31–40 of 424 posts
A very sad day when this was killed. It was my favorite social/intellectual experience at the time. Really never recovered from it.
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.
> Now that AMP is gone
Why do you say that?
and also, what other options took its place / fill the void / RSS is not dead! etc
I didn't use Google Reader much, what did it do for you that made it memorable? Or perhaps, what are other Readers failing to deliver?
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.
[0]: https://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-s...
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 eliminat…
I didn't use Google Reader much, what did it do for you that made it memorable? Or perhaps, what are other Readers failing to deliver?
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.…
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?
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. [1]: https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdea…