Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#171

Post by zeckalpha » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 12:43 PM UTC

anon1385 wrote: post #133

veidr wrote: post #111

> I have no interest in reading my feeds through > a web site (no more than I would tolerate reading > my email that way, like an *animal*). I haven't laughed that hard at something I read in a blog post so far this year. And I agree wholeheartedly. Who gives a shit about Google Reader the website? (Apparently, a whole lot of people... but not me.) I only care about the syncing. Like Zawinski, I want a fast, awesome,…

A proper standard for syncing rss? So that, like email, you just have to point your various clients at the address of the sync server you are using. That can be one you run yourself or one from some third party provider. If your provider closes you can just point your clients at the new service, without each client needing to implement a new custom API. You are also free to use whatever client(s) you want. It seems t…

What about something as simple as reusing IMAP for RSS?

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#172

Post by seanp2k2 » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 12:44 PM UTC

Orva wrote: post #57

snogglethorpe wrote: post #46

I don't really share most of jwz's specific complaints, but I've been trying to use feedly, and boy .... it's really hard to believe so many people are recommending this as a general Google reader replacement. Besides its somewhat quirky UI, the main problem I have with feedly is that it seems predicated on the assumption that you will more or less read through all articles, one by one, in order, and finish them. Tha…

> I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subc…

If Google were smart, they'd open-source Reader and let the people who love it maintain and run it (It's probably much too dependent on their architecture for this to actually be a viable option).

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#173

Post by metafunctor » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 12:46 PM UTC

tterrace wrote: post #169

Swipe to navigate is a terrible design antipattern. I can always tell when I'm reading a blog on blogspot because it'll dump me to the adjacent article when I'm scrolling or trying to zoom in on an image. I dumped chrome on ios because they didn't get it right either.

Hear hear. Although, I don't remember needing to swipe with chrome on iOS.

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#174

Post by nicholasalias » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 12:55 PM UTC

ababab wrote: post #35

FWIW, I started a vague attempt to round up the alternatives: https://github.com/smithbr/rss-readers-list

Great list. You missed a few. Feeder.co (my preferred alternative), Stringer, and probably a few more. Check out Russell Beattie's blog post here: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/readerpocalypse-the-alter...

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#175

Post by a3_nm » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 1:02 PM UTC

rachelbythebay wrote: post #2

Not many people seem that interested in my approach to solving the feed reading problem. I run my own backend and frontend and just let it fetch things for me. Then I periodically check in and flip through to see what's new. If I wind up on some new platform on which the web frontend doesn't make sense, I'll write a native one which speaks the same simple "POST in, AJAX out" language. No big thing. I set up a Kicksta…

> I set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've written and then some

You could also, you know, just release what you have as open source without asking people to pay $30,000 for the privilege?

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#176

Post by acdha » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 1:02 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #146

sage_joch wrote: post #54

Google doesn't seem to realize that one of their most valuable assets is trust. And that trust has eroded a great deal in recent months.

It really is time to grow up. They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes, we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone else to fill the vacuum.

Your apologia is begs the question of whether Google could make money or find a fit for it when they never even allowed the team to try:

“‘There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,’ he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/

Had there been interest, revenues were easy to find: a college student trying their first project would at least have slapped some Google text ads on there. Given Google's other projects, they could have just made Reader a service with a $5/year charge, bundled it with Google Drive subscriptions, etc. The Google+ integration was a hopeless botch full of obvious opportunities to make both services more valuable but they simply did not try and succeeded only in making a strong, active, influential community use their services less and distrust their executives‘ vision and competency.

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#177

Post by jtolj » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 1:02 PM UTC

stegro32 wrote: post #160

jimhart3000 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I finally tried out NewsBlur yesterday after waiting as long as possible to decide on a replacement. There's a lot going on there. I think I've more or less figured out what it's all for and how to navigate around, but one thing is still bugging me -- what's that orange triangle on the left of the feed area, that follows the cursor around unless you "lock" it, for?! Totally unexplained ux element.

I think (but am not certain) that when any part of an article moves past the orange triangle, it is marked as read.

Yes, this. I was confused by it too until I uncovered that in a GetSatisfaction thread. If you lock it about 1/4 of the way from the top, the auto mark-read behavior is like GReader.

It should probably default to being locked...

One of my favorite things about Newsblur is how minutely configurable it is, but I think all of that is probably throwing off new users.

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#178

Post by hawkharris » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 1:04 PM UTC

jsherer wrote: post #166

hawkharris wrote: post #32

Many startups are trying to consolidate news and social media posts — to become, basically, a one-stop shop for users. I understand that this offers greater convenience, but it also overlooks something people enjoy about the Internet. People like having different websites and services to check, with notifications unique to each one. It's kind of like spreading out your Christmas presents instead of tearing them open…

I agree. This is my approach for http://mnmlrdr.com/ — no social integration because a lot of people are only interested in reading their feeds, not talking about it in their reader app.

That's a cool. I like the simple, elegant interface.

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#179

Post by acdha » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 1:10 PM UTC

VMG wrote: post #124

skarmklart wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, GR is one of few services that I would have gladly paid $100/year for. They should at least have asked us users if we wanted to pay for the service in exchange for letting it live on.

The blowback on google charging for a formerly free service would have been a magnitude worse than them just shutting it down.

That's an unproven assertion which the torrent of people saying “I'd have paid for Reader” calls seriously into question.

Re: Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

#180

Post by melling » Tue, Jun 25, 2013, 1:11 PM UTC

RockyMcNuts wrote: post #151

melling wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is time to grow up. They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes, we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone else to fill the vacuum.

no, you seized control of an open RSS ecosystem with Reader and Feedburner, made those a platform no one could compete with, and then pulled the plug on the ecosystem. If you don't even understand that, that's why you can't be trusted.

Open Office has seized control of the document suite. Any day now Microsoft is going out of business, and the GIMP is about to destroy Photoshop...

Bottom line is if there is a real market for something and someone makes a better product.