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RIP Google Reader

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#121

Post by sofixa »

ProAm wrote: post #95
yreg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.

> it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.

The costs of storage and bandwidth of something as popular as Google Reader probably weren't negligible.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#122

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

ChrisSD wrote: post #47
cletus wrote: post #11

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.

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…

Yeah, I noticed this too: I think Google Reader was heavily used by the right sort of people (devs, bloggers and media types) that, when Google killed it, it created a lot of bad will with the people who shape opinions.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#123

Post by jonpurdy »

Glench wrote: post #42

Shout 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.

Shout out to Feedbin! It was created shortly after (I think) Google announced the Reader deprecation. I signed up around the first day and have been a subscriber since then. It even has a well-documented and supported API. I hope Ben keeps running it for many years to come.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#124

Post by chippy »

dbrereton wrote: post #58

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?

It was an app but with a network effect around it. All the replacements seem to have no community.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#125

Post by prepend »

ProAm wrote: post #95
yreg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.

It was also one of the first times I heard doublespeak from Google and stopped loving them.

Saying “it’s expensive to maintain” and killing it because it competed with, and was better than Google+ without giving them control, was such BS. That so many smart people built and run clones as one man shows proves that Google could have maintained it for next to nothing.

I hope they never kill Google scholar.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#126

Post by conesus »

baumy wrote: post #118
conesus wrote: post #35

It was in the summer of 2008, three years after Google launched Reader and had at least 5 million users, when I decided to write my own RSS reader. There were just so many features I wanted that I knew Google would never build and for some strange reason I thought I could make money with my own opinionated take on a news reader. Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I'd hea…

At some point a year or two ago I googled around for "best rss reader app" or "best rss news app" looking for android specifically, and I don't remember seeing newsblur talked about anywhere. All of the ones I did try (aggregator, feedly, inoreader, etc) were unsatisfactory in various ways. I just downloaded and tried newsblur and it's pretty much perfect for my taste and needs. Going to try it for a few days then wi…

Marketing is hard for me because I've hired a few folks to do targeted ads and it ended up being a big cost sink. Beyond that, I try to blog regularly and use big screenshots for new features, which helps a bit with SEO and discoverability. But getting NB onto lists? I'm not sure what that requires.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#127

Post by ecliptik »

waterhouse wrote: post #93
vanderZwan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newsblur also lets you subscribe to YT channels, which is much nicer experience than YT's own way of handling subscriptions

Hmm, interesting. Is it based on Youtube's raw RSS features? Because you can use RSS for an entire channel, or for a playlist, but the latter doesn't work if there are more than 15 (IIRC) videos in the playlist. Does Newsblur do something specific to Youtube to work around that? 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"…

I'm not entirely sure how the Newsblur youtube feeds work, but here's an older blog post on switching to API v2,

https://blog.newsblur.com/post/117767869761/a-real-solution-...

I have about 20 youtube channels in Newsblur and watch them almost always within Newsblur itself, so it works well enough.

For regex filtering, Newsblur has training features. You can curate a feed based off specific attributes, like author, topic, keywords, etc.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#128

Post by prepend »

sofixa wrote: post #121
ProAm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.

> it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off. The costs of storage and bandwidth of something as popular as Google Reader probably weren't negligible.

They probably were negligible. Billions of links, maybe some content cache that they already had since Google indexes and caches most of the web. Bandwidth was born by the user and content server. Checking RSS feeds is mostly a bunch of 304s.

The newsblur dev is in this thread and he runs a good reader and could probably say what the storage and bandwidth was.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#129

Post by dr-detroit »

buss wrote: post #97

I don't understand the hagiography. Any one of us can build a replacement instead of lamenting reader's demise. If you miss reader so much then rebuild it.

The point is these elites' lives are so comfortable they expect everything to be effortless, familiar, and bad things should be relegated to the realm of other people.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#130

Post by arcticbull »

aasasd wrote: post #104

So basically, one can begin slapping together a competitor as soon as Google rolls out a service—because the service is likely to go the way of the Reader in a few years.

Indeed, Google's launch validates a market, creates enthusiasm, and once they shut it down you can be there to catch the users.
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