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Google Reader is dead

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Re: Google Reader is dead

#201

Post by syzo »

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.

Do you use Youtube to watch videos? Google to search?

Also, what do you do for email, roll your own? Got any tutorials if so (I sorta want to start dropping Google myself - search and Youtube will be tough though)? Anything I found was a bit too complicated or I just didn't want to spend that much time on it.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#202

Post by chronic25 »

mikeash wrote: post #145
fooqux wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is fallacious. You're assuming they weren't going to start those other products anyway.

Google said "fewer products". Doesn't matter whether or not they were going to start those products anyway, what they're saying is incorrect.

Posing to make this comment deeper

Re: Google Reader is dead

#203

Post by ytjohn »

gizmo686 wrote: post #196
ddunkin wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would generally agree with you, but there are several popular services that I learned of from non-technical people. Things like tumbler, pinterest, snapchat come to mind. Lots of artsy social stuff out there that I have never used, but are used by non-technical people.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#205

Post by LoganCale »

sentenza wrote: post #102
chii wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And they've lost me for everything but Gmail (so far) as a result of the Reader shutdown (and other things).

Re: Google Reader is dead

#206

Post by snogglethorpe »

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?

I don't see any unread counts either, despite turning them on in settings (the FAQ mentions that there's such a setting, although it implies it's turned on by default, whereas it was turned off for me...).

In fact, I also don't get any icons—or text, they're just blank space—for buttons... to even open the settings dialog I had to click randomly in likely-looking blank spaces on the main page. >I get the feeling they really rushed this out, and maybe didn't do a whole lot of testing...

Re: Google Reader is dead

#207

Post by porker »

Aloisius wrote: post #161
porker wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you donate your data to the Internet Archive?

Or Common Crawl so other people could actually download and use it?

I didn't realise you couldn't download and use the data from Internet Archive. If not, that's pretty silly to back up the feeds to them, and I'm a bit annoyed to have contributed. I'd like to make them available to everyone to download, analyse, plug into their reader etc etc etc...

Re: Google Reader is dead

#208

Post by espes »

porker wrote: post #207
Aloisius wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Common Crawl so other people could actually download and use it?

I didn't realise you couldn't download and use the data from Internet Archive. If not, that's pretty silly to back up the feeds to them, and I'm a bit annoyed to have contributed. I'd like to make them available to everyone to download, analyse, plug into their reader etc etc etc...

http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Aarchiveteam...

Re: Google Reader is dead

#209

Post by coldtea »

kragen wrote: post #166
coldtea wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 they are shutting down. No, you very much can. Since, you know, they are shutting down a product in their main area of expertise, only to pursue BS non-products all around the map.

It seems that you and the Googlers have different ideas of what Google's main area of expertise is. It seems like you think it's "the web" — thus search, RSS, and I don't know what else you'd include — and they think it's "hacking", i.e. making things that were not previously known to be possible, e.g. a web search engine that automatically finds the useful sites, an email system with a hundred times as much storage…

>It seems that you and the Googlers have different ideas of what Google's main area of expertise is.

The "Googlers"? Marketing and business persons did this. If you have followed the story, there were posts describing how actual developer googlers used and loved Reader, and even tried to save it.

>It seems like you think it's "the web" — thus search, RSS, and I don't know what else you'd include — and they think it's "hacking", i.e. making things that were not previously known to be possible, e.g. a web search engine that automatically finds the useful sites, an email system with a hundred times as much storage as any other webmail system, a draggable and zoomable world map in a browser, gigabit fiber to the home, robot cars, a free-software smartphone, groupware that replaces chat and email, JavaScript that runs fast, balloon internet, scanning the books of the libraries of the world, an easy-to-use system for writing fault-tolerant massively-parallel programs, mass-market lifelogging, stuff like that

Seems like you bought hook line and sinker the BS PR copy they give.

For one, their core business is ads. Not search itself, not Android (a loss leader) and surely not flying robot cars.

Second, nothing "hackish" or "impossible" about most of which you describe.

Only the "web search engine that automatically finds the useful sites" fits the profile --and that's based on that Stanford research the founders did, not Google work. If anything, it deteriorated over time, with BS non results and meddling with it to promote ads and/or G+.

