Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

theawl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 187 posts

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#81

Post by basch »

kristianc wrote: post #80
basch wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rss had two major hurdles that made it difficult for people to pick up. 1) there was no collaborative space for teams to work together to create feed mixes. No service I know of became popular that allowed team of 7 people to moderate the member feeds of a metafeed. This harmed discovery. 2) Deduplication was usually a human task. Techmeme really spoiled me. It was impossible to see what other people had already mark…

RSS had the concept of OPML, which could have been used for that purpose, but I only saw it used in very isolated cases. The curation angle does feel like a space that the likes of Skimm, NextDraft et al have picked up. I'm not in love with the idea of another daily email newsletter, and Redef often feels like a long list of pieces that I "ought" to read rather than stuff I get genuine pleasure from, but it's the bes…

OPML was an export of lists, it didnt let you and me edit a list together. maybe opml+github+humandeduplicationofstoriesliketechmeme

the thing that makes techmeme great is that they CHOOSE the best story, and then link to the duplicates. It might be the first, or it might be the most researched source, and they may change the link if a better one appears. Hackernews does similar, but I cant easily click "other sites with variants of this story"

as an aside, I quite dislike the email newsletters, it seems very antiweb. nextdraft not having a website is infuriating.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#82

Post by bdarnell »

basch wrote: post #79
kristianc wrote: post #60

RSS was and still is great for following a few blogs that were relatively infrequently updated. If I follow Rands, DF or Marco, it works quite well. I receive timely, relevant content at a pace I can cope with and digest. The problem with RSS is that it scales incredibly badly for large, content heavy sites. I don't really want to see everything that Gizmodo publishes. I certainly don't want to see everything that Hu…

rss had two major hurdles that made it difficult for people to pick up. 1) there was no collaborative space for teams to work together to create feed mixes. No service I know of became popular that allowed team of 7 people to moderate the member feeds of a metafeed. This harmed discovery. 2) Deduplication was usually a human task. Techmeme really spoiled me. It was impossible to see what other people had already mark…

Google Reader's public labels had the capability to create a group-edited metafeed, but this advanced use case was never advertised. The one use that I know of for it was on the sidebar of the Google Reader blog: Each team member had a public label, and there was one person who had a label which subscribed to each of the others. Any feed that any team member subscribed to with their public label would show up on the sidebar of the blog; people would do this for their own blogs or their shared items.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#83

Post by basch »

bdarnell wrote: post #82
basch wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rss had two major hurdles that made it difficult for people to pick up. 1) there was no collaborative space for teams to work together to create feed mixes. No service I know of became popular that allowed team of 7 people to moderate the member feeds of a metafeed. This harmed discovery. 2) Deduplication was usually a human task. Techmeme really spoiled me. It was impossible to see what other people had already mark…

Google Reader's public labels had the capability to create a group-edited metafeed, but this advanced use case was never advertised. The one use that I know of for it was on the sidebar of the Google Reader blog: Each team member had a public label, and there was one person who had a label which subscribed to each of the others. Any feed that any team member subscribed to with their public label would show up on the…

I guess my vision of a metafeed is something that autoingests rss feeds, presents them to editors as "pending stories" and the upvoted ones become visible to non-logged-in-users/subscribers after a certain threshold. Maybe editors/moderators/curators (whatever we call them this week) would have some kind of superupvote to use sparingly if an important article was justified.

I imagine this place being like reddit, where I can view a giant list of rooms, and see how each room and its members are mixing content. it should also be easy to clone/fork (github/yahoopipes) a configuration if your team wants to start where another team began.

I also like how counterparties had a list of rejected stories, stories they acknowledged but refused to follow.

really I am describing a piece of technology that lets any group of people maintain their own techmeme plus a reddit like index of all the different rooms, that allows you to subscribe to multiple rooms and see them in one feed.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#84

Post by robocaptain »

I've been paying for newsblur (http://www.newsblur.com/) ever since google reader bit the dust. It's pretty much a direct replacement. Interface has come a long way since day one and is sufficiently slick now (UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc) that I don't really notice it.

