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RIP Google Reader

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#261

Post by darekkay »

pedrogpimenta wrote: post #100
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?

Adding to what people answered: 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…

> It meants RSS was dead.

This has been claimed for years, but it's simply not true:

> Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)

Re: RIP Google Reader

#262

Post by pantalaimon »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #245
pantalaimon wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a great illustration of the problem G+ had; events in g+ were amazing but nobody (apparently) knew. Setting them up was easy, inviting people was easy, privacy for events made sense from the UI, etc. If you set things up correctly, everyone who was invited would have a shared photo album that they would be able to share pictures to with one click. I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album created…

Maybe they added it later? When it launched there was no such feature, I think they added events after a year or so, but by then all the hype had already died down.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#263

Post by signal11 »

leajkinUnk wrote: post #253
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.

Collateral damage is an interesting way to put it. I've heard the internal story from people who worked at Google at the time, and it sounds like the rough sequence of events goes like this: 1. Google Reader is launched, built on internal Google technologies (the distributed database and filesystem technologies available at the time, like GFS). 2. Headcount is not allocated to Google Reader to do ongoing engineering…

This is a really good story about how not to be a customer-centric organisation and not take user feedback.

What I take away is that just because they’re not paying customers doesn’t mean they won’t remember and judge you. And clearly people hold grudges for a long time (witness the number people who still maintain “Micro$oft is evil” from their 90s experiences).

Re: RIP Google Reader

#264

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

mumblemumble wrote: post #80
ChrisSD wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

And it's not just the web. It's everything. Every company in our capitalist utopia just keeps growing and growing.

Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their offerings.

But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same. Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it.

And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former management's objectives for the site to run more closely to my interests than Microsoft's.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#265

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

jolux wrote: post #81
OskarS wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Twitter still supports the chronological timeline. It's no Google Reader, but I refuse to submit to The Algorithm.

Yes, and how often are you having to switch it back? I've read several stories that Twitter will flip it back for you every couple of weeks.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#266

Post by acdha »

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…

This is very contrary to my experience: it was thriving up until the day Google pulled the switch. I knew a number of people who were expecting them not to go through with it because Reader was so important to their daily routine. The catastrophic failure Google made was not recognizing how disproportionately the Reader community were influencers — in particular, tons of journalists used it so they were pushing out an un-QAed Google+ and telling everyone that it was great right after taking away the service they liked. Even if Google+ had been well-designed or implemented that would have been a tough sell. Since it took something like 6 months for them to think about problems like privacy, spam, or notification overload the coverage of Google+ was overwhelmingly negative.

All of the RSS readers I used at the time other than the Reader web app also had the option of fetching full text or loading the feed in a browser frame to avoid the fragment problem. Some of that was simply performance: a busy site publishing full text could generate some massive XML files which take time to transfer and parse.

Also, why is it a problem to show ads in feeds? Annoying ones, sure, but I'd be happy to have ads (or pay for a subscription) if that meant that places could pay journalists.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#267

Post by emayljames »

jasonjayr wrote: post #26
emayljames wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, folk will say "but use xyzRSS" and just not understand how well curated Google Reader was. It was immense for content.

Is there anything integrating rss + the fediverse in the same way for curation?

I tried many many others and the feeds just felt stale. You will maybe get some "but this is close", but because everyone in tech used GR, they will never have the same level of content.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#268

Post by [deleted] »

batpangolin wrote: post #205
simonw wrote: post #191

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…

This sounds more like a fantasy based on questionable ideas of karma or natural justice than an actual business consideration for Google.

[deleted]

Re: RIP Google Reader

#269

Post by llarsson »

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+?

I still remember being swept away by Google Wave. Such a cool idea at the time, I thought.

That was such a good idea compared to Google Plus. Your content, your comments, just aggregated.

They could have pulled it off, too, I am sure. They just didn't want to.

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