And even that was hardly impossible. The Chinese search engine Baidu is based on similar tech, which was also created in the US, independently of Google, around the same time (even actually predating PageRank (it's even mentioned in Google's US patents).

An "an email system with a hundred times as much storage as any other webmail system" was just a matter of resources and monetizing, not some special technology.

A "a draggable and zoomable world map in a browser" was bought from another company.

"gigabit fiber to the home" is offered in many parts of the world. That the US lacks in this area, is not something

"a free-software smartphone" -- what's innovative about it? They make money from ads. They give the software for free (especially since it was based on Linux and a modified Java SDK). And it's not like they made a killing off of it -- Samsung did.

"JavaScript that runs fast" -- Safari did that first (they released it to the public at the same time --Sep 2008--, but Safari as a stable version, Google as a beta of Chrome).

"an easy-to-use system for writing fault-tolerant massively-parallel programs" What's that? Go? Because you make it sound like the created Erlang.

Etc. The rest are "robot cars" and "google glass" -- mainly half-baked prototypes, that tons of other companies would have put out if they a) have the money, b) liked to show half-baked stuff years ahead of any release date.

And "baloon internet". A PR stunt if I ever saw one.

Re: Google Reader is dead

#210

Post by kragen »

coldtea wrote: post #209
kragen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you and the Googlers have different ideas of what Google's main area of expertise is. It seems like you think it's "the web" — thus search, RSS, and I don't know what else you'd include — and they think it's "hacking", i.e. making things that were not previously known to be possible, e.g. a web search engine that automatically finds the useful sites, an email system with a hundred times as much storage…

> It seems that you and the Googlers have different ideas of what Google's main area of expertise is. The "Googlers"? Marketing and business persons did this. If you have followed the story, there were posts describing how actual developer googlers used and loved Reader, and even tried to save it. > It seems like you think it's "the web" — thus search, RSS, and I don't know what else you'd include — and they think it…

Your disrespectful and patronizing tone is disappointing, but it would be more understandable if it were founded in a deep understanding. Many things whose possibility is now obvious were not obvious at the time; many things that are now being tried will fail.

To pick apart your post:

* "main area of expertise" is not the same thing as "main source of income".

* RankDex or for that matter HITS, is not the same thing as a search engine that you would actually use in preference to AltaVista; 1998 Google was already better than AV for the things that were in its index. Baidu didn't exist as a company until 2000.

* "just a matter of resources and monetizing" is hindsight bias. Hotmail was so sure Gmail was an April Fool's joke that they issued a response press release in which they offered more space than Gmail. The fact that Gmail was capable of offering two orders of magnitude more machine resources was, in large part, a result of internal infrastructural innovations at Google that weren't copied at other companies for many years. Of course, some people dismissed it as a "PR stunt".

* Where2 had a downloadable C++ desktop maps application and an idea about doing it browser-side when Google bought them. Gmail and Google Maps popularized AJAX, which had been previously considered impractical, despite our efforts at KnowNow.

* By "many parts of the world" do you mean a few apartment blocks in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Tokyo? I don't really think Kansas City is comparable in either density or wealth.

* I don't care what's innovative about Android (which, you forgot to mention, started as a separate company, like Where2). I care that I don't have to sign my first-born child away to Apple to program my smartphone. I'd care a lot more if Google had actually achieved what they set out to achieve with Android.

* If you're equating SquirrelFish (pre-Extreme) to the first release of V8, you're living in a fantasy world. There was an order of magnitude difference. Apple and Mozilla closed the gap substantially in the next few months because (a) V8 showed it was possible; (b) V8 showed how it was possible; and (c) V8 made it necessary.

* I meant MapReduce, which is another of those things that's obvious in hindsight, but was actually far from obvious, and which underpins nearly every data-heavy startup today.

* "Would have put out if" is Monday-morning quarterbacking, just like your hindsight bias on the other items. And there are plenty of companies with more money than Google that don't have robot cars on the road.

We'll see what happens with the robot cars and balloon internet. I think there's a substantial chance they'll fall far short of hopes, just like Wave (which I notice you didn't mention), but that's the way it is when you try things that may not be possible.

I'm not actually all that positive about Google, but I think that if you want to understand them, you need to understand what they value. You can do that without thinking, yourself, that it's awesome.

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