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How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

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Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#131

Post by defrost »

inigyou wrote: post #101
dhosek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve encountered feeds that do this and I tend to not keep those subscriptions long. That said, some feeds often have content that doesn’t present well in my feed reader and I’ll end up clicking to view the web presentation What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recove…

Doesn't Firefox still have this? It's a special kind of bookmark folder populated by RSS.

Moz Support says "Firefox's built-in support for web feeds and Live Bookmarks ended in December 2018 with version 64."

I checked as I use the Feedbro extension in Firefox and Chrome family browsers for holding and updating a tree of RSS feeds and thought I'd missed a built in FF feature :/

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#133

Post by smeej »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #103
timmg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+. Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to inter…

Google Buzz also seemed like a better path for Google to have a "social network" than what they tried to do with G+: Post short twitter-like things from various Google properties and have your friends posts show up in the same place. Between Buzz, Reader and gmail chat, Google had a fairly solid lineup of social products that they killed one way or another to boost G+.

I had a cohort of friends from grad school that used Buzz like crazy. We tried Google+, but it just wasn't as useful. This would have been 2008-2010.

We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#135

Post by al_borland »

Grombobulous wrote: post #129
al_borland wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mainstream ended up using social media to solve the problem RSS had already solved years earlier… it just had poor marketing. A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.

While that may be true, I just don’t believe for a second that RSS had any chance of becoming mainstream outside of techie circles. “Solving the problem” is only one aspect of the reason something becomes popular in the mainstream. I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.

> I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.

I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed.

If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#136

Post by smeej »

deepsun wrote: post #38
bakemawaytoys wrote: post #7

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

Same thing with Google Music, it was perfect. You could stream, or could buy and download mp3, or you could upload your library to it. And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it. But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.

The thing that pissed me off was that I had uploaded so many indie local bands' CDs, none of which were ever on YouTube, so I lost more than half of my music library when they forced that change and there was nothing I could do about it, having long since gotten rid of the disks because I believed them that they would never delete my stuff.

(Degoogled not long after that, actually. Fool me twice...)

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#137

Post by smeej »

jeffbee wrote: post #119
deepsun wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing with Google Music, it was perfect. You could stream, or could buy and download mp3, or you could upload your library to it. And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it. But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.

> "I am feeling lucky" YouTube Music still has this feature and it even uses the die icon, just like always. > you could upload your library to it. You can also do this in YouTube Music. > But they killed it They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.

Yeah, but if the songs in your Google Music library weren't on YouTube Music, you just lost them forever. End of story.

It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#138

Post by smeej »

titzer wrote: post #79
deepsun wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing with Google Music, it was perfect. You could stream, or could buy and download mp3, or you could upload your library to it. And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it. But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.

Why anyone trusts any streaming music service is absolutely beyond me. It will always get enshittified. I have 65GiB of mp3s I've accumulated from ripping CDs over the years and it used to be a burden to transfer around between machines. Now it easily fits on a thumb drive or microsd and it's easy to copy it onto all of my machines.

I trusted it in 2008 because none of these things had been around long enough to have a track record of enshittification.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#139

Post by jeffbee »

smeej wrote: post #137
jeffbee wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I am feeling lucky" YouTube Music still has this feature and it even uses the die icon, just like always. > you could upload your library to it. You can also do this in YouTube Music. > But they killed it They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.

Yeah, but if the songs in your Google Music library weren't on YouTube Music, you just lost them forever. End of story. It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.

This isn't true. I have tons of stuff that I uploaded that they've never heard of
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