upvotes on the discussions.
NewsBlur copied that set-up, but out of roughly 40 close friends from college who intensely used Google Reader, only five made the switch to NewsBlur. The rest ended up scattered among chat apps and other social networks.
True. My first internet enabled phone was Nokia 7210 (or 6210 i think). A tiny one, with half screen & lower half keyboard. Sharp crispy colors. Opera mini & Google Reader had all of my feeds lined up. Some philosophical posts, some technical, some funny, a bit of everything I liked. Pure Author Contents. No comments on the feed atleast. I miss it.
I would check it in the morning, while in washroom, in bus, waiting & any time.
In retrospect, Google Reader could have evolved into a service like tiktok that keeps pushing interesting contents to its subscribers. Of course, it's easier to say that in hindsight.
For me, Google Reader was about high volume headline digestion, reading articles without having to follow links, read articles without having to switch between a multitude of publishers’ crappy and varied web UIs. It was about fast and efficient information hoovering from around the world. Reddit is a different animal altogether. Great for what it does but not like a clean RSS tree.
Also, just want to add: Google killed the “discussions” search filter, which let you limit your search results to forums, around the same time, IIRC. Screw Google.
What I forgot to mention in that comment was that Google Reader was tied to your Gmail account. The only people who were in "your" network by default were other people on Gmail where Google had somehow determined that you knew each other (presumably whether you were in each other's address book). This is opposite of HN or Reddit, where everyone can sign up and it's basically all strangers in a public popularity contest.
Collateral damage is an interesting way to put it. I've heard the internal story from people who worked at Google at the time, and it sounds like the rough sequence of events goes like this:
1. Google Reader is launched, built on internal Google technologies (the distributed database and filesystem technologies available at the time, like GFS).
2. Headcount is not allocated to Google Reader to do ongoing engineering work. Headcount is instead allocated to projects like Google+.
3. The technologies underneath Google Reader (like GFS) are shut down. Without the engineering headcount to migrate, Google Reader is shut down.
Google+ was reportedly shut down for the same reasons (but different technologies). The internal tech stack at Google is always changing, and projects without sufficient headcount for ongoing engineering will eventually get shut down. The timing of the Google Reader and Google+ shutdown reflect the timing of changes in Googles tech stack more than it reflects any strategic direction by Google.
[Edit: Just to be clear, this doesn't explain the reason why these projects get shut down. It just explains the timing.]
As someone seeing org level decisions being interpreted very differently by different people, I am not sure how much weight we can give to this insiders representation- this sounds like what an Eng manager (who himself might not know the real reason) would tell their disgruntled engineers.
Also the real question is why google didn’t assign an Eng team for this product used by millions, not why products without engineers die..
Just to be clear... I wasn't explaining the reason these projects get shut down, just the timeline of events and some of the contributing technical factors, since these factors are a little different at Google than at other companies.
The decision to deallocate headcount and stop ongoing engineering effort on a project will eventually cause that project to get shut down, no matter what company you work at. However, at many of the software companies I've worked at, projects that run on "industry-standard" or at least mundane tech stacks can run for a very long time with a relatively low amount of effort. At Google, the timeline is shorter.
For example, if you have a web app that runs on Rails or PHP, or something that runs on the JVM, maybe with a Postgres, MySQL, or MS SQL backend, you might be able to shove it onto different machines or VMs for years, only making occasional / minor changes to the code base. If, in 2008, you had a JVM app which used PostgreSQL and ran in Apache Tomcat, there's a good chance you could still run it today with minor changes.
At Google, the internal tech stack--filesystems, databases, monitoring, etc... has changes that are large enough and frequent enough that the situation is different, and projects are shut down on stricter timelines.
This is a really good story about how not to be a customer-centric organisation and not take user feedback.
What I take away is that just because they’re not paying customers doesn’t mean they won’t remember and judge you. And clearly people hold grudges for a long time (witness the number people who still maintain “Micro$oft is evil” from their 90s experiences).
Because that thing was infinitely useful. I was able to read 100+ articles without burning out, got the only things that I wanted to see, filter what I didn't want and was able to track the most interesting sites.
I've skimmed everything in 15 minutes, mark/star/whatever anything with unprecedented speed.
It was the ultimate user-curated feed, without all the cruft of today's feed. It was mine, tailored for me, by me.
Unpopular retrospective opinion, but given how stagnant Reader was before its death, the boon of Reader Replacements to arrive on the scene after its demise was worth its disappearance. The race to be the replacement made a metric ton of competing products better.
Yes and no. By being the de facto standard and housing most of the people, it somewhat stifled innovation in the space. Sure there were a ton of front ends built over the top of it, and the space was vibrant, but it really shined after they were forced into the spotlight. It was like turning on a flashlight and spiders scattering everywhere. The scatter breathed new sustaining life into many many projects.
I tried a bunch of them (Inoreader, Feedly, Oldreader, ttRSS) before settling on FreshRSS. It has a beautiful interface, don't need to use a dedicated mobile client as the website works perfectly and is self-hosted. Marks all the boxes for me.
Quite simply, Google Reader is antiethical to an Internet brokered by a central conglomerate. It made total sense for Google to kill it. They wanted the shitshow we have now; however on the heels of Gmail they thought they could take over every other market (social, news, announcements, etc.) too. The irony is that killing Google Reader caused enough customer fallout that none of these other products ever made it. However they wouldnt have made it if Google hadn't killed Reader.
In retrospect Google should have doubled down to monetize Reader. I'm pretty damn sure we'd be consming far less of our news directly from Facebook and Reddit had they done so.
You're right, but it wasn't about competing product... It was about competing cost. Specifically, competition for hardware resources and engineers.
Social imposed upon Google substantial new costs under-the-hood in terms of infrastructure and time to implement. You wouldn't think a Facebook competitor would require a lot of compute and storage resources, or a lot of engineering hours, but Google had high hopes regarding what the platform would become, and they definitely didn't want to get blocked by lack of resources. In addition, a massive internal infrastructure overhaul to the accounts system that was coupled with the social initiative required a re-architecting of every app that had an "account" concept attached to it.
On the grand balance sheet, Reader was a product with a non-growing userbase, didn't align with Google's long-term strategy goals, took resources to maintain, consumed storage and compute resources that could be used for more valuable bets, and was on track for a software re-architecting (which faced Google with the alternative of saving the eng-hour cost by just killing it instead of re-architecting it). Those facets combined put it on the chopping block.
RSS is a bit of a relic of an earlier, more open web, and Google Reader was at the time the best, most popular RSS client.
