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How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

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Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#31

Post by leoc »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #15
firefax wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.

And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.

The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter.

But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#32

Post by carlosjobim »

GrayHerring wrote: post #24

I think the core issue is that it is hard to sell why you need an RSS, especially for the average user. It would not be uncommon to meet an IT professional who has at best heard the term, but never really tried to delve further. Sadly by the time the average internet dweller hears of RSS, their mind is already so ingrained in the "usual" browsing experience that anything that is out of the ordinary feels instinctivel…

I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time. There are millions of companies providing products and services which the average person has no interest in. Most books and music has no appeal to the average person, neither do most sports or hobbies.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#34

Post by galaxyLogic »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #15
firefax wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.

And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.

And killing G+ killed a community. I lost many could be real-friends, whom I've never heard from since. That if anyting was Evil, killing a community.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#35

Post by dannyobrien »

alightsoul wrote: post #19
bakemawaytoys wrote: post #7

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

As a result many people in developing countries were driven towards social media like instagram and TikTok where they get their news. And now they're addicted to them.

At the time, I was working at the Committee to Protect Journalists with dissident bloggers working in Syria, Egypt, UAE, Turkey, etc. We had a group of them come to the US to talk to the big tech companies about the issues they were struggling with: fake takedowns, language support, local censorship, and so on. I remember distinctly as we worked on the agenda for the meeting with Google that Google Reader being shut down was the first complaint any of us mentioned. We laughed, but it was serious.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#36

Post by glenstein »

timmg wrote: post #27
bakemawaytoys wrote: post #7

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+. Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to inter…

Exactly. Reader was maturing into a proto social network in its own right (I started commenting on articles with friends in it in college right before it started getting deprecated) and finding the organic activity and rolling with it and thinking in terms of honoring the core users could have been a very good strategy.

Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#37

Post by thataccount »

bakemawaytoys wrote: post #7

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

But they totally used Google wave. It was/is the future.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#38

Post by deepsun »

bakemawaytoys wrote: post #7

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

Same thing with Google Music, it was perfect. You could stream, or could buy and download mp3, or you could upload your library to it.

And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it.

But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#39

Post by tombert »

betenoire wrote: post #4

Google Reader going away felt like the beginning of the end the internet as I knew it. I miss websites

Yeah. There honestly was a purity to the disconnected nature of shitty Geocities and Angelfires pages, where filled with amateurs writing shitty HTML just because they thought it would be cool to have their own web site.

That's not a dig, to be clear. I was one of those kids writing shitty HTML for Geocities.

I don't hate the modern internet, but I feel like there's roughly now about ~10 sites that I visit frequently, whereas when I was a teenager there were lots more. Maybe it's just my "old man yells at cloud" moment.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#40

Post by jonas21 »

pronik wrote: post #28
bakemawaytoys wrote: post #7

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.

They tried to develop Gmail into a social network in 2010 with Google Buzz [1]. It received a lot of backlash from people who did not want their email to be a social network.

The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

[2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-wort...

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