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.
I dunno. They easily could have integrated AMP into Reader, couldn’t they?
It was a different time.
Back then, people would have shot it dead for tech-astroturfing.
Today, people wouldn't see the point since AMP is more convenient anyway. /s
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.
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.
AMP doesn't cause any issues for RSS readers. People are still using Inoreader, Feedly, etc just fine today. > Now that AMP is gone Why do you say that?
> "Why do you say that?"
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.
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.
Festooned with garbage? Nearly everything in that screenshot serves a purpose. Like is there a single thing in that screenshot that looks superfluous?
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.…
Feedly has a free tier that's more than sufficient for such light use.
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.
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.
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 can avoid content curation by only using Twitter with a unofficial client.
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.
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.