Killing it was bad for users, and bad for RSS, but it was also a very visible marker of a shift towards a more closed, proprietary web.
So it's not just "having Google Reader was better than not having it, I'm mad", but more about regret for what might have been if we'd all gone down a different path. The Google that, rather than killing Reader, had invested resources in it might have done other things.
Example: Right at the same time they were killing off Reader, they were removing XMPP/Jabber support from Google Talk. Is it plausible Google might have continued backing open standards like XMPP and RSS? And if they had...what would the internet be like now? It's certainly clear that RSS is much less popular than it was; could Google's support for the standard have prevented some of that?
In short: People are upset about Google Reader as such (I use bazqux.com, it's just as good as Google Reader ever was) but what it implied and represented.
RSS is hardly a "relic", it has in fact pioneered web federation technology. Newer Fediverse standards, such as ActivityStreams and ActivityPub build on the same foundation as RSS itself to decentralize more of the web.
Not sure I am/was upset enough to call it the hill I want to die on, but to me this was the decisive moment where social media took over people's consciousness. To me, it was a curated feed of educational, informative, and entertaining content sources; devoid of people constantly throwing their political biases in my face and telling me what a horrible person I am. Logically, it could have been replaced by any number of other feed aggregator tools, but it seemed the war was already lost and social media took over regardless. It wasn't the beginning of the social media onslaught, it was the last hurdle.
Meh, maybe that's inaccurate, but that's how I have felt ever since.
I think it was a more mercenary decision than (just) that: Consuming content in that method left fewer options for monetization through ads. There would be many fewer searches: right now, instead of actually typing the address bar, getting to a website for many people involves a google search as they type it into the address bar, see the results, and click on the site instead of going there directly. I'm sure they would have figured it out, but it probably wasn't a problem they were very interested in solving when they could just kill the product.
> Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.
A world where Google cares about Reader is a world where RSS remains a first class citizen on the web. So it's not Reader the product so much as what abandoning it said about Google's broader ambitions (and their hostility towards the open web).
Reader was a signal that RSS mattered. Google killing Reader sent the opposite signal. If Google cares about something, site owners have to care also (look at AMP) - and by not caring about RSS, they gave site owners permission to abandon their feeds.
In retrospect it's easy to see that the "death of Reader" wasn't some specific inflection point - Google had already stopped caring about RSS or the open web (if they ever even had). But this marked the first time a lot of us really saw and understood that Google had no interest in using its clout to protect us from the walled gardens, and instead it had ambitions to become just another walled garden itself (as became even more evident with the all-in Google+ strategy).
I agree. I used Reader a ton and was upset when Google cancelled it. I signed up for a few different paid readers, one in particular was trying to be a clone for Google Reader. But, in those few months, my behavior changed and I no longer felt like using them.
In other words, in hindsight I'm not sad it's gone. If I really valued it then I should have valued the clone but I didn't
I worked at Google, albeit not in mother ship (MTV) when Google+ was everything, those were some crazy times!! I recall when G+ numbers were so embarrassing that dashboards (built using jigsaw) were scrubbed clean and teams were mandated to report usage numbers in terms of percentages instead of active users. Apparently "25% growth QonQ" sounds better than "we added 2500 users"
I too don't get this. I also used Google Reader back then. When iPhone was novel and WiFi spots were rare, so people had to preload a part of the web to get through the day.
When they killed it I switched to NetNewsWire and didn't miss the previous product.
Since you brought up NetNewsWire, Google Reader had a critical feature back in 2005 that most RSS readers today still lack: you could configure feeds to not just store the RSS <item> but also visit the website to save the full article.
I just opened up NetNewsWire and, yup, 99% of my subscriptions are a few sentences and then a "Read more" link which kinda defeats some of the major upsides of an RSS reader. I don't just want a notification service, I want to completely cache the content locally so that I don't need to depend on an internet connection nor the fragility of the web.
I work on a project to transform partial feeds into full-text versions. The idea is you give it the partial feeds URL and subscribe to the feed URL it generates: https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/
This seems expensive to do for the host. Maybe specifically snapshotting pages for "Read it later" purposes but I can't imagine having to load up every web-page from every site you follow whether you're going to read it or not.
When you see just a blurb, you can click the paper/text icon to read the whole article. NetNewsWire downloads the feed and you don’t have to exit the app and load the full page. This works for me on kinja sites which have the read more link.
it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.
It was also one of the first times I heard doublespeak from Google and stopped loving them.
Saying “it’s expensive to maintain” and killing it because it competed with, and was better than Google+ without giving them control, was such BS. That so many smart people built and run clones as one man shows proves that Google could have maintained it for next to nothing.
What you have to remember about Google is that engineers are mostly free to choose what teams and projects they want to work on. And there's also a lot of pressure to go promo.
So in the context of the times (I joined Google roughly around when this all went down, but this is not insider information, I'm just speculating) I can imagine how it happened -- it likely became hard to staff the project. It probably became hard to "demonstrate impact" by doing incremental changes on it, and little desire on the company's part to put a major push on launching new features or migrating it to new tech stack etc. etc. People working on it could have transferred to any number of higher impact projects and done better for themselves in the corporate career success game.
No manager would have the "power" to demand that the people involved stay working on the project.
So if it needed technical work, and no product managers saw a future for it, and few if any engineers wanted to work on it, and Google was in the middle of pushing its energies behind G+... It seems inevitable for a project like that to die. It was likely dying internally long before it was killed externally. That's my educated guess anyways.
> it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.
The costs of storage and bandwidth of something as popular as Google Reader probably weren't negligible.
They probably were negligible. Billions of links, maybe some content cache that they already had since Google indexes and caches most of the web. Bandwidth was born by the user and content server. Checking RSS feeds is mostly a bunch of 304s.
The newsblur dev is in this thread and he runs a good reader and could probably say what the storage and bandwidth was.
Storage and bandwidth are pretty negligible. I'm under Digital Ocean's quota for bandwidth and NewsBlur is pretty aggressive in keeping feeds up to date. I don't keep an archive of every story ever published, but most feeds don't publish all that much and I could probably invest in storing everything with a cheaper archival DB.
Although the 80/20 rule is in effect, and when I query the DB I find that 80% of feeds have only a single active subscriber and 20% of feeds have 2+ active subscribers (activity in the past 30 days). But that's still quite a bit one-to-many fetching savings. And the majority of fetches are 304s.
Just as a curiosity, the parent is now my most downvoted comment ever. Interesting that it's so controversial to ask what's special about Google Reader.
