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Google is about to learn a tough lesson

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Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#141

Post by illicium »

marknutter wrote: post #104

Twitter and Facebook killed RSS. It's a far friendlier interface for people to keep up with news and people they find interesting. Geeks may be lamenting the loss of Google Reader, but they make up a very small percentage of the internet population these days. When I suggest that Twitter/Facebook is the new RSS I often catch a lot of flack for it, but honestly, that's how far more people consume information than any…

I can't subscribe to with Twitter/Facebook. With RSS, content authors only have to update their websites and not worry about crossposting to a social feed.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#142

Post by vilhelm_s »

stcredzero wrote: post #97
sbmassey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"? I guess I'm not really sure what the problem is: it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once, if that is the issue.

> How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"? An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome! I guess a unified service that usefully filtered low S/N ratio feeds of all kinds would be awesome.

>An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!

That's what google reader did for me, I subscribe to twitter feeds through RSS, label them (and other high-volue blogs) with a tag "noise", so I can easily mark them all as read.

Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#143

Post by stephenr »

danilocampos wrote: post #126
stephenr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail. To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses. Search and the collaborative part of google docs (ie multiple concurrent editors on a document) is the only thing where it's hard to find a true competitor that you can self host, not to mention hosted solutions.

>People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail. To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses. Aren't you a charmer. I'm about as far from a Google fanboy as exists. Trust in this conversation has been about existing tomorrow or not. No one doubts Gmail is going to exist tomorrow. And while you're right about…

If you're using a gmail domain email, setup auto reply/forwarding for a few months/indefinitely.

Businesses would largely be using their own domains, so the point is moot.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#144

Post by fernly »

zer0gravity wrote: post #33

I guess they're doing everything they can to get everyone to Google+. If they can't bait you, they force you. They want their own Facebook. Probably Blogger will also be phased out as soon as they afford to. But I don't think the future will belong neither to Google+ nor Facebook. I'm looking forward to a descentralized, user centric platform, that anyone can run on its raspberry pi box at home, that allows you to ma…

They are still "enhancing" Blogger. Less than a month ago they introduced a drastic change in the image-upload UI that basically broke it for everyone. It appears to have been meant as an improvement but whoever did it, clearly didn't understand who used it and how. Now they are "looking at" how they can fix it.

So what are the good alternatives to Blogger? And what if you have multiple blogs with hundreds of posts in them? Reader at least is emphemeral, there's no investment of work at risk.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#145

Post by stcredzero »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #142
stcredzero wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"? An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome! I guess a unified service that usefully filtered low S/N ratio feeds of all kinds would be awesome.

>An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome! That's what google reader did for me, I subscribe to twitter feeds through RSS, label them (and other high-volue blogs) with a tag "noise", so I can easily mark them all as read. Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.

> Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.

What about a cloud-based app that kept synced across your devices? I wonder if it would be possible to create a client that would let you quickly read Twitter, app.net and feed content, and filter the latter two? (So long as you stay below the 100,000 user mark?)

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#146

Post by dllthomas »

henrikschroder wrote: post #13
llambda wrote: post #3

> Google made a big mistake cancelling Google Reader that will have severe ripple effects to its empire. Oh come on: enough already. Obviously there was a /vocal/ user base which is very loudly now upset that the product is being sunset. Guess what, Google didn't see it as a large enough set of people to make it worth monetizing. Such is life. Move on. It's certainly not the end of Google if that's what this article…

I don't think people who use RSS realize what a small minority they are. I don't use RSS or Google Reader, I've never even seen it, but this week my Facebook has been filled by a tiny slice of my friends who are incredibly upset. The vast majority are just shrugging and not caring one bit. Only Google has the actual numbers on how many people are using their Reader, and they simply did the math. End of story. It's no…

As a regular user of reader, I'm more or less shrugging. The features I use aren't anything I can't put together for myself pretty simply out of available tools; having reader there just prevented me from bothering.

I realize I won't be getting things like the recommendations, but I've got plenty of feeds going presently. There may well be other features others love that I've been missing out on, but obviously I won't be missing them :-P

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#147

Post by jhonovich »

I saw a HackerNews thread ranking/listing RSS alternatives, found Feedly was the top one and migrated my feeds from google reader. Now, I kick myself for using Google Reader all this time when Feedly is clearly far better (for me).

While I've lost a little respect for Google, I am overall happy to find a better RSS reader alternative.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#148

Post by jsz0 »

efuquen wrote: post #14
llambda wrote: post #3

> Google made a big mistake cancelling Google Reader that will have severe ripple effects to its empire. Oh come on: enough already. Obviously there was a /vocal/ user base which is very loudly now upset that the product is being sunset. Guess what, Google didn't see it as a large enough set of people to make it worth monetizing. Such is life. Move on. It's certainly not the end of Google if that's what this article…

Reading the commentary on this I feel like I'm only schlep in the tech industry that didn't use Google Reader. But then I ask my non-tech friends and guess what 90% of them say "Oh, I had some feeds on there from awhile back but I never really read them that often". I wonder if the people who used it are such trendsetters why that is the case ...

Reader was basically a power tool for trend setting not a trend itself.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#149

Post by sbmassey »

jQueryIsAwesome wrote: post #130
sbmassey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"? I guess I'm not really sure what the problem is: it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once, if that is the issue.

I know the problem, not the solution, but maybe calculating the popularity among the people I follow on twitter (or the ones following the ones I follow in case that dataset is not big enough) to show me a lot less articles for frequent-publisher.

So are you saying that the problem is that you want everything to be in a single "river of news", but that this means that low volume feed items get lost? To me, this is more of an issue with social networking than RSS: with Reader, you can examine feeds separately if you want.

Re: Google is about to learn a tough lesson

#150

Post by cromwellian »

OGinparadise wrote: post #127
panacea wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"discontinuing a product" I guess you need to unpack what that product was. It was loss-leading free product that killed the ecosystem that proceeded it. That whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish' thing is what many people are decrying as a tad 'evil'.

Google did that to websites too: first they penalized a slew of sites such as local search, travel, finance, shopping comparison for having "shallow content," and then they introduced the Google versions of said sites, on top of everyone else on search results.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites. When I search for "Samsung TV", I don't want a link to another vertical crawler as the top answer, I want links to where I can read reviews and buy it. Vertical search is getting rolled up into search, not just by Google, but by Microsoft too, because ultimately, search engines should be smart enough to understand the semantics of the search to an extern where a special curated vertical isn't needed anymore. When Jean Luc Picard asks the Enterprise computer for the nearest Starbase, it doesn't tell him to phone up StarBases.com and ask them for a list instead.

When I ask "AAPL", I want the current price of AAPL. This has a direct, factual, answer, I am not looking to be sent to finance search engine or portal as the top answer.

Even before Google built reader, the "RSS" market was mostly free. No one was making a killing selling RSS readers, anymore than commercial web browsers really succeeded. Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.

What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly. But releasing free services when the price was already zero is hardly anything to write home about.

If you want to know who really killed RSS, ask Facebook.

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