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There's so much "that was the day Google died" sentiment in this thread, while in the same ten years the share price of GOOG has gone up from $19.87 to $90.63 (adjusting for splits), wildly outperforming the rest of the market. Goes to show that the company considers a much wider audience than just the tech crowd when making key product decisions.
Google Reader was "just a reader" and nothing more. They did not invest in it, it was stagnated but as it was working ok, I didn't have motivation to look for alternatives.
When Google Reader was announced to be shut down, it gave a great motivation to other reader's authors to develop their products. I would never replace current Inoreader with its insanse features with Google Reader again.
I doubt Google took into account how damaging for their reputation is would be to shut down a product that had an audience that was small but extremely online and influential, both at the time and into the future.
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I wasn’t reader user, but it seems to me like when advertising self interest took over
Meh the ad business was pretty established well before 2013 when Reader shut down. RSS was declining well before that. Google acquired Doubleclick in 2008 aka what became the real Adwords in its prime. I personally don't expect tech conglomerates to be the ideal solution for niche markets. But I don't see many people providing good arguments why alternatives like Feedly didn't take off if there was really a strong ma…
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I understand you completely. For me also it was a turning point, but the real nail in the coffin was when they shut down Inbox. That was when it went from a new Google product being interesting and getting in there early to every Google product being eyed with distrust and reluctance.
I had the same. After Reader, I was a bit grumpy but, well, found other alternatives. After Inbox tho... I went through the 5 stages of grief and started degooglifying my life. Made an okay setup with neomutt (and TripIt*) which I can trust would stay around longer than any Google ad-focused product. (* I mainly liked Inbox for its travel organizer)
I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…
It also coincided with a persistent trend of HN itself no longer featuring random blog posts heavily but rather a) mostly popular news sites like NYTimes that finally started understanding the web demanded clickbait/Twitter-friendly high volume articles (where no one reads the article but shares the headline) and b) blogs that went viral via Twitter/FB/etc. That was the new reality a decade ago. Social media apps was…
Notice any similarities? We have moved, just not to another RSS reader, but rather to G+/facebook/twitter/whatever, platforms which had that social element. Coincidentally, it was a time when g+ was failing to gain expected traction.
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Meh the ad business was pretty established well before 2013 when Reader shut down. RSS was declining well before that. Google acquired Doubleclick in 2008 aka what became the real Adwords in its prime. I personally don't expect tech conglomerates to be the ideal solution for niche markets. But I don't see many people providing good arguments why alternatives like Feedly didn't take off if there was really a strong ma…
Yeah. I think what really killed RSS was a change in people's behavior. Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites gained traction as link sharing communities and RSS became less relevant after that. Instead of subscribing to an RSS feed, you could just follow your favorite sites on Twitter, for example.
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Meh the ad business was pretty established well before 2013 when Reader shut down. RSS was declining well before that. Google acquired Doubleclick in 2008 aka what became the real Adwords in its prime. I personally don't expect tech conglomerates to be the ideal solution for niche markets. But I don't see many people providing good arguments why alternatives like Feedly didn't take off if there was really a strong ma…
Yeah. I think what really killed RSS was a change in people's behavior. Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites gained traction as link sharing communities and RSS became less relevant after that. Instead of subscribing to an RSS feed, you could just follow your favorite sites on Twitter, for example.
Programmers get nostalgic about their pet technologies that even the majority of tech-denographic (and often themselves) don't even use when given the option. I don't blame them but they aren't always honest about their favourite niche tech simply being niche technology.
This always seemed like one of Google's worst decisions to me, and given that I remember the time they tried to spend $6 billion to buy Groupon, that's saying something. It was a plain unforced error. Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sort…
It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.
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Yeah. I think what really killed RSS was a change in people's behavior. Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites gained traction as link sharing communities and RSS became less relevant after that. Instead of subscribing to an RSS feed, you could just follow your favorite sites on Twitter, for example.
How is RSS even dead today? I can’t think of a useful site that doesn’t still have an RSS feed - including Reddit.
Sure they still work and will continue to work but let's be honest it's a super niche technology and it didn't survive/flourish because it was flawed and fundamentally nerdy option people stopped caring about.
Supporting RSS takes the bare minimum of effort. Yet even in 2013 (aka a decade ago) RSS was declining in usage before Reader was killed.
I support open platforms but RSS had a super noise-to-signal UX and I personally don't miss it.
Google didn't kill RSS, they killed the best RSS product at the time and accelerated a dying protocol that would still be only used by HN's demographic and little else.