Journalists loved google reader, and they have outsized publicity effects when you kill something they love, that is related to their work.
Therefore it feels like it dying is way more of a deal than it actually is, since what is talked about with journalists feels like is what everyone actually cares about, even if it isn't.
Personally I still miss it, nothing was quite as fast or robust in reading RSS queues. RSS feed updates were fast & reliable, the UI was fast, keyboard shortcuts made it fast to use, it didn't have basic bugs that current alternatives have at times and the few alternatives don't quite approach how good it was.
It's not like there aren't Google Reader alternatives today.
IMO, what really happened was that a lot of the sorts of people who are active on social media really liked having their own curated RSS feeds and when explicitly using RSS--and providing feeds--fell out of fashion (not that it was ever really in fashion for the mainstream) [1], it felt good to blame Google Reader as the case rather than it being an effect.
[1] Sort of. Of course, RSS still gets used behind the scenes in a lot of places, not least of which are podcasts.
It was in the summer of 2008, three years after Google launched Reader and had at least 5 million users, when I decided to write my own RSS reader. There were just so many features I wanted that I knew Google would never build and for some strange reason I thought I could make money with my own opinionated take on a news reader.
Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I'd heard the news. That was a difficult month as I scaled (and wrote about scaling[0]), since by then Google Reader had 10 million active users. After Reader was sunset, about 5 million found their homes on the news readers that remained.
It's strange to think that naively competing with one of the big platforms paid off, but there's plenty of companies that did well in the wake of a giant choosing to ignore the ecosystem near their feet.
At some point a year or two ago I googled around for "best rss reader app" or "best rss news app" looking for android specifically, and I don't remember seeing newsblur talked about anywhere. All of the ones I did try (aggregator, feedly, inoreader, etc) were unsatisfactory in various ways.
I just downloaded and tried newsblur and it's pretty much perfect for my taste and needs. Going to try it for a few days then will likely become a paid user. This comment is coming from a place of relative ignorance, but have you considered investing in a bit of marketing, or a bit more if you have? For how good this app is among rss readers, it doesn't seem as discoverable as it deserves to be.
Marketing is hard for me because I've hired a few folks to do targeted ads and it ended up being a big cost sink. Beyond that, I try to blog regularly and use big screenshots for new features, which helps a bit with SEO and discoverability. But getting NB onto lists? I'm not sure what that requires.
I'm a subscriber so I have self-interest in you being successful and I've paid money to help support that. If there's one thing I would encourage/plead you to do, it's to hire one person who will do "advocacy marketing". You said "Marketing is hard" and there's no doubt. But you'll know the right person, because they'll be __more__ excited about talking about your product and how it can be used, and who can use it ... than even you are. Most importantly, they'll just do that one thing. RSS/Newsletters is an area of content that geeks love - so finding someone who wants to __regularly__ talk about that in content, video, <forums that count> would be massive. I'll stop there ;-)
Set up a referral scheme. Anyone who refers a new paid user to NewsBlur gets a month free. Anyone who refers 10 people gets a tshirt. Anyone who refers 100 paid users gets actual cash...
Make sure you run the messaging past a bunch of existing users to make sure you pique their interest but don't alienate them in the process.
FWIW, I've repeatedly come across Newsblur, when searching for RSS readers; it's quite possibly the most common name I see, even from back when Google Reader died, to a few months ago (when I last searched).
It's possible that you were adding the "for android" context in your searches, and it might not do well in that case (because of people seeing it as primarily web-based or cross-platform, and not emphasising the Android part).
Eh, it's likewise seemingly maintained by two guys, so it has some of the homely feel, and is not spammed to death like a widely popular service would be.
Thank you for Newsblur, it's one of my essential apps and I use it for almost everything; RSS feeds, reddit, youtube, twitter, newsletters, even gemini:// via proxy.
It's a solid product, and the amount of work you've put into it shows and I plan to remain a customer for years to come.
Then you'll be excited to see the upcoming redesign that I have yet to publicly launch (but want a few users on to test the waters early): https://beta.newsblur.com
The saved story feature does a great job of that, since it also allows you to filter saved stories by feed and by tag, so saved stories are easy to find again.
I've been with you since! Newsblur is still the way I keep up with the things I find important. I actually discovered HN on the suggested feeds thing on Newsblur!
I’ve been a paying (happily) user since Reader died, and I am a big fan of Newsblur. It’s one of my “multiple visits a day” sites / app.
You’re also super responsive on Twitter / support channels too whenever I’ve needed, thanks for putting together a great service and being such a strong face of it.
This is in no way meant to be disrespectful about your work, but I would argue that if one great engineer can whip up something that provides as much if not more than Google Reader, then maybe Reader wasn't really a good use of Google's time after all and it was right to let smaller developers handle RSS readers.
It just isn't a Google-scale problem that requires the kind of resources Google has to offer, it makes no sense for them to maintain something than small independent developers like you can handle just fine.
oh man I love the last item on the table comparing Free Newsblur to Paid Newsblur. Free version: My dog goes hungry! Paid version: Tiny photo of happy dog and a note about what a nice meal you'll cook for her.
All these years later, I still use the Google Reader frontend (with newsblur as the backend).
It turns out that Reader's UI assets were stand alone enough that you could just implement the backend API and it all would work.
I saw this originally in a project for viewing your Reader Takeout data[1], and just built on that idea to make my own personal Google Reader experience.
Wait, can I actually put feeds inside of it? I mean does it actually work? The question being does it support today's feed formats, like Youtube feeds?
There was also a browser extension [1] that locally reimplemented parts of the Google Reader interface. It has since been removed from the Chrome Web Store.
I guess you had to be there? "it's just like Google Reader" means it's NOT as good, but close enough. GR was solid and we LOVED it, especially the search. I think RSS readers are one of those things that some of us LOVE and we're still bitter that Google took it away. Maybe it was the first big thing Google cancelled? I know for me it was, and I've not trusted anything new from Google since. Maybe that's it... before they broke my heart with killing Reader I really believed they were different, that they really tried to "not be evil" and then POOF one day my favorite thing on the web was gone.
I guess you had to be there, I know it sounds ridiculous.
As others have said, it marked a turning point for how Google is perceived. It's not as though GR had 100k beta users like Stadia, it had nearly 5 million active users when it shut down. The closing marked the end of Google doing cool things because they're cool, and showed their true colors as a major corporation looking after profits first. Something that is pretty much a given opinion of them today.
