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).
RIP Google Reader
41–50 of 424 posts
Re: RIP Google Reader
#42Shout 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.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#43I 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?
No competition back then.
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.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#44Whatever 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.
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.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#45Whatever 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.
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.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#46Complaining 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.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#47Whatever 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.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#48[deleted]
Re: RIP Google Reader
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> 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?
Think of Google Reader as a 3rd party sync API, and a variety of tools use this API.
lets use Twitter as an example.
Google Reader is Twitter with their API
Reeder (or your RSS reader with support for the API) is like Tweetbot.
This isn't a great example, because read status of feed items and all that is handled by Google Reader. But it's close.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#50I 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.