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Google Reader is dead

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Re: Google Reader is dead

#191

Post by csense »

smackfu wrote: post #98
csense wrote: post #51

I have no gmail account, no Youtube account, and no Google Reader...Google's always been a little too big for me to want to trust more than I have to, so I've gotten by without accounts on their services... And that means I get to feel smugly superior to everyone else in this discussion.

The RSS area was pretty damns sparse outside of Reader. Were you just not using one?

For a while I was manually checking websites. I used RSSowl for a time, then Thunderbird.

RSS is a simple, open protocol (heck, they burn two out of three letters in their acronym to say it's "really simple") and there are plenty of alternatives. If they're really unsatisfactory it wouldn't be too hard to roll your own.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#192

Post by muzz »

maximilianburke wrote: post #162
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...

Yet another unfortunate reminder that if you're not paying, you're not the customer.

I wanted to pay. There was never a way to do so.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#193

Post by frio »

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...

While Orkut's fair game, the rest is Google X, which I'd consider a reasonably different ball-game.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#194

Post by tempestn »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #142
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…

I think a lot of people would have refused to pay out of principle; it's basically a hostage negotiation. "Give us $10, and you can keep Google Reader."

That's why you need to get the users to ask you to charge for it. Say, "Sorry, we have to shut down Google Reader because it's drawing needed resources from our other projects," or whatever. Then when people say, "NO! Please, just charge for it! I'd be happy to pay $20 per year for Reader!" you benevolently listen to the community and agree to transition to a paid service instead of shutting it down.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#195

Post by DennisP »

fooqux wrote: post #130
mikeash wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Of course I can accuse them of being scattered when they shut down Reader, if they still have a ton of other projects without any particular coherent goal, which is absolutely the case. They want to shut it down, fine, I don't really care. But the result is not "focus".

Regardless of how many products they have, they still have one less after shutting down Reader. I'd say the argument still stands.

Only if your measurement is the number of products. If you were to represent each product as a point in a multidimensional space of features, and measure according to how well they were clustered, then the existence of Reader would improve the clustering of Google's products, helping to counter the existence of products like self-driving cars.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#196

Post by gizmo686 »

ddunkin wrote: post #182
debt wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is, how many of those people would have become Gmail users if not for Gmail's early success with the technical people. I do not know the answer to that (or even if it is an accurate premise), but one theory would be that in order to get non-technical users, you must first get the technical users, who will give your product good word of mouth and help it spread.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#197

Post by voltagex_ »

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'd love to use NewsBlur, except when I signed up my screen is filled with French feeds, with no way to get rid of them and no indication of why.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#198

Post by RockyMcNuts »

btilly wrote: post #187
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I don't know that there's any one authoritative answer, but they fended off the initial Internet threat by cramming IE down everyone's throat. They did that in a number of cases, were fast followers and put people out of business by integrating/bundling. I think the attitude was they could do it again if they had to, thought they could do the same in phones and tablets, didn't listen to their customers, didn't update IE and XP for years.

Partly Microsoft got lazy and didn't execute the products customers wanted, maybe the senior people were wrong generation to realize they had the wrong products and Google and Apple were leapfrogging them, maybe all the legacy cruft in their ecosystem slowed them down, maybe the world changed so they didn't have the same market power. I don't know that fines ever really scared them into changing behavior. They flushed more money down the drain in online services than anyone ever threatened to fine them.

Even more than most, Google's business depends on trust. Once people feel they're going to get screwed over after investing time and trusting Google with their information and data exhaust, they'll go to DuckDuckGo, Apple, Facebook (ha), whatever. Google has nothing like the moat Microsoft had. On the Internet, the switch to the competition is a click away.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#199

Post by jarek »

dredmorbius wrote: post #155
jvdh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, keeping a webservice running takes time. Especially one that's being hit millions of times a day.

The way Google runs its services, much of the infrastructure is an existing back-end (yay, map reduce, also an inherent front-side CDN). There's some application-specific hosting, but it's a relatively thin layer. So the hosting costs aren't all that huge. My read: the stated rationale for killing Google Reader, especially in light of the huge cry of protest and impacts on blog traffic (Rob Malda posted web traffic r…

> My read: the stated rationale for killing Google Reader, especially in light of the huge cry of protest and impacts on blog traffic (Rob Malda posted web traffic results showing huge declines at WordPress and other blog sites at WashPo) suggests to me something else at work.

Usual theory about driving "updates" traffic away from decentralized RSS and into proprietary arms of Google+. Twitter removed RSS feed access to an account's updates for the same reason.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#200

Post by rz2k »

laureny wrote: post #126
mikeash wrote: post #124

Earlier 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,…

> 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, but they're just as scattered as ever You can't criticize Google for shutting down Reader and then accuse them of being scattered in the same sentence. By shutting down Reader, they are limiting their scattering, and Reader is not the only product…

Would Google be more, or less, scattered if it shut down search and Gmail?

Anyway, I thought this was some discussion about how Google may or may not be making a decision that will later in hindsight turn out to been bad for Google, followed by a tangent about whether anyone is allowed to make qualitative statements about any decision made by Google.

The tangent seemed sufficiently uninteresting before it descended further into an argument of semantics.

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