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RIP Google Reader

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#361

Post by ehsankia »

gfxgirl wrote: post #335
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 agree. I used Reader a ton and was upset when Google cancelled it. I signed up for a few different paid readers, one in particular was trying to be a clone for Google Reader. But, in those few months, my behavior changed and I no longer felt like using them. In other words, in hindsight I'm not sad it's gone. If I really valued it then I should have valued the clone but I didn't

It's almost like Google knew RSS was gonna die anyway and ditched that ship at the right time.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#362

Post by ehsankia »

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…

This is in no way meant to be disrespectful about your work, but I would argue that if one great engineer can whip up something that provides as much if not more than Google Reader, then maybe Reader wasn't really a good use of Google's time after all and it was right to let smaller developers handle RSS readers.

It just isn't a Google-scale problem that requires the kind of resources Google has to offer, it makes no sense for them to maintain something than small independent developers like you can handle just fine.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#364

Post by sjs382 »

jonpurdy wrote: post #123
Glench wrote: post #42

Shout out to https://bazqux.com , a modern Google Reader replacement and the only SaaS I pay for. I'm not affiliated, just really love it. It's been solid and awesome for me for over 7 years now.

Shout out to Feedbin! It was created shortly after (I think) Google announced the Reader deprecation. I signed up around the first day and have been a subscriber since then. It even has a well-documented and supported API. I hope Ben keeps running it for many years to come.

Same. It's definitely the SaaS that I'm happiest using.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#365

Post by rsj_hn »

getlawgdon wrote: post #348
xnx wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

fastmail is better than gmail.

Is it really? Gmail is pretty good at spam blocking and searching through your email. I haven't found a better alternative, although I'm open to other options

Re: RIP Google Reader

#366

Post by squarefoot »

nextaccountic wrote: post #346
WorldMaker wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google got a lot of early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of proprietary sec…

> I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now" This and when GTalk moved off XMPP.

And when they removed the discussion filter from searches, so that looking for opinions on a product from blogs/forums suddenly became next to impossible without being inundated by results of shops advertising that product. The technical cost of leaving that filter in place would have been zero, but apparently there were other priorities; that was the day everything cool I associated with Google ceased to exist.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#367

Post by pinkano »

jaywalk wrote: post #131
benhurmarcel wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when Reader was shut down, very rapidly alternatives were coming up. Lots of people switched to Feedly within a few weeks, and The Old Reader came up, etc. The transition really wasn't that bad.

I was one of those people who switched to Feedly. And I'm also one of the people still using the Feedly Classic app, which they had to launch because of the uproar after they radically overhauled the app. I'm just hoping they decide to keep it around, since they never update it it's not like it's costing them anything.

we'll keep it around, just won't update it

Re: RIP Google Reader

#368

Post by KMag »

WorldMaker wrote: post #319
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…

I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google got a lot of early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of proprietary sec…

Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known.

Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm not sure if learn-to-rank is still considered Ascorer, or its replacement. I left before Amit, but seeing the things that came out leading to his departure, I'm sure it's no longer called Ascorer.

(On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)

Re: RIP Google Reader

#369

Post by markogresak »

cacarr wrote: post #330
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Not that many people who use Linux are clamoring for it, but it's interesting that GitHub does not provide an official desktop app for Linux -- even though it's a frickin Electron all. And that's totally GitHub's doing. Meanwhile, at the parent company, Microsoft offets VS Code for Linux. And it's nice.

You can get it on linux: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/github-desktop-bin/ (mentioned in the official docs) or https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop.

What I dislike about Linux in general is how often the mentality for an app is “you’re using Linux, just find the repository and figure out how to get the release to your system or build it yourself”.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#370

Post by alfiedotwtf »

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…

> In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how Google was perceived

Yep. That was the point for me wehere Google went from startup I would like to work for sometime in the future to the ranks of IBM and Oracle

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