Why does nobody else benton the feature that local rss readers can't duplicate: the full history of the entire feed starting the first time it was indexed. Start up Google reader and for most feeds you've got the full history from day one.
I agree that HN goes overboard with Google Reader but I can also share the sentiment.
You are right when you say that there are many alternatives to Google Reader, even better ones you could say. I am fond not just of Google Reader but also I am fond of the times of better news consumption of back then.
When Google Reader disappeared, it left some sort of hole in news consumption that got filled up with Google+, Twitter and Facebook. The media outlets became obsessed about sharing news articles in social media, fighting for "likes", "+1s" and "retweets".
Google Reader provided a simple of way of having your news centralized on a snappy service, with good UI, without any ads or "smart suggestions" and without all of your social graph embedded in there. It was the way of consuming news for people that actually wanted to be informed.
And the best part, you could actually subscribe to other's people favorite feeds. It was kind of hidden, there was no dedicated "find friends" button or anything like that, you had to go out of your way and ask to someone "Can I have the link to you RSS feed for your saved items?" in order to "add them" to Google Read. And you could actually comment on their saved items.
I miss these times, I was actually a news junky back then because of Google Reader. I was shown what I wanted to be shown with no social crap or "hot articles" thrown to my face. I slowly lost interest in consuming news after that.
I think it's the ripple effect of ending that service. It meants RSS was dead. It probably was dying a slow death but that was the final straw.
Websites stop supporting RSS feeds more and more so we are left with nothing else than following them through facebook or twitter or whatever new thing comes on.
That's my take on it.
Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
A lot of the attempts to replace Reader aren’t clean enough - they try to present the feed like a magazine layout or do other BS to dress up information, where Google reader was “just the facts”. It feels a lot like this old game that kicked ass for the time, but you realize the magic will never be back again. Google killed it almost certainly because it distracted from other money making opportunities, so a lot of us associate it with a further corruption of the internet in a broad sense - like intentionally making things worse to make money off the bad process. They win, we all lose a little bit.
I think one thing that you're missing that hasn't been mentioned is content caching.
If your favorite website went away, you could still read and search all of the articles in the cached feed. I don't think there was an expiry time on it (other long-term users, feel free to correct me).
These days there is no equivalent. If someone you follow decides to take down their website, you have to hope that someone archived some of their content on the popular archive sites.
Well in this case it's fully deserved. I was in shock when G started nudging me to share my photo albums. They came pretty close to scamming me into sharing random crap I would never imagine sharing (reminiscent of Linkedin scraping and blasting your entire address book), all for the sake of promoting stupid, closed-off G+. And Google Reader, which I used on a daily basis until its death, probably fell victim to the G+ effort.
I use Newsblur as a replacement (thanks conesus!) but Google could have used their influence to promote RSS and make the web much more consumer-friendly, now without that everyone crawled off into their own walled garden like Facebook, etc. A number of people I read ended up only on Facebook unfortunately. RSS, while still around, never really took off to its full potential, and the G+ fiasco contributed to that.
It's kind of like your favorite coffee shop closing. Sure, I can get coffee anywhere but it was part of my daily routine. And a part of my daily routine that I enjoyed. When it gets yanked away it still leaves a gap that can't quite be filled by the next-best substitute.
Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything. Now they get rid of things left and right. It was basically the beginning of the end.
That is not quite accurate. They’ve always killed stuff randomly. My personal issues at the time were Sparrow (an amazing email app on iPhone, killed when they bought the developer), Google Wave, Google Talk (they were already a headless chicken as far as IM was concerned; Google Talk was interoperable with other servers and we used it quite a lot), Google Video.
Other notable cancellations before Google Reader were Google Buzz, Google Code search, Google Desktop, and Google Labs. There were dozens of others.
They have always been as focused as a squirrel on drugs.
I would argue that all of those were failures, so there was no reason to keep using them. So I guess the better argument is that at this time Google wasn’t known for cancelling successful products
Reader was a failure in the commercial sense, though. No good path towards monetization, no positive synergy with other products, too much technical debt that nobody wanted to work on.
It was just a very good, no-bs type of service. With good-looking performant UI (it was before "material" UI conquered almost all other google services). Not that I'm against Material, I do my websites on it, but I have to admit previous google design was more intuitive.
Yes you could follow friends who could republish from their feeds onto a feed you could subscribe to and eventually it supported comments on those items which would allow discussion within their community. Discoverability and community which hasn't been replicated with the scattered userbase after it was killed.
Exactly. It was basically a share-ier Twitter long before Twitter, built on an open standard (RSS.) You could subscribe to every news website's RSS feed and at the time, most would offer their full content in your feed. You had incredible power to curate and refine your feed based on your interests and social circle.
2. It was, by far, the dominant reader. Nobody other big corporation† decided to make a top-level project that surfaced feed reading like this. So people remember it fondly, because it was the heyday of RSS, before Twitter and Facebook took over news delivery.
†OK, fine, I think Apple did a thing where you could read RSS feeds in Mail.
I am old enough to have used Google Reader, and I don't get it either.
My guess is that the death of Google Reader was one of the last domino pieces to fall in the change from the multi-website internet to the Reddit aggregator internet. The replacement apps don't work because the internet model where RSS was useful died a decade ago.
This whole thing might be like the death of a popular BBS client for someone born in the 1980s. But then again... it's been 8 years. It's time to let go.
You're missing the pain that we had to go through to find something comparable.
I'm sure you know the meme that any new Google product that's launched is basically on borrowed time, because it'll get cancelled soon enough. Well, Reader was the first one to get that treatment.
I remember when Reader was shut down, very rapidly alternatives were coming up. Lots of people switched to Feedly within a few weeks, and The Old Reader came up, etc. The transition really wasn't that bad.
I was one of those people who switched to Feedly. And I'm also one of the people still using the Feedly Classic app, which they had to launch because of the uproar after they radically overhauled the app. I'm just hoping they decide to keep it around, since they never update it it's not like it's costing them anything.
Those of you who don’t understand why people were attached to Reader: Please keep in mind that it’s generally not the death of the tool that we lament after all these years. It is the destruction of our communities there that we’re still sad about.
Imagine your favorite coffee shop, bar, church or social club ceased to be. You’d still see some of the previous members at other places, but the community as it existed is gone.
Yep, though it wasn’t quite “closed” since people were after see comments from friends of friends.
I had several real professional friendships start this way, and quite a few others that I followed just to see the thoughts/opinions of people in different life stages & life styles. It was a very different vibe from other “social” sites even then, and I haven’t found anywhere else that had ability to have conversations about a large breadth of topics while also going deep into them if one wanted.
