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RIP Google Reader

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#281

Post by waterhouse »

cromka wrote: post #212
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"…

Tiny Tiny RSS has regex filtering. Use it extensively and works as expected.

Nice. Incidentally, I found https://siftrss.com/ , which lets one do string-based filtering at the level of creating a new feed based on the old one, which means you can plug it into your existing reader.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#282

Post by cecida »

markappel wrote: post #21

While I share the lament, I happily pay for https://www.inoreader.com/ which innovated beyond what Google would have been willing to do. Highly recommended.

Ya, I signed up for it a few weeks ago based upon a recommendation here. It's a brilliant RSS reader. Has every feature I want.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#283

Post by rexf »

crazygringo wrote: post #149
dpeck wrote: post #114

Those of you who don’t understand why people were attached to Reader: Please keep in mind that it’s generally not the death of the tool that we lament after all these years. It is the destruction of our communities there that we’re still sad about. Imagine your favorite coffee shop, bar, church or social club ceased to be. You’d still see some of the previous members at other places, but the community as it existed i…

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 were social features. Since it used google accounts, there was a large base of people who were able to like your shared news items (IIRC).

I didn't have a large following, but I would see people liking my shared feed items from time to time, and they could subscribe to your feed (IIRC).

Re: RIP Google Reader

#284

Post by cmrdporcupine »

prepend wrote: post #125
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 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.

What you have to remember about Google is that engineers are mostly free to choose what teams and projects they want to work on. And there's also a lot of pressure to go promo.

So in the context of the times (I joined Google roughly around when this all went down, but this is not insider information, I'm just speculating) I can imagine how it happened -- it likely became hard to staff the project. It probably became hard to "demonstrate impact" by doing incremental changes on it, and little desire on the company's part to put a major push on launching new features or migrating it to new tech stack etc. etc. People working on it could have transferred to any number of higher impact projects and done better for themselves in the corporate career success game.

No manager would have the "power" to demand that the people involved stay working on the project.

So if it needed technical work, and no product managers saw a future for it, and few if any engineers wanted to work on it, and Google was in the middle of pushing its energies behind G+... It seems inevitable for a project like that to die. It was likely dying internally long before it was killed externally. That's my educated guess anyways.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#285

Post by leajkinUnk »

ramraj07 wrote: post #279
leajkinUnk wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone seeing org level decisions being interpreted very differently by different people, I am not sure how much weight we can give to this insiders representation- this sounds like what an Eng manager (who himself might not know the real reason) would tell their disgruntled engineers. Also the real question is why google didn’t assign an Eng team for this product used by millions, not why products without engine…

Just to be clear... I wasn't explaining the reason these projects get shut down, just the timeline of events and some of the contributing technical factors, since these factors are a little different at Google than at other companies.

The decision to deallocate headcount and stop ongoing engineering effort on a project will eventually cause that project to get shut down, no matter what company you work at. However, at many of the software companies I've worked at, projects that run on "industry-standard" or at least mundane tech stacks can run for a very long time with a relatively low amount of effort. At Google, the timeline is shorter.

For example, if you have a web app that runs on Rails or PHP, or something that runs on the JVM, maybe with a Postgres, MySQL, or MS SQL backend, you might be able to shove it onto different machines or VMs for years, only making occasional / minor changes to the code base. If, in 2008, you had a JVM app which used PostgreSQL and ran in Apache Tomcat, there's a good chance you could still run it today with minor changes.

At Google, the internal tech stack--filesystems, databases, monitoring, etc... has changes that are large enough and frequent enough that the situation is different, and projects are shut down on stricter timelines.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#286

Post by p4bl0 »

JustARandomGuy wrote: post #111
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…

Thanks for NewsBlur! I’ve been a paying customer since Reader got cancelled. I recommend NewsBlur to everybody: super uptime, great API, integrated with IFTTT, and supported by a lot of good mobile reader apps

Same here!

Re: RIP Google Reader

#287

Post by kybernetikos »

cheschire wrote: post #271
llarsson wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe I'm just remembering poorly, but Wave seemed super buggy and laggy to me at the time.

We used it for architectural discussions and exploring ideas. I'd be hard pressed to think of something that was better for that.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#288

Post by tech234a »

psanford wrote: post #15

All these years later, I still use the Google Reader frontend (with newsblur as the backend). It turns out that Reader's UI assets were stand alone enough that you could just implement the backend API and it all would work. I saw this originally in a project for viewing your Reader Takeout data[1], and just built on that idea to make my own personal Google Reader experience. [1]: https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdea…

There was also a browser extension [1] that locally reimplemented parts of the Google Reader interface. It has since been removed from the Chrome Web Store.

[1]: https://crxcavator.io/report/cemddjmmnfebpkpkonmbkdmakilpkci...

Re: RIP Google Reader

#289

Post by bosswipe »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #265
jolux wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember this happening on Facebook but it hasn't happened to me on Twitter that I can remember. I've had the setting on for at least a couple years without issues.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#290

Post by greenyoda »

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…

Here's yet another thank-you! I've been a paying NewsBlur user since Google Reader died, and enjoy using it every day.

Despite everyone saying that "RSS is dead", it's very rare for me to find a blog I'm interested in that doesn't have an RSS feed.

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