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Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

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Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#311

Post by jhbadger »

DrBazza wrote: post #147
rhaway84773 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the reason they killed it for me. Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits. It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.

Even now, 10 yrs on, that makes no sense (their justification, not yours). How do you convince a bunch of blog authors to switch from 'free-to-air' and searchable everywhere RSS feeds, to move into closed social media platform? It seems like idiotic management making idiotic decisions completely out of touch with the userbase has been with us since the dawn of the web. Just this week, Spotify are turning the mobile a…

Speaking of blogs, I wonder if the death of Google Reader led to the death of blogs in general. It was about that time that people seemed to stop writing blogs and moved to Facebook/Twitter and their generally far shorter (and to me, less interesting) postings.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#313

Post by johannes1234321 »

scarface74 wrote: post #304
johannes1234321 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do I care if it’s a “niche” technology as far as other people subscribing if it is still supported by publishers? If it is a niche technology it will fall out from requirements docs and from CMS implementations. One can already see that many news sites only provide headlines, not even teasers in the feed and different site generator based blogs (using Hugo and such) forget to create feeds as well. My feed reade…

They don’t have the entire article because they can’t display ads. DaringFireball and a few other blogs get around this by having native ads as an RSS entry.

One could also embed an image on the text or do textual ads in the article. However market is too small, thus they do the simple thing which is limiting the value of the feed, till nobody cares about it anymore and they turn it off.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#314

Post by throwwwaway69 »

raizer88 wrote: post #156
izacus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Google (or any company) _pay_ for outsourced teams to maintain a declining unprofitable product? Would __your__ company ever do that?

Because if the product is not in red (pretty sure Google Reader was in green), closing it burn user trust. I know about opportunity costs, but I'm not sure Google is in a position where it bleeds money so bad that need to rationalize things. And having one more product helps you synergize strategies across the board.

>closing it burn user trust

99.9% of Google users are completely unaware of their reputation around closing down products. Closing Google reader a decade ago is a cause that nerds like us on HN care about, but virtually no one else. And the same nerds like us also care enough about our online presence to not use Google products for a hundred other reasons anyway

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#315

Post by kmarc »

rustyminnow wrote: post #281
codethief wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was it that made it so good? I had already degooglified my online life when it got released, so I never tried it out.

For me the killer feature was the way emails were (automatically) contextually organized. Instead of your inbox being chronological, it would create "bundles" of emails that were related based on sender, or subject line, or content. You'd have a bundle for each of: your JIRA emails, github emails, bank emails, cron messages, threads with your boss or coworkers, travel emails, receipts, etc. Bundles were created autom…

All these

And location based unpinning. I was traveling between two cities for work and there were certain stuff that I wanted to focus on one city, other stuff in the other (also private stuff at hometown).

Oh my I miss that feature.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#316

Post by maccard »

JohnFen wrote: post #297
aniforprez wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah sorry I didn't notice you weren't the same person While the subject line could be better, the subject is not the only indicator of the importance of the email. It is coming from "Google Payments" and as a customer of GCP, why wouldn't you treat every email that comes from Google with an equal amount of importance even if there are false positives? As I said, having a filter of email addresses routed to a specific…

> It is coming from "Google Payments" How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time. If the subject line reads like spam, I'm not looking at who sent it. I just delete it out of pure muscle memory. Again, not saying this is a good habit, but it is an understandable habit.

> How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time.

by that logic, you shouldn't trust any email unless it's signed and you've verified the sender. If the sender is your cloud provider, you read the email and decide from there whether or not it's worthwhile.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#317

Post by dbspin »

arthur_sav wrote: post #196
rhaway84773 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the reason they killed it for me. Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits. It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.

What stops anyone else from building another reader?

One reason, which I don't see mentioned a whole lot, is that far fewer places offer a real RSS feed (complete with the article / post in question) than once did. If they offer an RSS feed at all.

I looked at aggregation options for news recently, and discovered that walled gardens and the use of custom CMS's by news organisations have made RSS aggregation of say breaking news all but impossible.

Sure, you can still get blogs, reddit, hacker news etc. But the days of essentially every website having an RSS feed are gone.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#318

Post by josephd79 »

devn0ll wrote: post #44
jochem9 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself, I'm still heavily using RSS. I stumbled upon this thread via RSS.

+1 (something else that was killed by google but still everyone knows that means) I used freshrss, and got to this article via RSS as well. It's my only source of news. I'm usually the first to know about new stuff in my circle of friends because of my carefully curated RSS feeds.

What reader do you use?

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#319

Post by josephd79 »

devn0ll wrote: post #44
jochem9 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself, I'm still heavily using RSS. I stumbled upon this thread via RSS.

+1 (something else that was killed by google but still everyone knows that means) I used freshrss, and got to this article via RSS as well. It's my only source of news. I'm usually the first to know about new stuff in my circle of friends because of my carefully curated RSS feeds.

Nevermind, i see it. I apparently can’t read.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#320

Post by esperent »

dpe82 wrote: post #290
rhaway84773 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the reason they killed it for me. Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits. It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.

AFAICT Reader was a casualty of Vic Gundotra consolidating and growing his empire within Google as king of all things social. Only two good things came out of the Google+ era: consolidated login across all Google apps, and Photos.

> consolidated login across all Google apps

This makes great business sense for Google. Personally though, it's the reason I decided to de-Google. I was running some dev stuff from my personal account, - just messing around and too lazy to set up a separate dev account. Then I started to hear stories of people getting locked out of their google account because they did... Something. Something totally unknowable that triggered some flagging system and boom, everything is gone. So I started looking alternative services, one company per service. The last things I use Google for are Maps, Photos, Android backup. The only data I care about are my contacts and photos, and I keep a separate backup of both.

I was satisfied with this, but a few months ago I set up a new gmail account for a business. I hadn't set up the real business email yet so I used this email so sign up a bunch of other services that our business needed. Tripadvisor, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Google maps (registered with our actual verifiable business address), Google webmaster/SEO stuff with our actual real website. I spent a full day doing this. Then I was busy for a week on other stuff and when I went back to use this account it was permanently locked. No recourse, just a message saying the account violated something and was permanently locked - with a text box to write a complaint if I felt this way unfair.

Of course, I did write the complaint, as politely as possible, including my business details and personal email. But I never heard back and I assume no one actually reads those.

I permanently lost access to the TikTok account (no big deal except that I had got a good name. But I made the account under duress from my business partner anyway). I was able to gain access to the Facebook easily. Tripadvisor took me most of a day to regain access. Google maps still, several months later, has the wrong name for our business.

Moral of the story: if you're using Google as a primary service for anything without keeping backups elsewhere, maybe... Don't.

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