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RIP Google Reader

ripgooglereader.com

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#171

Post by btouellette »

crazygringo wrote: post #158
chippy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What was the network effect or community? I thought it was just an RSS reader. Were there forums or commenting on posts or something? I don't remember anything at all like that.

Yes you could follow friends who could republish from their feeds onto a feed you could subscribe to and eventually it supported comments on those items which would allow discussion within their community. Discoverability and community which hasn't been replicated with the scattered userbase after it was killed.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#172

Post by giobox »

addicted wrote: post #44
vanderZwan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

While it can't have helped, I can't "single handedly" blame Google for the death of RSS. By 2013 RSS was already arguably dying all by itself.

RSS was awesome in late 2000s during the Web 2.0 mania and it was common to see entire site's contents reproduced in their feed. By 2013 I'd argue many sites had realized giving their full text content away with no ads in the RSS feed wasn't exactly helping their bottom lines and started delivering ads and content snippets instead. The intent of course was to drive you back to the site where ads can be served more reliably. When these practices became widespread RSS quickly lost its shine for me and others I'm sure.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#173

Post by macintux »

aasasd wrote: post #148
baumy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well you'd come upon it sooner if you used alternativeto.net, which is pretty good among software listings.

But also could apparently use some marketing.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#174

Post by macintux »

atmosx wrote: post #154
mumblemumble wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the social media giants.

... so everything consolidated in G+?

Certainly that was Google's intention. Thank goodness they failed.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#175

Post by thefz »

I found peace with Tiny Tiny RSS on a small and cheap VPS. It has all the features I need and I use it daily. Hardly any problem with it, 200+ feeds.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#176

Post by tomcooks »

Remembering a tool that killed useful technology, for what reason? If there's one thing that should be remembered is RSS itself, and shouldn't RIP but come back to life.

Google is not your friend, don't praise gigacorps - especially when they kill stuff that works.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#177

Post by dpeck »

seaman1921 wrote: post #156
crazygringo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what was the community? I thought it was just an RSS reader. This is the first I've ever heard of a Reader "community". I'm looking it up and it doesn't appear there were forums or anything. What was the community aspect?

there was no community aspect, they probably mean to say that it was their favourite hangout spot, like a library

Nope, I don’t mean that at all. See sibling comment of yours for details.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#178

Post by Uehreka »

xiphias2 wrote: post #46

Complaining 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.

Not a Reader user, so maybe I’ve got this wrong, but I think what many people are complaining about boils down to something like this:

Google, with their monopol-ish resources, created a free reader app that was so good that it was hard for other RSS readers to match them (on features, and certainly on price). As a result they consolidated most of the market around RSS readers (even though RSS remained an open protocol). So when they killed Reader, it may have made it possible for other RSS readers to finally compete openly, but it also shook things up so much that many Reader users may have just dropped RSS entirely, shrinking the RSS community and the audiences of RSS-based blogging.

Sure, in an efficient market customers would simply flow from the large and killed product to the new alternatives. But in our inefficient world, it’s possible that the barrier of having to export and import feeds was too high for a lot of users (even with things like Reader Takeout).

One might argue that if that’s the case, then perhaps all those RSS audiences weren’t actually all that engaged in the first place. But I’d argue that it’s actually quite possible for genuinely good things to be very fragile.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#179

Post by kevstev »

bayindirh wrote: post #147
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.

Because that thing was infinitely useful. I was able to read 100+ articles without burning out, got the only things that I wanted to see, filter what I didn't want and was able to track the most interesting sites. I've skimmed everything in 15 minutes, mark/star/whatever anything with unprecedented speed. It was the ultimate user-curated feed, without all the cruft of today's feed . It was mine, tailored for me, by m…

you make it sound like this functionality is now dead and you are grieving it. Feedly offers all of this, its what I migrated to after Google Reader.
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