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Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

googleblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#241

Post by sylens »

It is wild to me how many people view this event as the divider of two eras of Google. And the same is true for me. Before this, I loved Google products - I was a fan of everything they did, I had an Android phone, things were working great. After they shuttered Reader, I never trusted anything they built the same way again.

It's wild to think that something that was not really used for me for work or education had such an impact on my perception of a company. But I'm not exaggerating when I say this had a bigger impact on me than Microsoft's three red lights issue on my XBox 360 or their PlaysForSure debacle.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#242

Post by paulcole »

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.

> It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them

(citation needed)

This really feels like your (and a popular) reading of the situation, but isn’t as unequivocal as you make it seem.

To me it’s more like the iMac not having a floppy drive or no USBA ports on the newer MacBooks. Google saw that the web was trending away from blogs and written content. They removed one of the tools that people used to keep up with blogs and written content and accelerated the decline of blogs and written content.

People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#243

Post by ChatGTP »

pirsquare wrote: post #91
js4ever wrote: post #16

This is probably the inflection point in history where I lost all trust I had in Google. I don't know how much they saved by shutting it down (probably nearly nothing) but I know that for me and people around me it was a such terrible signal that I never trusted again Google for anything serious/business. Well done guys

Yes in my case I was a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud and they abruptly shutdown all my servers last friday. Any decent human being would at least try to rectify things ASAP, except for Google. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution. They're the most dysfunctional organization I've seen in my life. It's like communications between teams goes with a "none of my business" attitude. Context: https://ww…

This single comment has made me decide to move away from Google cloud before I launch my product in the coming weeks.

Thanks.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#244

Post by lenocinor »

Still mad about this too, like so many others here. I’ve been using Feedly since then, and it works for the RSS part. But I really miss the small community of people I discussed things articles with in Google Reader. Most of those people I no longer talk to. It was a unique form of sharing and commenting that just worked for us in a way no other products did.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#245

Post by ilikepi »

compsciphd wrote: post #211

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…

> 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.

They actually did start to integrate them. Google Reader had native sharing functionality for several years. Then in 2011 they suddenly removed it and replaced[1] it with sharing through Google+. My small network of Reader-using friends were split over wanting to join Google+, so that mostly killed our practice of regularly sharing links with each other.

[1]: https://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-in-reader-fres...

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#248

Post by dontlaugh »

ilikepi wrote: post #245
compsciphd wrote: post #211

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…

> 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. They actually did start to integrate them. Google Reader had native sharing functionality for several years. Then in 2011 they suddenly removed it and replaced[1] it with sharing through Google+. My small network of Reader-using friends were split…

That's what killed Reader sharing & comments, yes.

They should have done the opposite, growing Google+ out of Reader: keep the Reader sharing, but also automatically share to Google+.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#249

Post by thr717272 »

modo_mario wrote: post #111
jemmyw wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also liked Google+ it was where I could manage my tech social stuff without participating in the madness that Facebook was becoming.

The trickle in invitation system with which they made it public was such a glaringly obvious mistake it still makes me mad. So many people I knew had accounts there but stopped using it because their friends weren't there or by the time they could join their friends had already left because in turn their friends weren't there.

That, on top of branding it with the same name as the hated login system that[1] hamfistedly joined peoples accounts across vwry different contexts.

[1]: or so I heard, I wasn't affected, I postponed that part again and again until that part ended up being very smooth for me

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#250

Post by garrickvanburen »

karpierz wrote: post #246

Can anyone explain exactly what made Google Reader so amazing? I never used it, but from what I can tell it was basically an RSS reader?

Fast. $0. Straight-forward UI. As mass-market as any RSS Reader got.

Arguably it was The RSS Reader.

Killing Google Reader effectively killed RSS, shifting the gravity of the big tech companies from a fundamentally open & interoperable consumer web to a fundamentally closed silo.

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