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RIP Google Reader

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#221

Post by yreg »

yreg wrote: post #68
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.

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?

Just as a curiosity, the parent is now my most downvoted comment ever. Interesting that it's so controversial to ask what's special about Google Reader.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#222

Post by aasasd »

nanoservices wrote: post #204
volongoto wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually really like Microsoft ToDo. Your setup can be as simple as you want or as complex as you need it to be!

Case in point, ‘To Do’ is derived from Wunderlist that has been around since 2011.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#223

Post by oetnxkdrlgcexu »

brundolf wrote: post #202
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.

Sounds like I better get started on my Stadia clone ;)

"netflix for games" is an incredible value proposition if you have the capital to act on it.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#224

Post by approxim8ion »

It's interesting how impactful Google Reader was that not an insignificant number of people bounced off RSS entirely when it died.

Most RSS readers/providers have been at least serviceable for me. On newsboat now, trying elfeed occasionally too.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#225

Post by kergonath »

bluedays wrote: post #69
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?

Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything. Now they get rid of things left and right. It was basically the beginning of the end.

That is not quite accurate. They’ve always killed stuff randomly. My personal issues at the time were Sparrow (an amazing email app on iPhone, killed when they bought the developer), Google Wave, Google Talk (they were already a headless chicken as far as IM was concerned; Google Talk was interoperable with other servers and we used it quite a lot), Google Video.

Other notable cancellations before Google Reader were Google Buzz, Google Code search, Google Desktop, and Google Labs. There were dozens of others.

They have always been as focused as a squirrel on drugs.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#226

Post by jonny_eh »

brundolf wrote: post #202
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.

Sounds like I better get started on my Stadia clone ;)

You'll also be competing with Amazon (Luna), Nvidia (Geforce Now), Microsoft (Xbox Game Pass), and Sony (Playstation Now). Plus other small players that are much farther along, like Shadow.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#227

Post by asdff »

giobox wrote: post #172
addicted wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are services that pull the full text from truncated feeds.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#228

Post by Emendo »

Google created a popular free RSS reader, stopped innovating it, and then declared to the whole world that usage of Reader (and by extension, RSS) had decreased so much that it isn't worth it for Google to keep on life support.

It didn't have to happen like that. I argue that Google unintentionally did an embrace and extinguish on RSS. That's what people were unhappy about.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#230

Post by ryanmcbride »

CA0DA wrote: post #229

I've been using "Feedbro" Firefox extension as a Google Reader replacement. Pretty good!

I was about to ask this thread what people use as an RSS reader because I really can't stand Feedly. I'm going to check this out, thanks.
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