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Google Reader is dead

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Re: Google Reader is dead

#81

Post by chii »

Narretz wrote: post #73

I use The Old Reade, which I can use exactly like Google Reader, with the exception that k does not always skip to the next article; if you're reading an article it skips to the top of that. Same strange behavior as Google Reader is that while the number of unread posts is correct, the content of your feed is not up-to-date, so you first have to click on the result number, then it is updated. Apart from that, it's re…

google reader had this feature where you could subscribe to an rss feeds filtered by label (or folders). I wish the old reader had it (i tried inoreader, and old reader, and neither has this feature unfortunately).

Re: Google Reader is dead

#82

Post by greyman »

Narretz wrote: post #73

I use The Old Reade, which I can use exactly like Google Reader, with the exception that k does not always skip to the next article; if you're reading an article it skips to the top of that. Same strange behavior as Google Reader is that while the number of unread posts is correct, the content of your feed is not up-to-date, so you first have to click on the result number, then it is updated. Apart from that, it's re…

We'll see how it takes off when more users will come. It works fine feature-wise for me, it's just noticeably slower than Google Reader was... they probably don't have a large enough infrastructure yet.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#83

Post by ersii »

WildUtah wrote: post #22
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.

And they actually, truly pulled the plug, with almost no warning. Now I have no idea what I'll do.

I've gotten a warning/notice almost every day the last months, that Google Reader is about to shut down. That's not "with almost no warning".

You can still export your feeds from Google Takeout until the 15th of July.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#84

Post by Shooti »

piqufoh wrote: post #66
tempestn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they should have done is announced that they were killing it, then when the entirely predictable public outcry hit, 'listen to the community', and make it a paid service instead. From the numbers Feedly and Newsblur and such are picking up, it doesn't seem like a stretch that a paid version of Google Reader could have brought in at least $10M/year, even given the resulting loss of users. The only difficulty woul…

> make it a paid service instead Taking a pure business centric view - We're not google's customers, advertisers are. If we paid for the service we would expect no advertising - and so google's customers would lose.

Maybe, but Google have plenty of tactical products which only have an indirect at best business model. Reader shutdown seems more a case of management vision. Under Page's reorg there are now 5 consumer facing units:

1. Knowledge (Search, Maps, News, etc) 2. Social (Google+, Blogger etc) 3. Chrome, Android, Apps 4. Youtube 5. Ads and Commerce

Most natural fit would be 1) or 2), but evidently neither Knowledge or Social wanted to pick it up. That leaves 3) as the remaining possibility through a merger with Currents, but that units already spreading itself thin.

In the end I think they really wanted to recapture the server cycles since even at Google's scale caching every single feed and creating a searchable index for each user is expensive (for this reason none of the online replacements are able to offer search so far).

They probably saw Reader as taking too many resources for its relative impact, and we know from the former product teams comments that even while work on it was still active the upper management was was never really all that effused about it at the time. Page's views didn't change after he took over so it was really just a question of when not why.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#85

Post by droidist2 »

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…

Couldn't 99% of all complaints/concerns (especially on the internet) be classified as first world problems?

Re: Google Reader is dead

#86

Post by icebraining »

workbench wrote: post #65

Last time I ever trust that company with a service I rely on. and before you ask no I have never used GMail

Because they closed a service? I think you'll be hard pressed to find anyone - company, non-profit, whoever - who will maintain a service indefinitely.

If you want to keep something running for as long as possible, you need to eliminate single points of failure like those (except yourself, of course). That means building a stack where each part is either ran by you or a replaceable commodity.

For example, I run my email, RSS and website on a generic VPS (of which there are many providers) which runs an open source stack that I know how to configure and maintain.

I still rely on other people, but not on a single person or company.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#87

Post by oelmekki »

batiudrami wrote: post #71
bdz wrote: post #28

"... we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience." Yeah, Reader held back the development of the robot car, glasses, floating balloon internet and the brazilian social site...

I'm pretty sick of this argument. Google is a company, they are not compelled to continue to support a product which is (presumably) not making money, or even if the resources they devote to it could be making more money elsewhere. Honestly I think Google went above and beyond by giving advance notice, having an API which allows feed exporting and allowing subscriptions to continue to be exported after they close it…

Even if I agree with you that google handled reader shutdown pretty well once it's been decided, I'm not sure the "they're a company, they do what they please to make money" is better than the argument it's refuting.

You can't say "Please, let all of you use our products, it'll be awesome !", then say "we don't care if you're not satisfied, we do what we please". Having users also imply responsibilities.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#88

Post by epsylon »

batiudrami wrote: post #71
bdz wrote: post #28

"... we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience." Yeah, Reader held back the development of the robot car, glasses, floating balloon internet and the brazilian social site...

I'm pretty sick of this argument. Google is a company, they are not compelled to continue to support a product which is (presumably) not making money, or even if the resources they devote to it could be making more money elsewhere. Honestly I think Google went above and beyond by giving advance notice, having an API which allows feed exporting and allowing subscriptions to continue to be exported after they close it…

I'm pretty sure plenty of Reader power users would have been glad to pay for it, myself included.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#89

Post by porker »

martinkallstrom wrote: post #41
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.

Would you donate your data to the Internet Archive?

Re: Google Reader is dead

#90

Post by lake99 »

iliaznk wrote: post #58

RIP By the way, I quite like the Digg Reader but it doesn't display the unread count regardless of the settings. Is it only me?

Not just you. I don't see unread counts either, no matter how many times I toggle the odd-looking button in settings.
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