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As someone who was born too late for Google Reader, I genuinely don't understand why people bring it up every 5 minutes. There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, some of which have the branding of "it's just like Google Reader", so what am I missing here?
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?
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…
Newsblur also lets you subscribe to YT channels, which is much nicer experience than YT's own way of handling subscriptions
Also, does any RSS reader have some kind of regex filtering option? "I want all the items from this RSS feed that match the following regex".
While I'm at it, how about getting the output of an arbitrary program? (Use case: websites that have a page with what I want—e.g. every article published by a certain author—but have no built-in RSS functionality. Ideally I would specify the program as "curl [URL] | egrep -o [stuff]", and it would generate new RSS entries anytime that output changed.) I know I can kludge together a cron job that runs such a program and generates a file, and point my RSS reader at the URL "file://path/to/output.xml", but is there anything with built-in functionality like that?
As someone who was born too late for Google Reader, I genuinely don't understand why people bring it up every 5 minutes. There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, some of which have the branding of "it's just like Google Reader", so what am I missing here?
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.
I too don't get this. I also used Google Reader back then. When iPhone was novel and WiFi spots were rare, so people had to preload a part of the web to get through the day. When they killed it I switched to NetNewsWire and didn't miss the previous product. What was so special about Google Reader?
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.
Social imposed upon Google substantial new costs under-the-hood in terms of infrastructure and time to implement. You wouldn't think a Facebook competitor would require a lot of compute and storage resources, or a lot of engineering hours, but Google had high hopes regarding what the platform would become, and they definitely didn't want to get blocked by lack of resources. In addition, a massive internal infrastructure overhaul to the accounts system that was coupled with the social initiative required a re-architecting of every app that had an "account" concept attached to it.
On the grand balance sheet, Reader was a product with a non-growing userbase, didn't align with Google's long-term strategy goals, took resources to maintain, consumed storage and compute resources that could be used for more valuable bets, and was on track for a software re-architecting (which faced Google with the alternative of saving the eng-hour cost by just killing it instead of re-architecting it). Those facets combined put it on the chopping block.
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.
IMO, what really happened was that a lot of the sorts of people who are active on social media really liked having their own curated RSS feeds and when explicitly using RSS--and providing feeds--fell out of fashion (not that it was ever really in fashion for the mainstream) [1], it felt good to blame Google Reader as the case rather than it being an effect.
[1] Sort of. Of course, RSS still gets used behind the scenes in a lot of places, not least of which are podcasts.
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…
As someone who was born too late for Google Reader, I genuinely don't understand why people bring it up every 5 minutes. There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, some of which have the branding of "it's just like Google Reader", so what am I missing here?
I think it's the ripple effect of ending that service. It meants RSS was dead. It probably was dying a slow death but that was the final straw.
Websites stop supporting RSS feeds more and more so we are left with nothing else than following them through facebook or twitter or whatever new thing comes on.
That's my take on it.
Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)