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Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

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Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#101

Post by tomjen3 »

baby wrote: post #59
streptomycin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have an RSS feed that doesn't include the full post, just a title and maybe the first sentence or two. A lot of sites do that (Salon.com comes to mind immediately).

But that's also not what I want. I want people to come check regularly (or not) if something is new. That's a way to create loyal visitors.

And cut 99% of your visitors?

I have a handful that I visit often, reddit (heavily changed which subreddits I follow), hn, facebook, a local news site and google.

Anyway your site is never going to make that list, but I am prepared to go visit it if it shows up in my feed - that is the reason I have a feed in the first place.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#102

Post by digikata »

onemorepassword wrote: post #7

I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.

I've actually been wondering if there's a pattern to these closures related to some scaling issue on the Google infrastructure. Google tends to build services tightly integrated with a common fabric. Scaling issues might cause the design of smaller services to take more than their share of resources.

Consider that Reader and other small services needing event and data synchronization, were often started by independent "20%" teams, earlier on in google's infrastructure build out. So maybe services at a higher priority are needing those resources. Or maybe they're looking at upgrading the "google fabric" in an incompatible way and if you have to redesign fundamental assumptions through the code of smaller services, you might stop and take a hard look at seeing if a large rewrite is worth it.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#103

Post by Wilya »

marknutter wrote: post #91
ldh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, RSS isn't ideally suited for "news" when you can just hit an aggregation site or two. But it's extremely useful for following particular content you're interested in regardless of popularity. If I come across a particularly insightful, well-written blog on some obscure programming topic I'd like to read more of what that person has to say without having to remember to check back at some point or cross my finger…

Most of the time the author has a Twitter account you can follow and they post not only links to their new articles but also random interesting thoughts you wouldn't necessarily get through RSS.

Twitter's single timeline format is very much not designed for following all updates from someone (which is what I'm interested in for a blog). There are ways around it (keeping your subscriptions count very low, list tricks, etc), but it's complicated compared to just using rss.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#104

Post by sentenza »

marknutter wrote: post #91
ldh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, RSS isn't ideally suited for "news" when you can just hit an aggregation site or two. But it's extremely useful for following particular content you're interested in regardless of popularity. If I come across a particularly insightful, well-written blog on some obscure programming topic I'd like to read more of what that person has to say without having to remember to check back at some point or cross my finger…

Most of the time the author has a Twitter account you can follow and they post not only links to their new articles but also random interesting thoughts you wouldn't necessarily get through RSS.

The twitterverse is a very small subset of reality, although it is very easy to believe otherwise, as it is used by "us" and "our multipliers". As far as my (of course limited) observations go, twitter is filling the social communication need of a certain part of the population and is rejected because of practical considerations by the rest.

If you wonder what the practical problems are, consider a person that has the (possibly job-related) constraint that they cannot look at their twitter client whenever they want. If that person now wants to stay informed about something without missing an update, they are essentially screwed with twitter and other information-stream based services. At this point I am very certain that what I just described is not an outlier but rather the reality for a large section of the general population.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#105

Post by sentenza »

baby wrote: post #92
mindcrime wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a great way to piss people off and have them go "fuck this guy and his shitty blog with no RSS feed" and mentally assign it to bin 13 and never come back. When I visit a blog or site with no RSS feed, I know my first thought is something like "What a bunch of amateurs, why would I waste my time with this?" Now, of course, people like me (and other HN readers) may not be your target audience, and your decisi…

I feel like you're over reacting. It's really not a game changer feature. I know I'll hurt the feeling of 1% of my visitors by not including it, the clever rest of the RSS users will first judge whether the content is worth it or not.

But whether or not it is a game changer depends on the value of your users time and mental real estate. When you tell the rss crowd that they should remember to regularly come to your site, what you are actually telling them is that you consider your output to be so valuable that other people should regularly reserve time and effort just to see it. You are basically saying that you consider yourself at least as interesting as sites such as reddit.

