331–340 of 354 posts
Killing it was a foolhardy move on GOOG's part. In part, due to the loyal fanbase it had, but just to keep something running that doesn't cost as much, and gets you a lot of goodwill was a false move.
RestIn PC.
I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…
For real, go back to HN posts, just 5 years ago, a whole chunk of them are parked domains and 404s.
My 10 year old macbook, 5 year old iPhone, no support, no parts.
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.
It wasn't killed in favor of Google+. It was killed because nobody wanted to work on it and nobody wanted to fund it. Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do th…
It's always seemed strange to me how singularly obsessed Google culture seems to be with the idea of promotions. All the weird things Google does seem to come down to "that's what gets people promoted". But... why? It doesn't seem like Googlers are systematically underpaid, so why is promotion such a focus?
Maybe this is part of the reason my own stint at Google didn't work out so well.
I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn’t reader user, but it seems to me like when advertising self interest took over
Meh the ad business was pretty established well before 2013 when Reader shut down. RSS was declining well before that. Google acquired Doubleclick in 2008 aka what became the real Adwords in its prime. I personally don't expect tech conglomerates to be the ideal solution for niche markets. But I don't see many people providing good arguments why alternatives like Feedly didn't take off if there was really a strong ma…
I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…
As such its existence never mattered to me.
P.S. I still use RSS Feeds and have a reader as a Chrome extension.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Monetising by adding ads to a content, they fetched from other sites was a questionable back than. So, they couldn't just add ads to the reader easily. They were believing google plus would be popular. So, having a closed social network, where they could control everything and put ads without any complains makes sense. Besides, Reader was not that popular among the general public.
it doesn't matter that it wasn't that popular amongst the general public, they should have viewed it as having an enthusiastic user base and since sharing and commenting was part of reader, would be a way to encourage people to add content to google+. A social network is only as valuable as the content that gets placed on it. Killing reader shut off a mechanisms for sharing. I went from sharing articles I saw on RSS…
It was the social graph that made Google Reader great not the basic RSS functionality. That was really the game changer. It tapped into your friends feeds, what they liked and read. You could follow other peoples recommendations, and the user belonged to a network of other users. It also made finding widely shared news items stand out and interesting blogs to follow easier and strengthened the network by doing so. Al…