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RIP Google Reader

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#371

Post by matkoniecz »

KMag wrote: post #368
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…

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…

> (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.)

Damnatio memoriae?

> Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae

Re: RIP Google Reader

#372

Post by charles_f »

rrdharan wrote: post #256
kevstev wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Feedly is great!

Have some respect, we're still grieving here!

Re: RIP Google Reader

#374

Post by tvararu »

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…

Reading this post inside Newsblur. :)

Re: RIP Google Reader

#375

Post by twsted »

As others have said, I also think that this was a turning point in how Google was generally perceived.

But anyway, there is nothing to miss about it, even if it was not clear at that time: having a news aggregator on the cloud owned by google itself, or any other company FWIW, it is not something we should aim for.

Why should we give all this information about our preferred readings or favorite news to anyone?

Re: RIP Google Reader

#376

Post by DocTomoe »

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.

Why would I need an "official desktop app" for anything, if I got a perfectly good git, and with git being perfectly integrated in modern IDEs (should I need a more GUI approach?)

Re: RIP Google Reader

#377

Post by lrem »

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…

Seems everyone and their dog moved their long-form into medium. And it does RSS. So, it's back to being mainstream?

Re: RIP Google Reader

#378

Post by eeZah7Ux »

Andrex wrote: post #134
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

g. Reader had a reshare feature that made your account a RSS feed. Your peers/friends/colleagues would feed from you and to you. Together with reshared count, it implemented a very effective peer review mechanism. Having high adoption, it provided me very good feeds - nothing comes close now.

Exactly. It was basically a share-ier Twitter long before Twitter, built on an open standard (RSS.) You could subscribe to every news website's RSS feed and at the time, most would offer their full content in your feed. You had incredible power to curate and refine your feed based on your interests and social circle.

Amazingly, that pattern is very easy to implement and yet nothing across Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit comes even close.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#379

Post by atmosx »

llarsson wrote: post #269
atmosx wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

I liked wave a lot as well.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#380

Post by CodeGlitch »

Lazare wrote: post #340
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.

RSS is a bit of a relic of an earlier, more open web, and Google Reader was at the time the best, most popular RSS client. Killing it was bad for users, and bad for RSS, but it was also a very visible marker of a shift towards a more closed, proprietary web. So it's not just "having Google Reader was better than not having it, I'm mad", but more about regret for what might have been if we'd all gone down a different…

Podcasts are published using RSS - so I wouldn't say RSS is a relic if it's being used for a good chunk of modern media.
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