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Stop Whining About Google Reader

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Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#21

Post by beering »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #17
akkartik wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the part you curated you can export and take with you.

You can't export the content of the feeds (EDIT: using Google Takeout, that is.) Oftentimes, GR is the only one that still has a copy of an older article. What use is it to know I've starred an article if I can't read it anymore? (To remedy this, I've been using Reeder to export all my starred items to both Instapaper and Evernote. But no thanks to Google.)

Closest thing you can do is grab the JSON of the data as the browser downloads it. The cached content that shows up on a feed's pane is transferred in bulk via JSON, so it should make a decent archive.

Just need a way to do it automatically...

Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#22

Post by Trufa »

DonCarlitos wrote: post #2

No!! First Wave, now this. It's a question of trust & honest transparency. Why should anyone trust Google ever again?

Nobody really depended on Wave yet, it was pulled off very early, so not a fair comparison.

> honest(y) transparency

I think they are being very transparent about it, gave the users plenty of time to migrate to another service, being very clear about their timelines.

> a question of trust

With that I agree with you, though, what is the option? Because if a giant as google is pulling a service out, who should you trust with it? smaller companies? While they might be more interested in keeping the service up, they are more susceptible to other thing that may cut the life of the product short.

What is the other option? Self hosting, that's a whole other discussion, it might be the solution, but it's far from perfect.

> Why should anyone trust Google ever again?

What can you trust 100%? Even google, facebook, twitter might go broke in some years, giants have fallen before, but one might argue that it's still the safe bet.

Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#23

Post by emin_gun_sirer »

TillE wrote: post #18
emin_gun_sirer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was indeed a Reader user, but by no means a power-user, so I could very well be unaware of some difficult-to-duplicate parts of Reader that are hidden under the covers. Can you let me know what I could be missing?

> historical feed data Google caches the entire history of an RSS feed from the moment it entered their database. This is in many cases unique, irreplaceable data that's going to have to be systematically extracted over the next few months, because I seriously doubt Google will release the entire data dump.

Thanks, I appreciate this.

In your estimate, what percentage of Reader users have, or will, donate to the Internet Archive to perform this archival task?

At what percentage level would it be wrong to call Reader users "entitled", given that the IA folks were hurting for disk space while these complainers chose to ignore its pleas?

Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#24

Post by maigret »

derefr wrote: post #5

I'm not concerned about finding another RSS reader, or about the impact on "RSS as a standard." Mostly, I'm concerned that blogs I enjoy which are "at the margin" of traffic profitability will be killed when at least some of their subscription base stop following them on Reader, and then never start following anywhere else. Ask any company who makes money from an email list what would happen if everyone suddenly beca…

In this case, the blog should be where the readers have migrated - G+, FB, Twitter, etc. If they were on the limit, it is probably because they couldn't capture an audience big enough anyway.

I'm concerned about the standard. Because having all information circulating through walled gardens is bad. My opinion is that the root cause is not that not enough people used GReader (you didn't wrote that, but others did), but rather that Google had no (good enough) revenue model with RSS.

If a sustainable and easy to use pay model finally emerges, then open standards would keep those different sources syndicated. Because syndication is not something people will give up soon, at the opposite.

Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#25

Post by Samuel_Michon »

emin_gun_sirer wrote: post #9
shared4you wrote: post #6

> they're attached to their Twitter feed but dontcha-know-it's-just-not-the-same thing as Google Reader I need to have a Twitter account to follow someone's feed. But I don't need to open account anywhere to subscribe to an RSS feed. The blog owner doesn't know who the subscribers to his RSS feed are. RSS anonymous and private. That is the difference. Twitter is like centralized VCS. RSS is like distributed VCS. Iron…

There is some confusion here between RSS and Reader. RSS isn't being canceled. Anyone can download any feed any time they like. You did need a Google account to use Reader, which made it not so anonymous and not so private. Once again, RSS != Google Reader. They are not even the same type.

I didn't use the Google Reader web client. I'm not even sad to see it go, I think the UI is really bad. Yet, I use the Google Reader service all day, through RSS clients on several platforms (none of which made by Google). I use the Google Reader service to store my subscriptions and allow for syncing of my read items, starred items, etc. That's what I'll need to find a replacement for: a RSS service that interfaces with all the RSS clients that I know and love.

Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#26

Post by maigret »

emin_gun_sirer wrote: post #9
shared4you wrote: post #6

> they're attached to their Twitter feed but dontcha-know-it's-just-not-the-same thing as Google Reader I need to have a Twitter account to follow someone's feed. But I don't need to open account anywhere to subscribe to an RSS feed. The blog owner doesn't know who the subscribers to his RSS feed are. RSS anonymous and private. That is the difference. Twitter is like centralized VCS. RSS is like distributed VCS. Iron…

There is some confusion here between RSS and Reader. RSS isn't being canceled. Anyone can download any feed any time they like. You did need a Google account to use Reader, which made it not so anonymous and not so private. Once again, RSS != Google Reader. They are not even the same type.

Yup, still this is a move against RSS from one of the biggest Internet company. Such a company sets trends and moves markets. So it matters.

Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#27

Post by andrewmunsell »

bonzoesc wrote: post #8

> A real hacker would not whine about missing code. Hackers see missing code as an opportunity to build. Hackers like to build. Fuck you and fuck your "no true Scotsman" bullshit. Who appointed you to be king of hackers?

Yeah, I have to kind of agree here... Just because someone is considered a "hacker" doesn't mean he or she can't use someone else's product instead of building their own. Not everyone has time to build their own RSS parser and reading interface.

It's kind of like taking away a mechanic's car--they'd still be annoyed you took it away. Just because someone can build something (and maybe not quite to the extent of an entire multi-billion company's skill and attention), doesn't mean they should waste time doing so. If you think you can do better, go for it, but in most cases it's better to use what's out there.

Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#28

Post by michaelwww »

Broad generalizations, harsh judgements about people with nothing to back them up, wise guy pretensions, a professor talking the cynical tough talk. I prefer Maddox but he didn't write about Google Reader. He does write about getting banned from Apple Stores.

Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#29

Post by notaddicted »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #17
akkartik wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the part you curated you can export and take with you.

You can't export the content of the feeds (EDIT: using Google Takeout, that is.) Oftentimes, GR is the only one that still has a copy of an older article. What use is it to know I've starred an article if I can't read it anymore? (To remedy this, I've been using Reeder to export all my starred items to both Instapaper and Evernote. But no thanks to Google.)

It can be done but it isn't pretty.

My first resort when someone deletes their blog or whatever thing that was meaningful to me that I foolishly failed to mirror, is to go to archive.org and see if they have a good mirror. If they don't but they do have enough that you can find out the RSS URL, you can get google reader's archive of the feed like so: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/17484/archive-exp...

What you get back is just raw XML.

EDIT: for example, here are the last 100 posts from Mark Pilgrim's blog: http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://diveintomark.o... ... in this particular case archive.org has a good copy though so this isn't necessary as a last resort.

Re: Stop Whining About Google Reader

#30

Post by emin_gun_sirer »

bonzoesc wrote: post #8

> A real hacker would not whine about missing code. Hackers see missing code as an opportunity to build. Hackers like to build. Fuck you and fuck your "no true Scotsman" bullshit. Who appointed you to be king of hackers?

>Fuck you

Feel free to disregard my opinion and express your disagreement in whatever terms best reflect you as a person.

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