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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

#261

Post by kareemm »

Funny, I was at the O'Reilly conference in 2005 (Etech) when Google Reader was *launched*, and wrote a blog post about it[1].

Here was my take on the launch:

> At first I wondered if this would be the product that pushes RSS aggregators to the mainstream, but I'm beginning to think that a full-featured RSS reader won't ever cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream. A product like My Yahoo suits the purposes of a huge percentage of the mainstream audience, so unless their needs change significantly, there's no incentive to change to another aggregator.

Sadly this seems to be true: My Yahoo didn't make it, but the FB/Twitter/Insta/TikTok/Google News algos serve as curated feeds where non-nerds prefer to get their news. There was a lot of anger amongst the digerati when Google Reader shut down, but in retrospect it seems to have been the right move.

1 - https://www.reemer.com/archive/v1/2005/10/07/web_20_google_a...

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#262

Post by markstos »

I probably gave up on using a feed reader about then. Instead, I subscribe a few things I care about by email, and hear about some things passively through social media.

The idea is that I can't keep with via email, I don't have time for it. For a while, I used "feed to email" for the services that didn't offer an email subscription, but I've since let that go.

Now I feel like I don't have time for "one more place for news" to add back a feed reader into the mix.

But I'm open to being convinced I should give Feedly or something else a try!

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#263

Post by freetonik »

DrBazza wrote: post #147
rhaway84773 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

>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?

I don't think the idea was to convince bloggers to switch, but rather to stop one good distribution channel from potentially competing with social media. Google kept Blogger alive, because people can still publish there AND distribute links via social media.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#264

Post by bborud »

scarface74 wrote: post #79
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #60

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…

> Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), 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.

That is actually a very important observation about Google: products that Google engineers wouldn't elbow each other in the face to work on will eventually shrivel up and die.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#267

Post by zimmund »

markstos wrote: post #262

I probably gave up on using a feed reader about then. Instead, I subscribe a few things I care about by email, and hear about some things passively through social media. The idea is that I can't keep with via email, I don't have time for it. For a while, I used "feed to email" for the services that didn't offer an email subscription, but I've since let that go. Now I feel like I don't have time for "one more place fo…

I tried several alternatives (including one which tried to be exactly like Reader), but I didn't get used to them. Up until then I always knew what was happening in tech and global news. Since Reader was killed I ended up relying on news websites and I find features by accident, not because I read updates on blogs/media. I feel I got disconnected from the bleeding edge of the web that day.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#268

Post by mock-possum »

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…

Nixing Wave was the beginning of the end for me. I know it was supposed to be some kind of failed experiment, and some features got rolled into Drive, but I had a bunch of Waves with my roommates and I miss it now.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#269

Post by paulcole »

svachalek wrote: post #260
paulcole wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The use of passive voice here is a little comical. "The lion noticed that the gazelle was headed for its stomach, and it turned out to be right."

I don't think I used passive voice in my comment at all. Can you quote the part that is passive?

Only part that might be slightly confusing is:

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

"They" in that sentence refers to Google, which should make it more clear. But it is still all in active voice.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#270

Post by plorkyeran »

aniforprez wrote: post #144
pirsquare wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You missed emails asking for verification" Did you saw the title of the email? "Important Information for your Account". It reads more like an informational email. How many important emails you've received this week? Could've been worded "[Action Required]", "Account Suspension Notice" etc. And they didn't even drop a notification when my servers were shutdown. "This will happen to you again on AWS or any other prov…

Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information". I don't understand how that part isn't your fault. They even tell you that your account will be suspended in the email. How do you not have a special filter to route emails from critical service providers? And I don't agree that GCP is "the only one that will suspend you for things like this". AWS can and has susp…

"Important Information for your Account" is a marketing email 99% of the time. Emails which are actually important normally tell you why they're important in the subject.
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