Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Reader is dead

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 215 posts

Re: Google Reader is dead

#41

Post by martinkallstrom »

georgebashi wrote: post #34

Google Reader kept the content of RSS feeds cached forever, meaning it was the last surviving record of a huge number of dead and deleted blogs. The Archive Team have spent the last month or so fetching those blogs out of Reader to serve as a permanent archive. They posted a few days ago on HN asking for some last minute help, and managed to archive 46.23M feeds. Check out their efforts here: http://www.archiveteam.o…

My former startup Twingly http://twingly.com has hundreds of millions of blog posts stored (everything collected since 2006) in 128 MySql shards with a unified query interface. The last few months of data are indexed and searchable for free from their website, but the entire archive is kept forever.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#42

Post by davidjohnstone »

steve19 wrote: post #8

Right up till the 11th hour I held out hope that Google would give Reader a last minute stay of execution. A sad day indeed.

As much as my life would have been easier this year without the decision to close Google Reader (I think this is what they call #firstworldproblems), it's a good thing that they didn't change their mind and decide to not shut it down at the last minute.

Too many people have invested too much time in creating viable alternatives to Google Reader, and un-discontinuing it would have thrown a massive spanner in the works. I probably would have stayed with an alternative out of spite.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#44

Post by mikelat »

unicornporn wrote: post #38

For me, this was a good move. It inspired me to finally look past Google for the web based services I use daily (search, mail, rss, analytics, calendar, video hosting etc). Google's wants to know as much about me as possible. Putting all of my eggs in their basket seems like horrible idea. I've now come quite far in my exodus. Yesterday I found https://www.startpage.com/ (uses Google) which gives good results (roughl…

> Google's wants to know as much about me as possible.

Which is the reason they shut it down most probably. They can data mine your documents, emails, social networking etc but something like google reader doesn't help much. They most they'll get out of it is a few rss feeds and can analyze what you like, but hell they already know what you search for so it's useless data.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#45

Post by psbp »

unicornporn wrote: post #38

For me, this was a good move. It inspired me to finally look past Google for the web based services I use daily (search, mail, rss, analytics, calendar, video hosting etc). Google's wants to know as much about me as possible. Putting all of my eggs in their basket seems like horrible idea. I've now come quite far in my exodus. Yesterday I found https://www.startpage.com/ (uses Google) which gives good results (roughl…

How is startpage a solution to the problem? If everyone stopped using google, startpage would be useless.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#46

Post by bering »

davidw wrote: post #36
habosa wrote: post #23

RIP Reader. For those looking for a replacement, especially those with an Android phone, check out Newsblur. It's all open source, the developer is accessible, and most importantly it works insanely well. I honestly like it better than Reader.

I'm trying it, but it has a few things that bug me. They messed with the arrow keys - they no longer scroll the page. I'm always accidentally going to the next or previous article. ARGH! I miss the smart sorting order that Reader had - it was really good about bubbling stuff I cared about up to the top and letting me whip through the rest.

The developer has listened to the feedback on scrolling and added configuration options so you can now use the arrow keys. Bugged me as well, but I'm happy with the new options.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#47

Post by crdoconnor »

mikelat wrote: post #44
unicornporn wrote: post #38

For me, this was a good move. It inspired me to finally look past Google for the web based services I use daily (search, mail, rss, analytics, calendar, video hosting etc). Google's wants to know as much about me as possible. Putting all of my eggs in their basket seems like horrible idea. I've now come quite far in my exodus. Yesterday I found https://www.startpage.com/ (uses Google) which gives good results (roughl…

> Google's wants to know as much about me as possible. Which is the reason they shut it down most probably. They can data mine your documents, emails, social networking etc but something like google reader doesn't help much. They most they'll get out of it is a few rss feeds and can analyze what you like, but hell they already know what you search for so it's useless data.

I always just assumed that they were using it to weight web page rankings, and that it probably paid off just for that reason alone.

If a website has a lot of genuine RSS subscribers in Google Reader who read it regularly, then that shows a strong degree of trust in the source, and thus a good reason to rank it highly.

You can't really mine social networking / emails for the same kind of information. Not unless everybody who used google reader started using G+ the same way (which is not gonna happen).

Re: Google Reader is dead

#48

Post by petercooper »

It'll be less important now than it was 3-6 years ago, but get ready for all those FeedBurner subscriber count widgets to show huge subscriber # crashes as Reader no longer checks in.

Back in the day, they were a sort of informal auditing system and definitely helped me land advertisers for my blog (simply because I could "prove" I had 20,000 readers or whatever).

Thankfully I ditched the Web and moved to e-mail and know exactly how many subscribers I had, but this was certainly more luck and not any great piece of foresight on my part ;-)

Re: Google Reader is dead

#50

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

davidjohnstone wrote: post #42
steve19 wrote: post #8

Right up till the 11th hour I held out hope that Google would give Reader a last minute stay of execution. A sad day indeed.

As much as my life would have been easier this year without the decision to close Google Reader (I think this is what they call #firstworldproblems), it's a good thing that they didn't change their mind and decide to not shut it down at the last minute. Too many people have invested too much time in creating viable alternatives to Google Reader, and un-discontinuing it would have thrown a massive spanner in the works…

I was thinking about this last night and even had Google kept it going I'd have stayed with Feedbin. Kill it once and there's always the possibility they'll try and do it again.

Feedbin is a small outfit with a fraction of the resources that Google has but they care about RSS reading, something Google clearly don't whatever they say or do now.

I'll happily pay a couple of bucks a month to support someone with a commitment to a product I'm interested in.

Post reply on HN