RIP Google Reader • Hacker News Board

Re: RIP Google Reader

#191

Post by simonw » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

Something I find really interesting about the closure of Google Reader is that it affected a relatively tiny proportion of people - the vast majority of humans have never heard of RSS and would have no idea what the product was even for.

But... those ten million users are incredibly influential. Today they are in positions where they make cloud computing purchasing decisions on behalf of huge organizations. And they haven't forgotten.

I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent loss of trust and sales.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#192

Post by waterhouse » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

ecliptik wrote: post #127

waterhouse wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

Nice, so they do have something custom-built for Youtube. And I don't know if that extends to following a particular playlist, but at least for my purposes, matching a string in the titles of a channel's videos would be equally useful. So that should work.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#193

Post by beefman » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

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…

Happy customer since 2013. Never stop!

Re: RIP Google Reader

#194

Post by ufmace » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

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…

Interesting perspective. I had long tended towards the viewpoint of, "Jeez guys, it's just an RSS reader, there's 50 better ones now, why do we have to whine about Reader getting cancelled every 5 minutes?". This is the first good explanation I've found for why it could be considered a bigger deal.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#195

Post by dpeck » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

mattmcknight wrote: post #167

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?

It allowed you to share and discuss items with a closed set of friends. It was really good for that. http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/reader-and-talk-are... http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-control-over-c...

Yep, though it wasn’t quite “closed” since people were after see comments from friends of friends.

I had several real professional friendships start this way, and quite a few others that I followed just to see the thoughts/opinions of people in different life stages & life styles. It was a very different vibe from other “social” sites even then, and I haven’t found anywhere else that had ability to have conversations about a large breadth of topics while also going deep into them if one wanted.

It had a BarCamp kind of feel to me, more like the discussions that happen at a party with a lot of people who are confident in themselves but aren’t looking to prove it to other attendees.

Note that this is almost certainly some bit of romanticizing, and the communities would of course have a lot of variance but mine was dope. Fashion designers, artists, historians, a couple chefs, computer scientists, theologians, and others came together for great conversations and lots of perspectives.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#196

Post by pantalaimon » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #174

atmosx wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... so everything consolidated in G+?

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

But they didn't even try very hard. G+ didn't event have a way to create events. Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar.

But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#197

Post by jdauriemma » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

It still hurts

Re: RIP Google Reader

#198

Post by gambler » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

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…

Finding good applications, especially for Android, is way harder than it should be. Seems like this is a problem worth solving as well.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#199

Post by thayne » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

I never really used google reader, and there are plenty of other RSS clients out there. What I mourn isn't Google Reader specifically, but the decline of RSS generally, which to be fair may have been accelerated by the end of Google Reader.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#200

Post by volongoto » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

crucialfelix wrote: post #188

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.

Google Keep is next. It is neat and simple, though I haven't been using it lately.

I use Keep, but there are already millions of apps that does what Keep is doing. I don't think there will be a huge vacuum.