Google lost a lot of trust and goodwill from a lot of its power users with this move. I hope for them they had a good reason.
Why do they need the trust and goodwill of a lot of power users?
Google Reader is dead
181–190 of 215 posts
Re: Google Reader is dead
#182Google lost a lot of trust and goodwill from a lot of its power users with this move. I hope for them they had a good reason.
Why do they need the trust and goodwill of a lot of power users?
When people work in a the tech field, they assume a large percentage of people are power users, because they probably don't get out enough.
Every non-technical person I know has a Gmail account, they sure don't know what reader is.
Re: Google Reader is dead
#183Who actually paid money directly to Google for this service? If your answer is 'not me', then I find it tough to complain.
Re: Google Reader is dead
#184Google lost a lot of trust and goodwill from a lot of its power users with this move. I hope for them they had a good reason.
Why do they need the trust and goodwill of a lot of power users?
read Crossing The Chasm. You don't get the late adopters unless you get the early adopters first. Google may think they've got to a point where they can just cram stuff down people's throats, but if so, it's the beginning of the end for them, like it was for Microsoft.
Re: Google Reader is dead
#185Re: Google Reader is dead
#186Earlier 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…
You're attacking a straw man here. To attack Google for shutting down Reader in general is, I agree, silly. They don't owe us anything, and they managed the shutdown fairly gracefully. But that's not what was going on in the comment you replied to. He's pointing out that their stated justification doesn't make a lot of sense. Google says they're shutting down Reader to put more focus on a smaller number of products,…
Except what if Google wanted to kill RSS from the beginning? Feeds are the best way to bypass all "gatekeepers" and now they have questionable future because Google's "free" offering made competition pointless. The cache of feeds from 2004+ is also gone which is a whole other issue that leaves me very upset because that cannot be replaced with another web app.
Re: Google Reader is dead
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do they need the trust and goodwill of a lot of power users?
read Crossing The Chasm. You don't get the late adopters unless you get the early adopters first. Google may think they've got to a point where they can just cram stuff down people's throats, but if so, it's the beginning of the end for them, like it was for Microsoft.
I am curious on what basis you say that Microsoft thinking that it could cram stuff down people's throats was the beginning of the end.
It seems to me that Microsoft behaved that way for over a decade. It resulted in some pissed off geeks, and no real problems until the Europeans fined Microsoft enough to scare the company. (A fear they never recovered from.)
Re: Google Reader is dead
#188I wish there was a decent alternative out there. They all seem to be a bit unpolished. The most polished alternative I've seen is Feedly. I wrote to the founder about this many moons ago explaining that in trying to be 'innovative' with the UI, for me the whole user experience detracts so badly from the functionality I want from the app that I don't want to use it. Where is the alternative, with the polish, without t…
There are a few I have come to like:
These ones are all simple and much like google reader. Digg, BazQux and The Old reader all have pocket and/or similar services integrated and are all nice. I have decided that I will be using BazQux for my reader needs, it is fastest and seems to be nicely designed and is robust. It will also not be going away because it is currently profitable.
The Old Reader http://theoldreader.com/
Digg Reader(yes that digg) https://digg.com/reader
and BazQux reader https://bazqux.com/
Comma feed http://theoldreader.com/
Re: Google Reader is dead
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're attacking a straw man here. To attack Google for shutting down Reader in general is, I agree, silly. They don't owe us anything, and they managed the shutdown fairly gracefully. But that's not what was going on in the comment you replied to. He's pointing out that their stated justification doesn't make a lot of sense. Google says they're shutting down Reader to put more focus on a smaller number of products,…
Except what if Google wanted to kill RSS from the beginning? Feeds are the best way to bypass all "gatekeepers" and now they have questionable future because Google's "free" offering made competition pointless. The cache of feeds from 2004+ is also gone which is a whole other issue that leaves me very upset because that cannot be replaced with another web app.
> Feeds are the best way to bypass all "gatekeepers"
I'm not sure that's really true. PubSubHubbub -- which started out as a way to actively push updates to Atom/RSS feeds and has been generalized to be a way to do that for any HTTP resource -- seems to provide much of the same capacity, but to do so in a more general and better structured way (it requires the recipient to have the ability to receive as well as initiate HTTP requests, but it would be strange for someone complaining about Reader's demise to see that as a problem; any web-hosted feed reader is going to have to be able to serve HTTP requests anyway.)
Re: Google Reader is dead
#190Last 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…
> 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 a company isn't willing to ever close a service voluntarily, its going to have a much higher risk (because it can't adapt to market changes) of having to close all of its services involuntarily.
So, yeah, I'd agree with that.