Highly recommended by a (former) hardcore google reader user. If I recall correctly, got quite a good bit of press here on HN at the time.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#85

Post by peloton »

hemmer wrote: post #19

I've tried a variety of RSS readers recently for keeping track of academic publications (arxiv and journal feeds etc). I've settled on inoreader [1] as this: (i) includes a search feature in the free tier, (ii) has keyword highlighting (useful for trawling through long lists of papers), (iii) has a reliable Android app. [1] http://www.inoreader.com

Agree, Inoreader has a lot of power user features.

The iOS apps are good too.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#86

Post by tajen »

vanderZwan wrote: post #38
raverbashing wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Reader had a very important social aspect as well

People keep forgetting this. Google Reader was the best social network for academically minded people that I have ever been part of. As one blogger after it's shutdown said: it was a social network for people who don't want to talk about themselves

One usecase of RSS is, ahem, porn (yes that's part of life, especially Tumblr). That's a non-trivial usecase which is the reason why I donated to TheOldReader but refuse to pay a subscription; and RSS readers stubbornly trying to share my RSS reading on a social network was a risk for me.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#87

Post by mwexler »

I too miss Google Reader.

Feedly does OK, but is expensive. Of all I tried, however, it consistently was the least worst.

Most of the replacements suffer from bad apps on at least one mobile platform I use, poor web experience, lack of speed (esp. search), and even lack of features (esp. search)...

...and all suffer from lack of leveraging modern text analytics. If I have overlapping stories in my feed, perhaps a winning service would merge duplicates or cluster similar stories? Akin to threading, but more implicit. This is esp. a problem in my "apple" feeds, where any mention of anything from apple shows up verbatim in every feed. A Techmeme style (pick one, nest the rest) would be really interesting.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#88

Post by WickyNilliams »

robocaptain wrote: post #84

I've been paying for newsblur ( http://www.newsblur.com/ ) ever since google reader bit the dust. It's pretty much a direct replacement. Interface has come a long way since day one and is sufficiently slick now (UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc) that I don't really notice it. Highly recommended by a (former) hardcore google reader user. If I recall correctly, got quite a good bit of press here on HN at the time.

I'm also a happy newsblur user. The free tier is more than enough for my needs, but I was so happy with the service I decided to pay the annual subscription

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#89

Post by bdarnell »

kristianc wrote: post #60

RSS was and still is great for following a few blogs that were relatively infrequently updated. If I follow Rands, DF or Marco, it works quite well. I receive timely, relevant content at a pace I can cope with and digest. The problem with RSS is that it scales incredibly badly for large, content heavy sites. I don't really want to see everything that Gizmodo publishes. I certainly don't want to see everything that Hu…

If RSS scales badly for sites like Gizmodo, don't use it for sites like Gizmodo. RSS is great for small-scale personal publishing; in fact some sort of aggregator is practically a necessity for such a thing to work (this is why blogging has drifted to tumblr, facebook, and twitter: publishing integrated with aggregated consumption is a powerful thing).

This leads to a chicken and egg problem: when someone is first introduced to RSS, the only sources they know about are ones that don't work well with RSS. It's hard to cultivate the kind of network that makes RSS valuable to you until you've already bought in to the concept.

Personally, at my peak I was subscribed to about 400 feeds, but they only published about 100 items a day.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#90

Post by icebraining »

thomasahle wrote: post #45
janvdberg wrote: post #3

I've been using http://theoldreader.com ever since. As the name implies, it does a pretty good job of mimicking Google Reader.

Just read the features of the pro version: "1 year of post storage, up to 1000 posts per feed" I totally forgot Google Reader would store feeds forever, so you could search back in time. That was actually an amazing feature.

Feature which is still available to those who self host :) My TinyTinyRSS database has 359533 posts stored, taking a whooping 559MB. I frankly don't get why they have such low limits to paying customers. Storing a whole 1GB on S3 would cost them just 3¢ of the monthly $3. Unless they also scrape images from posts...?
Post reply on HN