I moved to newsblur, but Reader was a product near and dear to me.
RIP Google Reader
351–360 of 424 posts
Re: RIP Google Reader
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To this day I've yet to use any social media as much as I used sharing Google Reader articles on Google Buzz.
My little circle of friends just caught the thing right at the right time, and we loved it hard!
Re: RIP Google Reader
#353Earlier 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…
Though very disappointed, it is not surprising in retrospect. Google doesn't want to make a niche application for a handful (relatively) of nerds. They want to make unduplicatable AI/big-data services for billion+ users. Anyone can make a feed reader. No one else has been able to create a search engine, translation service, or email service (spam filtering, auto-complete) nearly as good.
Sites will not let you crawl unless you are Google or maybe Microsoft. They might have, if it looked like you were likely going to become much better than Google and would be competitive. But you will never look like that because they will not let you crawl. Is this true? I don't know, but it is one story. And gets to why there's a more fundamental economic mechanism to Google's monopoly, over Amazon's or Microsoft's.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#354Using Google Reader felt like hanging out and having a beer with my favorite friends. It was teeming with conversation threads waiting to be pulled.
Seeing a new share was like getting a tiny intellectual present, filled with all the right connotations - "Here's this thing I think you would find interesting," "I care about your opinion, what are your thoughts on this," "It's not important, but it is entertaining," "not trying to share this with the world, just you, my friend."
Google Reader was our company's post-lunch ritual. A way to balance a mornings worth of engineering effort and soporific pad thai with a jolt of fresh news and virtual office banter.
RIP.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#355Earlier 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.
First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with that material design, and it all was very confusing
I swear material design was the result of one too many post-it note sessions.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#356As 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?
I guess you had to be there? "it's just like Google Reader" means it's NOT as good, but close enough. GR was solid and we LOVED it, especially the search. I think RSS readers are one of those things that some of us LOVE and we're still bitter that Google took it away. Maybe it was the first big thing Google cancelled? I know for me it was, and I've not trusted anything new from Google since. Maybe that's it... before…
I never heard of google reader until long after it ended, but endless mountains of garbage claiming to be "just like X" is all too familiar.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#357I must be misunderstanding the value prop of Google reader.
How hard can it be to just clone it if people love it so much?
Re: RIP Google Reader
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unpopular retrospective opinion, but given how stagnant Reader was before its death, the boon of Reader Replacements to arrive on the scene after its demise was worth its disappearance. The race to be the replacement made a metric ton of competing products better.
Do you have a favorite? I have a Feedly account but I don’t use the site much, and the Reeder app added local subscriptions recently.
I tried a bunch of them (Inoreader, Feedly, Oldreader, ttRSS) before settling on FreshRSS. It has a beautiful interface, don't need to use a dedicated mobile client as the website works perfectly and is self-hosted. Marks all the boxes for me.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you had to be there? "it's just like Google Reader" means it's NOT as good, but close enough. GR was solid and we LOVED it, especially the search. I think RSS readers are one of those things that some of us LOVE and we're still bitter that Google took it away. Maybe it was the first big thing Google cancelled? I know for me it was, and I've not trusted anything new from Google since. Maybe that's it... before…
I miss search the most, no other replacement came even close. Like a searchable corpus of your curated library of stuff you're interested in.
Search was also the feature I missed in most replacements. Pretty happy with BazQux these days, though.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly, Google Reader was a pretty straight forward RSS reader, and there are a bunch of other ones that existed then as they do now. Literally a week after it went down, someone wrote an exact alternative in Go you could host on AppEngine [1]. It was nearly identical. Many other similar project sprung up too, which goes to show how basic and non-special Reader really was.
People love to put it on a pedestal and circlejerk to the nostalgia, but an app that any engineer worth their salt can code in a weekend isn't really something worth Google's time and Google-scale.