It had a BarCamp kind of feel to me, more like the discussions that happen at a party with a lot of people who are confident in themselves but aren’t looking to prove it to other attendees.
Note that this is almost certainly some bit of romanticizing, and the communities would of course have a lot of variance but mine was dope. Fashion designers, artists, historians, a couple chefs, computer scientists, theologians, and others came together for great conversations and lots of perspectives.
It really did create a community atmosphere that I've only seen at cocktail/dinner parties, where everyone knows someone but you meet new friends-of-friends and maybe become friends yourselves.
I was a heavy Google Reader user and mourned it for years. At some point, though, I discovered Miniflux [1], and haven't really missed Reader since.
What I do miss from the Reader days, though, is widespread RSS support. I wonder if the death of such a prominent RSS reader gave sites "permission" to stop supporting RSS, and pushed RSS into further obscurity. Anecdotally, it feels like RSS is a feature often not carried over after a site redesign.
Something I find really interesting about the closure of Google Reader is that it affected a relatively tiny proportion of people - the vast majority of humans have never heard of RSS and would have no idea what the product was even for.
But... those ten million users are incredibly influential. Today they are in positions where they make cloud computing purchasing decisions on behalf of huge organizations. And they haven't forgotten.
I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent loss of trust and sales.
Reader wasn't the breaking point for my company, but there's a clear trend in Google products
- They will break your API contracts, and break them often.
- They will likely be end-of-lifed, usually 2 to 5 years after implementation (perfect timing for the devs at your company that did the original implementation to have mostly moved on to a different company, so lots of domain knowledge loss right before a major product shift)
- They often look shiny but run like absolute fucking dogshit. I don't know if you've loaded GCP console (or hell, even just gmail)_recently, but prepare to spend 30+ seconds waiting for the initial pageload to finish.
----
I have influence on which products we purchase and use. We do not use Google for anything in production (with the exception of our Android app, for fairly obvious reasons).
Again, reader didn't break the camel's back, but it sure added some weight.
Same. I'll never put GCM on my backend options list when building products after Reader. I can't operate with that level of EOL risk exposure. Will be migrating off Gmail now too with so much risk of account cancellation in the Android Dev community but that's going to be a longer project.
Such thought processes has already saved me from wasting my time on AMP.
A few folks here are asking why old timers still mourn Google Reader when there are so many good alternatives available now. I agree, there are. It even opened the door for many more tools in the space. I love using Feedly, Reeder, and NetNewsWire.
But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue to fray. At the time Google felt like an important part of the open web, and RSS was part of the glue that held it together. Discontinuing Google Reader felt like an admission that Google did not stand for those values anymore.
>But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue to fray.
That's really the thing. People lash out at Google because it's a concrete target. And probably one of the worse examples of Google killing something that seemed clearly in the purview of an early mission to organize information. I'm often a bit surprised that Blogger has survived.
But it's also emblematic of the fact that a fairly niche open web activity was becoming even more niche.
The real missed opportunity for Google was expanding reader's social/collaboration features into a more robust social network.It would have saved them from trying to ham fist Google+ for everyone. It could have been a home for Wave and Buzz type of tech. Instead they threw out the baby, be damn the bathwater.
That being said, I have a found NewsBlur a great replacement.
I was aghast when they killed Reader in order to promote G+. It was obviously the kind of "strategic business" decision that I would only expect from a failing organization, which changed my view of Google.
The organic, 'bootstrapped' way forward for Google would have been to carefully expand the social features of Reader, which had a large loyal following. Instead they forced it to stagnate then sacrificed it upon their stupid G+ altar trying to copy Facebook years late. SO lame.
While I share the lament, I happily pay for https://www.inoreader.com/ which innovated beyond what Google would have been willing to do. Highly recommended.
I recently started to consume content via RSS again.
It turns out, most of the blogs I care about have a working RSS feed.
I'm using newsblur (no affiliation) and it's working quite well, I no longer need to poll the websites, or wait for posts to appear here or on Twitter.
The nicest side effect is that checking newsblur before HN/Twitter limited my mindless scrolling, although this comment proves it didn't eliminate it.
{RSS Reader} also lets you subscribe to {Feed based Service} which is a much nicer experience than {Feed Based Service}'s own way of handling subscriptions.
-----
I've found that the above statement works for a very large set of values for {Feed Based Service}.
One really great example was when I setup Redmine (open source Jira alternative) for my company's project management needs. Instead of having it email me notifications, having them in the Reader was amazing.
Hmm, interesting. Is it based on Youtube's raw RSS features? Because you can use RSS for an entire channel, or for a playlist, but the latter doesn't work if there are more than 15 (IIRC) videos in the playlist. Does Newsblur do something specific to Youtube to work around that?
Also, does any RSS reader have some kind of regex filtering option? "I want all the items from this RSS feed that match the following regex".
While I'm at it, how about getting the output of an arbitrary program? (Use case: websites that have a page with what I want—e.g. every article published by a certain author—but have no built-in RSS functionality. Ideally I would specify the program as "curl [URL] | egrep -o [stuff]", and it would generate new RSS entries anytime that output changed.) I know I can kludge together a cron job that runs such a program and generates a file, and point my RSS reader at the URL "file://path/to/output.xml", but is there anything with built-in functionality like that?
Nice, so they do have something custom-built for Youtube. And I don't know if that extends to following a particular playlist, but at least for my purposes, matching a string in the titles of a channel's videos would be equally useful. So that should work.
I think youtube had killed every RSS endpoint, I remember channels disappearing from my RSS app. So either youtube has done the right thing or that specific reader is scrapping the HTML of the channel pages.
I am subscribing to youtube channels through thunderbird. It works well for right now and it makes it easy to either open the url or copy it to youtube-dl or mpv for out of browser watching, but getting the rss url for a named channel is so janky now, and it feels like it works only because nobody has turned it of, like it is one design tweak from being disabled entirely.
Ah well, I will continue subscribing in Thunderbird until whomever keeps RSS alive at youtube (thank you, if you are reading this) moves on to better things.
Then I will watch it sunset just as I did with google music, G+, Google reader and all the rest Google has killed over the years.
Nice. Incidentally, I found https://siftrss.com/ , which lets one do string-based filtering at the level of creating a new feed based on the old one, which means you can plug it into your existing reader.
"when there were more than five websites and we could log off without missing anything."
