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Google Reader is dead

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Re: Google Reader is dead

#101

Post by yfefyf »

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…

Google isn't charging its users. But it couldn't make any money if it has no users.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#102

Post by sentenza »

chii wrote: post #78
mmahemoff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about a company with $50B revenues; $10M isn't even pocket change. Running a "service on the side" doesn't just cause "focus" problems for senior management. It creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which far outweigh the few million bucks of profit Google might make.

I think the real cause is they don't want to promote a different platform (i m thinkin g+) as the mainstream source of content stream, and supporting RSS as a protocol is only going to dilute that goal. Even if they were making a profit on reader, they would still kill it (unless it's fuck-you profit, which it certainly isn't). I don't agree with their goal, but since i m not a google customer, and i don't pay them m…

Hm. They managed to lose me as a G+ user by discontinuing Google Reader, since Reader was the centerpoint of all my sharing activity.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#103

Post by camus »

Long live to Google Reader! I hope, it will allow some startup to come up with great products, but please ,think users first , not showing off your html5 skills or whatever... RSS is about reading text content and suscribing to feeds , not bells and whistles or closed social networking plateforms.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#104

Post by Semaphor »

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…

> 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).

At the beginning I was as pissed as everyone else. Now? I love Newsblur more than I did Google Reader; I'm looking forward to checking out the new reader alternatives popping up and Fastmail is so much faster than GMail.

I still use some Google services but only when I find them to be by far the best solution.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#105

Post by ciniglio »

If you're looking for a new reader to try, check out www.readuction.com .

It's a different take on RSS, that intelligently gives you fewer articles to read. A friend and I built it over a few months, and we'd love any feedback you have.

You can import and export your feeds, so no need to worry about having data locked in.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#106

Post by Achshar »

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?

It was showing the count a few days ago. Most probably a bug. They'll fix it soon enough I guess.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#107

Post by radiac »

icebraining wrote: post #86
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 em…

I feel exactly the same way - wherever possible I run my own services on my own servers, so I know where my data's going, and I'm not at the mercy of someone else changing or removing a feature I like, or shutting it down completely. If I fall out with the hosting company, I can just get another server elsewhere.

I only switched to self hosted for RSS recently though - when google announced they were shutting reader, I figured I'd write my own for an existing django site. Quick shameless plug: I released it on Sunday, in case anyone's interested - https://github.com/radiac/django-yarr

Which brings me on to my main exception for self-hosting: public repositories on github. The collaborative features they provide seem worth the loss of control - although their recent UI enhancements (making it harder to check issue counts, find repo addresses etc) does rather prove my point.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#108

Post by MarkMc »

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 have the opposite view - when I use Reader the folks at Google know how often I click on certain topics, and how long I spend reading each topic. My gut tells me that such information would be quite useful to their search product, even if they have already know my search history. And for some users Google will not know their search history and social information.

A similar logic applies to Google Checkout (aka Google Wallet). I would have thought that knowing my purchase history would be very useful to the search algorithm.

So I really don't understand Google's approach. Their search algorithm is their prime asset, but they seem willing to degrade it bit by bit.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#109

Post by cbr »

johnchristopher wrote: post #100
batiudrami wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Understanding the position you are explaining doesn't make the shutdown of Google reader any less regrettable or irritating. It's my impression that it's a little bit cliché and borderline to trolling: every time a "free" product is shutdown and people complain or discuss about it there is a good free-market capitalist soul coming with condescending comments about how people shouldn't expect anything when given somet…

If people get pissed off even when companies "do everything right" then companies won't try as hard in the future. Getting other people to accept changes like this from companies helps change the incentive structure so that there will be fewer cases where a free service disappears with no notice or data export.
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