I'm of course not sure, but it might well be a really bad move to not offer a rss feed, although feed subscriber numbers are not that high. People using rss are people that consciously manage the way they interact with inforation and the internet. It is possible that these people are also more valuable as multipliers.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#106

Post by simoncion »

ok_craig wrote: post #52
Andrenid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually the final step for me. I've been an avid Google fan since the early days. I use all the Google services, I use Chrome religiously, I convince family/friends to switch to Chrome from IE, and I've always been convinced Google is the one we're supposed to look up to for how things should be done. Yeah they've made mistakes, and G+ is a clusterfuck of brilliant talent thrown down a horrible path of close…

I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox. There appears to be a really prevalent attitude here on HN that you can either really love or really hate a company. If you like it, you use all their stuff. When the switch in your mind flips and you know you must instantly start hating them, it means you must stop using every instance of their software, whether it's related or not to whate…

> I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox.

Did you know that the Google Chrome New Tab page will occasionally display an advertisement for an entirely unrelated Google product? The latest one that I saw was for the Pixel! (NB: I've never seen this happen in Chromium.)

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#107

Post by mcintyre1994 »

michaelwww wrote: post #77
onemorepassword wrote: post #7

I'm one tinfoil hat away from believing this isn't just about discontinuing unprofitable products, but a concerted effort to kill off support for open standards (RSS, CalDAV, what's next?) and turning the Google universe into a Facebook/Apple style walled garden called Google+. Evil plan or not, the days of Google as the champion of the open web are over.

I'm not understanding all the people saying this kills RSS. There are plenty of RSS readers out there.

Agreed. If an open standard was relying entirely on a company not to 'kill' it, it was already dead as an open standard.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#108

Post by hosay123 »

lucian1900 wrote: post #31
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship sailed a long time ago. I see it as when they gave up on Friend Connect / OpenSocial as when they sort of gave up on the idea of open-first, and instead started focusing it competing feature-for-feature. Mozilla is the champion of the open web these days. Google started their proprietary NaCl and Dart projects because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is. And now Mozilla…

NaCl (in particular PNaCl) is merely a different approach. I would call asm.js crazy, but that's just me. Something similar could be said about Dart, but there the language itself is not so interesting (merely not insane). The VM is potentially the language-independent bytecode and stdlib in a browser we've all been waiting for. While Google have been behavin evil-ly lately, in particular related to Google+, NaCl and…

Nacl is not merely a different approach, it's a wholly backwards incompatible approach based on techniques that tried and failed in the 80s (try searching for ANDF).

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#109

Post by mcintyre1994 »

nsns wrote: post #76

It seems that every decision that betters Google+ hurts the Google brand. If Google+ is the new Google, then Google is now Google-, obviously. The fact that they are (allegedly) surprised at the amount of people using Reader is a tastement to how insignificant it is to their business.

They're not at all surprised, can I ask where they said that? I'd love to see how a company that makes billions by knowing as much as possible about their user base words the idea they're surprised by a quantity of users on a product of theirs.

Re: Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

#110

Post by ldh »

marknutter wrote: post #91
ldh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, RSS isn't ideally suited for "news" when you can just hit an aggregation site or two. But it's extremely useful for following particular content you're interested in regardless of popularity. If I come across a particularly insightful, well-written blog on some obscure programming topic I'd like to read more of what that person has to say without having to remember to check back at some point or cross my finger…

Most of the time the author has a Twitter account you can follow and they post not only links to their new articles but also random interesting thoughts you wouldn't necessarily get through RSS.

That just plain isn't true. Even if it were, Twitter is singularly unsuited to that kind of information consumption.

I don't need everyone to find RSS as useful as I do and I'm fine with the fact that others have different usage patterns and preferences. But I wish everyone saying "meh, what's the big deal" would realize that others find RSS to be the best fit for them and are well-justified in worrying about its decline.

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