Google Reader shutting down • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#321

Post by pseut » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:26 AM UTC

conesus wrote: post #13

This has been a long time coming. Four years ago I began work on my own feed reader, NewsBlur, and it's now a full-fledged Google Reader competitor. It's also a paid app and has been paying for itself nearly since the beginning. http://www.newsblur.com I hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story sharing was l…

I have to say, an rss reader that depends on numpy and scipy is pretty intriguing.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#322

Post by BHSPitMonkey » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:27 AM UTC

rdl wrote: post #72

Ugh. I was living in fear of this happening for the past 3 years. I will never trust Google again. Apparently the only Google service I don't have a good alternative for is Google Books (for search; kindle, torrented bookwarez, and scribd works fine for the raw PDFs)

> I will never trust Google again.

What other free hosted service provider deserves your "trust" that it will never, ever go away, and which provides facilities for exporting all your data in a nice way (a feature which will likely be accessible long into the future)?

I'm just as irritated as you are, but given that they've provided notice and good backup/takeout options, I don't see a betrayal of trust anywhere.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#323

Post by endgame » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:27 AM UTC

I never used google reader, but I wrote my own tool to merge the feeds I care about into one megafeed: https://code.google.com/p/msrss/

That way, I don't have to depend on any web services.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#324

Post by pclark » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:27 AM UTC

conesus wrote: post #13

This has been a long time coming. Four years ago I began work on my own feed reader, NewsBlur, and it's now a full-fledged Google Reader competitor. It's also a paid app and has been paying for itself nearly since the beginning. http://www.newsblur.com I hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story sharing was l…

when i read about greader shutting down I instantly thought "good day for Samuel"

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#325

Post by knodi » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:27 AM UTC

WTF is this bullshit... I love Google Reader.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#326

Post by programminggeek » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:27 AM UTC

This is another reminder that if Google does a service for free, there is likely a business to be had in making a paid version, simply for the inevitable moment that they kill the free service. Think paid Google+, paid GMail, paid search engine maybe? You get the idea.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#327

Post by winkerVSbecks » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:28 AM UTC

The loss of Reader doesn't matter much to me a most others. It's the fact that Reader synced all my RSS feeds to whichever application that was/is the flavour of the month. It's that ability to have a repository of your feeds available in an instance. That's the product people need. Google should try to build that functionality into Gmail or something.

Also, fuck any RSS feed reading service that charges monthly. I'll pay for an app, but I'm not paying a monthly subscription fee to read freely available content.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#328

Post by Amarandei » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:29 AM UTC

Instead of wasting your time creating petitions to keep Google Reader open, I suggest you make a petition to make Google Reader open source. Google is going to close Reader either way so at least we'd haven a self hosted good alternative.

Every alternative I've seen so far in this hole topic(yes, all of them, I've tested all of them) is either poorly designed, bad UX, weird browser problems or trying too hard to be more then a RSS reader. Guess I'll just have to spend 2 days and build my own. Oh, well :)

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#329

Post by trevorhartman » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:29 AM UTC

If you haven't already used it, check out http://getprismatic.com/. It replaced Google Reader for me. (It also replaced HN for the most part).

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#330

Post by rdl » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 1:33 AM UTC

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #322

rdl wrote: post #72

Ugh. I was living in fear of this happening for the past 3 years. I will never trust Google again. Apparently the only Google service I don't have a good alternative for is Google Books (for search; kindle, torrented bookwarez, and scribd works fine for the raw PDFs)

> I will never trust Google again. What other free hosted service provider deserves your "trust" that it will never, ever go away, and which provides facilities for exporting all your data in a nice way (a feature which will likely be accessible long into the future)? I'm just as irritated as you are, but given that they've provided notice and good backup/takeout options, I don't see a betrayal of trust anywhere.

I didn't use Google Reader because it was free, I used it because it was 1) good and 2) the back-end to essentially every other RSS-based service I used. So they're not competing with "free", they're competing with everything.

I learned this lesson when I made the mistake of Google Voice (which was free for some aspects).