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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

#271

Post by pornel »

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?

Some people just liked the UI and features, but I think major reason why people are so butthurt about Reader, is that its existence was a very important symbol: it was a mainstream product from a well-respected company that elevated RSS to being a normal feature of websites, not just a niche protocol of open-web-loving bloggers.

And conversely, shutdown of the Reader was a wakeup call that big corporations exist to make money, and things that don't monetize well are not going to survive.

That was just past the peak of "Web 2.0" frenzy that used free public APIs for all kinds of "mashups". The APIs didn't even require developer keys and didn't have stringent rate limiting. Everyone was giving away their data for free! It's hard to believe now.

Around the time of Reader shutdown, Twitter locked down their API, significantly curbed 3rd party clients. Facebook and Google abandoned XMPP. Later Google Maps became serious about monetizing their API, and all those mashups and RSS feeds started dying down.

So in short, shutdown of Google Reader was the beginning of the end of Web 2.0.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#272

Post by acdha »

dmix wrote: post #46
srcreigh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the bug factor was Facebook. There were places making money selling ads in feeds but they weren’t making within an order of magnitude what Facebook promised. Google+ was a botched reaction to that but I do wonder what Google could have done embracing the open web instead and actually trying to monetize Reader or provide top-notch feed ads. It might not have made Facebook-level rates but it also wouldn’t have soured a generation on their business.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#273

Post by paulcole »

thr717272 wrote: post #257
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…

I'm fairly sure someone here can provide you with a proper citation, but in the meanwhile I was very much online here and elsewhere during that time and IIRC it was common knowledge at the time and AFAIK nobody came up with a better hypothesis.

If someone doesn't comment on their reasoning for a decision they made, everybody else's best guess doesn't become the truth.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#275

Post by ink_13 »

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…

It's interesting you should say that, because I was up and running on an alternative platform pretty quick. RSS was and is so core to how I gather and consume information from the web that I'd be considerably unhappier without it.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#276

Post by AlecSchueler »

thr717272 wrote: post #256
AlecSchueler wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was already ads in feeds or feeds that were nothing more than links. But IIRC there were also sites that let you pay for a full feed and I think something good could have come out of it.

And there are websites that let you pay for add free.

The original point is simply that RSS would have gone the way of the web, in terms of the presence of advertising, had it become mainstream.

There being workarounds or other models possible doesn't change that and it also applies to the web today. As another commentor pointed out, RSS would have unique difficulties for adblockers as well.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#277

Post by deegles »

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.

Was its usage actually declining? When it was shut down every other feed reader alternative I tried was overloaded for weeks.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#278

Post by miguelazo »

asoneth wrote: post #209
arthur_sav wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops anyone else from building another reader?

There are many fine RSS readers, but what I miss most was the social and community features. The communities that spring up around things like GReader are like lightning in a bottle. Perhaps the companies that can afford to build things like that have concluded that other forms of social media are more profitable. There still are niches of the internet that operate like a book club for excitable nerds, but they can b…

>There are many fine RSS readers

Perhaps, but they were one more thing to log into, and the Reader/Gmail integration was unparalleled. Also, for those of us who really liked the simple Reader UI, nothing really ever replaced it. Not even the explicit attempts to mimic it.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#279

Post by miguelazo »

paulcole wrote: post #242
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.

> 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…

> but they were (for the most part) right

And yet here we are, discussing things on a platform that is very akin to the web that Reader advanced. There was always going to be a market for non-Web 2.0 social media junk, albeit smaller. And frankly, trying to copy already successful iterations almost always fails (Google+). The resources that would have been required to maintain or even update Reader were minimal-- they were already wasting money on far more expensive dead end projects that were never going to make money.

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