In my experience, when you get fed up and quit things like Facebook and Twitter (also, pruning other things like YouTube channels that try too hard for 'engagement'), you magically return to a time when you can log off without missing anything.
It's nice.
I get that it's scary, but it seems worth mentioning that it is possible. I'm not at all sure that I'm suffering for the decision. If I was, that would imply that there's a give-and-take and that being wired to that addictive armature had a chance of giving you meaningful attention. I no longer believe there's significance in attaining the attention of folks who are there because they're glued to the machine. It's the activity of twitter-scrolling or what have you, that they're pursuing, not you. If they're deeply enough sunk into it, they've got nothing left for any real connection with anybody.
Seems like Google Reader was a bit like 'real connections with people', at a manageable pace.
I still miss it terribly. And it’s a constant reminder that no matter how useful or popular it is, any Google product/service/API/platform that you use or depend on could be shut down at any time.
I’m excited thinking about 2040 when Google pulls a Microsoft and starts working to be cool. One of the fun nostalgic ways they show that they’re no longer assholes will be reviving and open sourcing Reader. Kind of like how Microsoft open sourced calc.exe.
There’s no business value or harm but it’s a good symbol. Old Microsoft would have complained how they had to prioritize engineering resources and open sourcing calc.exe was bad (like Google needed to prioritize engineers away from Reader).
The Web hasn't recovered from it, either. In retrospect, they obviously did it to pave way for AMP. Now that AMP is gone, maybe there's a small chance they could bring it back.
Recently it was reported that Google will no longer give search-result priority to AMP pages. Which means any incentive for publishers to support them is gone.
That seems pretty speculative. We've known AMP would be losing its priority in the carousel for almost a year now, but I haven't seen any reduction in its usage.
Complaining about Google killing Reader and Google's monopoly power in the same page is strange. Actually killing reader made Reader competitors the chance to develop, didn't it?
I think there was a trend for content providers to share content on multiple platforms directly instead of with RSS, that's what people may not like.
Not a Reader user, so maybe I’ve got this wrong, but I think what many people are complaining about boils down to something like this:
Google, with their monopol-ish resources, created a free reader app that was so good that it was hard for other RSS readers to match them (on features, and certainly on price). As a result they consolidated most of the market around RSS readers (even though RSS remained an open protocol). So when they killed Reader, it may have made it possible for other RSS readers to finally compete openly, but it also shook things up so much that many Reader users may have just dropped RSS entirely, shrinking the RSS community and the audiences of RSS-based blogging.
Sure, in an efficient market customers would simply flow from the large and killed product to the new alternatives. But in our inefficient world, it’s possible that the barrier of having to export and import feeds was too high for a lot of users (even with things like Reader Takeout).
One might argue that if that’s the case, then perhaps all those RSS audiences weren’t actually all that engaged in the first place. But I’d argue that it’s actually quite possible for genuinely good things to be very fragile.
I never really used google reader, and there are plenty of other RSS clients out there. What I mourn isn't Google Reader specifically, but the decline of RSS generally, which to be fair may have been accelerated by the end of Google Reader.
Shout out to https://bazqux.com, a modern Google Reader replacement and the only SaaS I pay for. I'm not affiliated, just really love it. It's been solid and awesome for me for over 7 years now.
Shout out to Feedbin! It was created shortly after (I think) Google announced the Reader deprecation. I signed up around the first day and have been a subscriber since then. It even has a well-documented and supported API. I hope Ben keeps running it for many years to come.
I tried many many others and the feeds just felt stale. You will maybe get some "but this is close", but because everyone in tech used GR, they will never have the same level of content.
I was first dissapointed when they close. Then I started using Feedly. It turns out quite well: I they are as powerfull, but I have one less entangelment with google ecosystem.
Will you stop crying about Google Reader already and move on please.
RSS is alive and well if you want it to be. I've switched to theoldreader.com when Google pulled the plug, imported my feeds and have been there ever since.
I'm subscribed to 125 feeds, 72% of which had new posts in the last year (following super low volume things is one of the many advantages of RSS). Most of the inactive ones have simply atrophied or ceased to exist entirely rather than turn off their RSS feeds.
I never log into YouTube but follow many channels via RSS instead. There's also Twitter gateways, although the one I've used stopped working and most everyone I care about has moved on to Mastodon anyways, so I haven't bothered with finding another.
I still regularly subscribe to new blogs, Youtube channels and other stuff via RSS and don't really know any other sane way to follow such things. I'll certainly not go and bookmark a bunch of sites and then click on them to see if they have posted something new or not - that would be insanity.
So yes, Google took a big dump on RSS, but then that's what Bigcorp does. Get on with it - RSS is fine. Build more feeds into your webthings because if it doesn't have RSS the grumpy old nerds like me will probably not look at it twice! :-P
I quickly glanced at theoldreader.com front page, and it looks nice. I tried setting up a new account and it immediately proposed to try out 14 days free "premium".
Not only do you have to click on a tiny link to discover what the premium brings, but there is no information on how much the premium plan costs. That's a really bad UX.
I am still holding out naive, idiotic hope that someone will build an Inbox replacement. And not the box-ticking feature-parity that they still haven't delivered on, but the actual intelligent workflows, while maintaining a clean uncluttered experience, that Inbox was so good at. I do understand though, that a lot of people who didn't "get" Inbox will not understand this sentiment either. But there are dozens of us!
The closest I'm finding now, strangely, is Outlook, and MS Todo. Through a combination of flagged emails and the archive function. Though it's still in multiple places and not one. SparkMail app helps as well with slightly advanced snoozing, but nowhere near the Inbox experience. I'm bitter now, thanks
Having To-dos and Calendar entries pop up at the right time, eliminating the need to switch apps in the daily flow, it was all such a work of genius.
I never got used to Outlook, though I don't recall why, and now I'm back to what macOS has, even though it feels so basic and I sometimes end up unprepared for meetings or have them in the wrong time zone because I add them through Mail but can't edit them in Calendar.
Inbox without Google would be such a great product, if I had a team to work with I would take on this problem (I'm a PM happy to contribute what I can if anyone is interested):
- The main useful features don't have that many "smart" parts, I think it would take some translation layer into all the different protocols to appear seamless. That's probably the hardest part to implement given how ancient e-mail, calendar, tasks are (at least from a user perspective, I must admit, I don't know much about the protocols).
- The "smart" features, such as trips could be implemented as plugins.
- Add an interface for custom plug-ins and this would integrate so well both in individual workflows of power users and teams.
