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Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

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Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#211

Post by compsciphd »

Google Reader's shutdown made it realize that google didn't understand communities and platforms.

OK, you want to push Google+? Isn't google+ supposed to be a platform (and not simply an application). Let google reader be an application on top of the Google+ platform.

i.e. facebook is valuable because people share things on it. Why would you kill an app that is causing people to share things with each other. Leverage that user base.

Reader should have simply been one app built on top of the Google+ platform. Yes, this would involve rewriting it to some extent, but better to do things that maintain your user base, than do things that give people reason to leave.

Google has repeated this error over and over again since then, especially with their chat/messaging strategies. Don't give people reasons to jump ship. If you force them to migrate to something new, they can just as easily migrate away from you.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#212

Post by boxed »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #201
boxed wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS isn't vulnerable to such attacks though.

RSS is just as exploitable as anything else.

No, it isn't. RSS is not a search system. It has no such exploit, because it just doesn't work like that at all.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#213

Post by compsciphd »

octacat wrote: post #208
DrBazza wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even now, 10 yrs on, that makes no sense (their justification, not yours). How do you convince a bunch of blog authors to switch from 'free-to-air' and searchable everywhere RSS feeds, to move into closed social media platform? It seems like idiotic management making idiotic decisions completely out of touch with the userbase has been with us since the dawn of the web. Just this week, Spotify are turning the mobile a…

Monetising by adding ads to a content, they fetched from other sites was a questionable back than. So, they couldn't just add ads to the reader easily. They were believing google plus would be popular. So, having a closed social network, where they could control everything and put ads without any complains makes sense. Besides, Reader was not that popular among the general public.

it doesn't matter that it wasn't that popular amongst the general public, they should have viewed it as having an enthusiastic user base and since sharing and commenting was part of reader, would be a way to encourage people to add content to google+. A social network is only as valuable as the content that gets placed on it. Killing reader shut off a mechanisms for sharing. I went from sharing articles I saw on RSS feeds via reader to a group of friends to sharing them on facebook.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#215

Post by cfeduke »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10

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…

Yes, this is why I've never considered Google Cloud and have kept everything on AWS. (Even when a client says the choice is Azure or Google... I'll take that Microsoft poison.) I have zero confidence anything Google produces will be around in a few years.

This is too bad too, because I have used Google's Cloud offering for some hobby projects (specifically related to Gmail and spam filtering, because... why would Gmail's spam filtering function?) and it seems really good.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#216

Post by jefftk »

mkl wrote: post #177
saurik wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what makes it so amazing !!! It was a delicious self-parody. I remember reading it and thinking it made absolutely no sense as a metaphor: just imagine the poor archer being told "instead of having 15 arrows to take with you today, we've decided to give you three really heavy arrows"... that was the announcement that really made Google product management feel like a laughing stock to me, and is what I return t…

The "more wood" is in the bow, not the arrows. A bigger, heavier bow will shoot arrows with more force, but will take more effort, strength, and time to operate, so shoot fewer arrows harder.

It's still a little weird, since the bow is mostly ahead of the arrow, and only "behind" it in a metaphorical supporting sense.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#217

Post by Reason077 »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #142
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10

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 was the reason they killed it for me. Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits. It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.

Imagine if, instead of simply shutting down Reader, Google had gradually and subtly integrated it more and more in to Google+ over time. Things could have turned out very different!

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#218

Post by mschuster91 »

aniforprez wrote: post #192
mschuster91 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but this part of your article is basically handing all responsibility of poorly handling important communication off to someone else I'm not the person you replied to. Anyway, I'd expect of a company like Google to not word their e-mails in the same way cyber-criminals do - and for what it's worth, many cyber-security training programs actually teach that vaguely worded but "important sounding" subjects are a key i…

Ah sorry I didn't notice you weren't the same person While the subject line could be better, the subject is not the only indicator of the importance of the email. It is coming from "Google Payments" and as a customer of GCP, why wouldn't you treat every email that comes from Google with an equal amount of importance even if there are false positives? As I said, having a filter of email addresses routed to a specific…

> I don't see the issue with the subject line. I get the general rule to not mark everything important but in this case the mail IS important

In a world where people get sometimes hundreds of emails a day, on top of a constant onslaught of spam, scam, phishing and otherwise malicious email, it is basic netiquette of summarizing what exactly you want from the receiver.

Additionally, a lot of people seem to have taken buzzfeed-style clickbait headlines as the role model for communication and that may be a factor here as well.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#219

Post by dejj »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #56
plorkyeran wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was the first thing they'd killed which had been around for quite a while, still had devoted users, and Google didn't offer a replacement. If you look at the graveyard, the pre-Reader things they killed were things which had flopped (e.g. Buzz), things which were no longer relevant (e.g Gears), acquisitions, and mergers where they had two redundant products (e.g. Google Video).

Despite the prior “more wood behind fewer arrows” announcement, it might be the first time Google killed something that was popular with Googlers. I think it was an “Elves leave Middle-Earth” moment for my friends on campus. Memegen was full of “we can launch (ultradoomed project) but can’t keep Reader alive?” snark, less good-natured than usual. I’ve heard it blamed on Vic and G+, actual security issues from scrapin…

Thanks for linking “Elves leave Middle-Earth”.

The soda can anecdote made me realize that “We give you free soda and after-hours pizza, so you can ruin your health for the company.” matured unceremoniously into “If you want to ruin your health, pay for it like any other member of society.”

Realize it, and “embrace the warmth of leaving home.”

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#220

Post by AlecSchueler »

boxed wrote: post #210
AlecSchueler wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put an advert in the feed, make the post nothing but a link to the web url etc There are plenty of anti-patterns to follow in RSS. We just didn't see them because only techies were using feeds.

So? You just unsubscribe from any that are shit. Unlike on google where you can't delete a site from the search results (which you can on kagi btw, which is great).

So if RSS took off with the general public and this was your plan you'd very quickly be left with an empty feed reader.

The point is that RSS was/less overrun by advertising than the web because of cultural reasons, not thanks to something inherent to the technology.

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