I think I’ve tried basically every email client out there since Inbox shut down and haven’t found a satisfying replacement. I’ve found Twobird to be the closest though.
I believe this was just a money decision. You really can't run all those fancy tracking ads and other engagement/conversion tricks within RSS readers, or if you did, people would just switch to readers that didn't support ads and tracking. RSS was, mostly, just content that you could format and read as you like and that's a pretty big threat to operations like Google who rely so much on ads and tracking. Reading mode in browsers is the middle ground that sorta works. We still get presented with ads and tracking but get the option to view things in a sane format. Of course, we don't get the neat all-in-one aspect we had with RSS. We still, somehow, are using the bookmark system for visiting and consuming the web.
Migrated to Feedly & Feedly has been OK but recently, soured on Feedly as they capped the number of feeds. And I've written my own RSS readers, pre-Google-Reader & now in 2021 (though it a work in progress & starting to buckle with a 300MB sqlite DB file on a shared host ;)). Those limits might not rankle many subscribers but I don't view RSS as a "I must consume every item" but as a stream to wade in, and a filtered repository to query.
The technology of a RSS reader is banal & simple in the basics. But here is where the value is for me -- the history of all the stuff that scrolls off from the most recent 10, 25, 50 posts that are available on a RSS feed. Having a large collection of subscribed feeds is like having a filtered search window into only those web sources that you assign great relevance. Even in 2021, a even more pronounced chasm to Google (or DDG or $yourFavoriteSearchEngine) searches, given all the botification / content farm hijacking / general cruft / copied content / etc. -- to search in your own set of collected RSS feeds, that go back years, even if disappear off a site's current feed XML. Or even if the site goes poof, or worse, is reappropriated by a domain harvester to siphon ad generated revenue on boiler plate content.
Google Reader, if it was championed by Google, could have served this role masterfully. (There still is, oddly, in existence Google Custom Search Engine where you can specify a collection of URLs but it doesn't to seem to work as well as searching RSS history, in my experience at least).
yeah I myself don't view RSS like email. It's an archive where you can pick what you want to read and leave the rest. If you have a lot of feeds, and the reader is limiting and/or removing feeds and/or unread items, this annoys me, because I like to keep everything in an archive. Time for a VPS for you?
Paraphrasing from a tweet that I saw a while ago: "You don't miss Google Reader. You miss your life as it was when you used Google Reader. You miss being young".
I miss how the internet was when I was young. I don't miss being young. I found the internet to get away from being young haha. I do not miss that life.
Similarl to what I felt when Google Reader shut down, I was saddened when Mozilla removed RSS/Atom support from Firefox. I believe the decision had something to do with maintenance/performance/security concerns.
As usual, there are no WebExtensions which match the functionality of the original feature.
Seeing that screenshot makes me remember how much I miss the original simple HTML UI used in all Google Apps. So fast,light weight, and it just worked.
Google created a popular free RSS reader, stopped innovating it, and then declared to the whole world that usage of Reader (and by extension, RSS) had decreased so much that it isn't worth it for Google to keep on life support.
It didn't have to happen like that. I argue that Google unintentionally did an embrace and extinguish on RSS. That's what people were unhappy about.
For me, it wasn't so much Google Reader itself, it was a free feed sync source.
So I could subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, then use a 3rd party app (like Reeder or any number of others) to view the feeds I was subscribed to, and it would provide all the tracking and syncing so to speak.
It fills the gap of services like Feedbin, Feedly, and others. Except it was "free" and now I have to pay $50/yr for Feedbin. While this isn't a big deal, I don't track that many feeds so it's kind of unpleasant to pay $50/yr for the 10 feeds I track.
> So I could subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, then use a 3rd party app (like Reeder or any number of others) to view the feeds I was subscribed to, and it would provide all the tracking and syncing so to speak.
Can you explain what this means? What's involved here? How does it differ from dumping all your RSS feeds into an ordinary RSS reader?
Problem with Feedly, in my experience, has been the rate they provide updates to feeds. I may track these 10 or so feeds which is low, but I do want timely updates to those feeds in my RSS app. Seeing delays of multiple hours is a lot less useful to me in several cases.
I realize I am sounding a bit whiny here. I just didn't have these problems with Google Reader and it sucks that the free option that worked well disappeared. At the end of the day though, $50/yr isn't a big deal, it's just a combination of everything becoming a damn subscription and how I'm sort of tired of subscriptions. Subscription fatigue is real for me.
There were multiple options you could migrate your feeds to when it was shutdown. So I wouldn't say "no competition", but more some specific features that the competition didn't have.
I find https://feedbin.com/ almost identical (Feedly feels a bit too different for my liking, but is clearly the most popular) but it also feels like times have moved on and I don't find myself using it in the same way. The blogosphere isn't quite what it was back in the late 00s.
Why isn't there a federated clone? This seems ideal for the fediverse. I think the server would just need to host your feed URLs, save a little read state info, and host your favorites/starred feed that other users can subscribe to. It doesn't seem like much overhead on the server side.
Then we get to the client and I don't know what I'm doing.
Google Reader was my favorite web app by a wide margin and I can remember how well informed I was back then. Social networks were not part of my life yet, so free time was spent on Reader. RIP.
Now I work the best I can using IFTTT to pull news from the feeds that are still functional and then pushing results into an Evernote notebook I nostalgically named Reader.
Using Google Reader felt like hanging out and having a beer with my favorite friends. It was teeming with conversation threads waiting to be pulled.
Seeing a new share was like getting a tiny intellectual present, filled with all the right connotations - "Here's this thing I think you would find interesting," "I care about your opinion, what are your thoughts on this," "It's not important, but it is entertaining," "not trying to share this with the world, just you, my friend."
Google Reader was our company's post-lunch ritual. A way to balance a mornings worth of engineering effort and soporific pad thai with a jolt of fresh news and virtual office banter.
Going to take this opportunity to tell everyone that NetNewsWire has gotten really good – it's free, looks great on Big Sur, syncs via iCloud, I can't recommend it enough.
I think the reason things like this just don't die is we all long for the days (long past) when Google was a leading force in making the web nicer, and having a very positive reputation, from making search a thousand times better than [Yahoo|Ask Jeeves|etc.], making maps amazing (compared to MapQuest/etc.), building a good, free email service (we've since learned the cost of 'free'), and building products everyone knows and loves like Reader.
I have been building an RSS reader for developers called https://diff.blog. It's havily integrated with GitHub. For example, when you sign up, it automatically follows the blog of developers and organizations you are part of. I have been working on it in my spare time during the last 2 years and it has been growing steadily. It has over 1200+ users now. Do give it a try!
I never did use Google Reader, having been used to Firefox Live Bookmarks. Today I'm using the Livemarks extension. Just taking a brief look at alternatives, because Livemarks was a very early response to Mozilla removing Live Bookmarks in 2018, Feedbro looks to be even more popular and more Google Readerish. It's more than I'm looking for but it looks good for the Google Reader crowd. On my phone (iOS) I use Inoreader.
Wasn't it pretty silly to need an online application in order to subscribe to and monitor RSS feeds?
It's almost anti-RSS.
It's like requiring an online application to browse the web.
An RSS reader is just a browsers that has a list of bookmarks. Those bookmarks point to specially formatted XML documents. It automatically refreshes those document and notices new items, which it presents somehow, perhaps an mail-inbox-like interface.
As others have said, I also think that this was a turning point in how Google was generally perceived.
But anyway, there is nothing to miss about it, even if it was not clear at that time: having a news aggregator on the cloud owned by google itself, or any other company FWIW, it is not something we should aim for.
Why should we give all this information about our preferred readings or favorite news to anyone?
geez, when was this made, recently/now? It's like come on, "dead longer than it was alive"..... there were so many contributing factors to the environment and shifts of the day when it happened -- this endlessly bringing it up shows like so much unawareness of surroundings/history
and also, what other options took its place / fill the void / RSS is not dead! etc
I installed FreshRSS on a server and imported my Google Reader feeds. I love having an RSS client that won't go away, and it's at least taught me that I should never rely on Google keeping something available, so it was a valuable lesson as well.
Does anyone have a good RSS reader suggestion?
I'm looking for a desktop application (Linux preferably).
I'd really like one that does download all the feeds, but lets me tag words and topics that I'm interested, and get a notification based on that.
I believe it's chrome that killed RSS altogether. Even today, there is not native RSS support in chrome. Before chrome all major browsers had native RSS support. You could just subscribe to any website.
The killed RSS, then the reader. It's all on Google for demise of RSS.
Was a huge disappointment when google made a decision to close it. I remember lots of services appeared pick up the audience. I switched to BazQux back then and still using it (bought lifetime license after several years and enjoying it every day).
I use NetNewsWire on my iPad and it's outstanding. Totally free (no ads) and open source (MIT). Brent Simmons is the project lead and he has a long history with RSS and clearly loves it.
The cherry on top is the complaint about how users only go to five sites anymore...by the very community of people who started the death-of-RSS myth because Google stopped providing the app they used.
I miss pre-Google+ Google Reader. It's social features(shared feeds and comments) make it the only social network I've really enjoyed using without any serious dislikes.
Remembering a tool that killed useful technology, for what reason? If there's one thing that should be remembered is RSS itself, and shouldn't RIP but come back to life.
Google is not your friend, don't praise gigacorps - especially when they kill stuff that works.
I don't understand the hagiography. Any one of us can build a replacement instead of lamenting reader's demise. If you miss reader so much then rebuild it.
So basically, one can begin slapping together a competitor as soon as Google rolls out a service—because the service is likely to go the way of the Reader in a few years.
This is the VC cycle in a nutshell: venture capital does some PoC, business/tech R&D, and when it fails (usually does!) the lessons are still available to others.
It's no different even if the (defunct) startup has a patent: IP law doesn't really matter when the IP doesn't have any money behind it.
> It's no different even if the (defunct) startup has a patent
Not true - VC's are scared of giving money to anything that directly infringes a patent. If the company ever does wildly well, you can be sure whoever bought that patent for cents will be trying to collect millions...
I don't think VC's care about patents, they care about risk. A patent without any money behind it isn't a risk. A company that isn't making money to steal also isn't at risk. But if you have money, and the patent holder has money, then let the legal fireworks begin, and as a happy side-effect, the patent attorneys get to pay for their kids' college, and maybe an investment property or two.
You'll also be competing with Amazon (Luna), Nvidia (Geforce Now), Microsoft (Xbox Game Pass), and Sony (Playstation Now). Plus other small players that are much farther along, like Shadow.
If you think about it, though none of these except Shadow are "small players naively competing with big business", it still kind of demonstrates the point. Google starts something that is ostensibly a good idea, demonstrates that there is some market, but flops the execution. I don't know what'll happen to Stadia, I'm hesitant to dismiss it just because "lol Google made another thing, surely they'll kill it in a year", but just skimming the news it does seem it'll go the way of Allo and Hangouts and Reader (And G+ ironically)...
I think that is a reasonable take, it my more accurately say to both founders and investors that time / money invested in doing something Google is already doing is not a "bad bet"[1]
[1] Caveat search engines? Who knows when that house of cards will finally collapse.
[1] only "knuckleheads" would take that one on ;) Come join the new club in town https://knuckleheads.club/ - your immense knowledge and experience can help the cause a lot.
I really hope they don't kill it. Although, I never really recovered from the Red Wedding of Reader. However, I recently convinced myself to use Google Keep; it has a neat implementation of grabbing text from an image and works fairly well.
I realise that I will be training the algorithms, and appending data to the already vast collection. It is a trade-off I am willing to accept. I have generally been using it to grab text from labels for ingredients and other products to create my own notes.
Yes, the aesthetics are great and quite functional too! They have released the fonts for free as well. I use that my VSCode for markdown:
` "[markdown]": {
// use the beautiful duospace font when available
"editor.fontFamily": "iA Writer Duospace, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe WPC', 'Segoe UI', system-ui, 'Ubuntu', 'Droid Sans', sans-serif, monospace",
`
I should mention that I use it on mobile and share article links to it if it's something I want for research. Then on desktop I read and take notes on that same page. It turns reading into a more active process of knowledge acquisition/retention/application.
I think it's Google Podcasts, barely any efforts on features for the app, seems like they just made it because there needed to be a podcast app, Keep, while not given much attention by Google, is still easily accessible within Gmail.
For me, when I see old screenshots like this, it makes me realize how festooned with garbage UIs used to be. Just sooo much unnecessary shit. Everywhere.
I also don't love the state we're in today, when useful things are hidden or just removed altogether. But man, I can appreciate how we got here.
Huh?! Can you point out a single UI element in that screenshot that doesn't serve a useful purpose?
Reader's UI was basically perfect. I believe that's what proved to be the end of it at Google. There was no more changes to be made to it. So Google had to shut it down, because they absolutely have to be doing new stuff.
Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.