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Google Reader shutting down

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Re: Google Reader shutting down

#341

Post by fractalsea »

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…

Out of curiosity: have you also seen a decline in users? I'm interested to know whether Google has seen a decline due to a general loss of interest in feed readers, or whether they are losing users to competitors, such as yours.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#342

Post by mcovey »

rdl wrote: post #291
Udo wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is one of those companies that make me feel like a wuss for being their customer. Okay, in this case one could (convincingly) argue that advertisers are the real customers of Google Reader, but I would have gladly just paid for the service. Apple is another such company for me, and I dumped considerable amounts of money into them, and they similarly just let me know with every single action that I'm not their…

You really should get off Gmail. At the very least, use a domain and google apps for your domain, to keep the option of fleeing later. Even for search, there are really only a few companies crawling now -- Google, Bing/MS, and Blekko. I'm going to try Bing for a month (I tried in the past, and it wasn't great, but was close) and Blekko for another month, but I'm pretty sure I don't care about any other Google service…

2 more for search, Yandex is growing fast and getting really good, and DuckDuckGo of course. I've been using Yandex a lot lately. Their products are getting more available in English, in fact they have webmail with a built-in RSS reader that resembles google reader.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#343

Post by pinchyfingers »

initself wrote: post #188
kmfrk wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just Fever ( http://www.feedafever.com/ ). You host it yourself, and it does the job perfectly.

PHP and MySQL, yuck!

We're here to make $$$, not to be trendy. There's plenty of good reasons to use PHP, especially if commercial viability is a primary goal.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#345

Post by nickbaum »

anigbrowl wrote: post #258
nickbaum wrote: post #186

Former Reader PM here, no longer at Google. Having fought many times to keep Reader alive, it's worth considering whether a large enough outcry would lead them to reconsider. White House Petition!

Within the limits of confidentiality and business ethics, can you explain what the issues are in a situation like this? I agree with other readers above that Reader is probably a poor source of ad clicks and thus direct revenue, but it seems like it would offer invaluable forward intelligence for Google (just as searches for 'influenza' and 'flu' have proved to be excellent leading epidemiological indicators). ISTM t…

As a stand-alone product, Google Reader could easily have justified continued investment and headcount.

The problem is that internally you're competing for resources against products with (a) tons of users (Gmail), (b) tons of revenue (AdWords), (c) high strategic priority (Android, Google+).

To justify staffing a smaller product, you have to argue that it has the potential to be as big as the other products, and that the marginal impact of an engineer is higher on an under-staffed product.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#346

Post by rdl »

mcovey wrote: post #342
rdl wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really should get off Gmail. At the very least, use a domain and google apps for your domain, to keep the option of fleeing later. Even for search, there are really only a few companies crawling now -- Google, Bing/MS, and Blekko. I'm going to try Bing for a month (I tried in the past, and it wasn't great, but was close) and Blekko for another month, but I'm pretty sure I don't care about any other Google service…

2 more for search, Yandex is growing fast and getting really good, and DuckDuckGo of course. I've been using Yandex a lot lately. Their products are getting more available in English, in fact they have webmail with a built-in RSS reader that resembles google reader.

DDG is essentially passthrough to Google/Bing/Blekko, though, so you're still somewhat exposed to the risk of those companies being crazy. Although I guess 3 is enough that DDG should be able to survive even if 1-2 go crazy or die.

It's perhaps somewhat nationalist, but Russian companies are slightly above Chinese companies on my list of "would I want my traffic going through their infrastructure", from a privacy/information security standpoint. I don't think this is irrational. (The US is far from ideal either, but has stronger laws, although is more likely to be "interested". The ideal would be a Canadian or European search provider run in some kind of hostproof model.)

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#347

Post by frou_dh »

antirez wrote: post #120

I wonder if it's just a Google Reader issue or RSS are fading out. I'm not a huge RSS user but I would be very concerned by RSS decline, it was one of the rare inter-operation standard that was very positive, easy, clean, and helped a lot programmers to put things together.

It's bugged me when I've seen people say that Twitter replaces RSS. In my eyes, RSS is for feeds where you actually care about each item and the decision whether or not to read it. Twitter is catered towards dipping in and out, with items constantly slipping through the net.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#348

Post by pan69 »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #281
pan69 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you supposed to use RSS with G+? Wouldn't that be a mess?

Sorry, I was unclear; I meant use G+ instead of RSS feeds.

But that wouldn't be up to me, that would be up the feed publishers to use G+ instead of RSS. :)

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#349

Post by camdykeman »

niggler wrote: post #128
recuter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is often asked of startup founders 'what if Google starts doing what you do?', a valid question. Perhaps it is worth contemplating products too small for Google to concern themselves with, ones they might abandon, that would still be an attractive opportunity for the rest of us. I've been rooting for you and recall enjoying the blog posts about its making - I've always figured that "RSS is dead" and there is no lo…

" now would be a great time to start building it." Now is too late. The right time to have started building it was 2-6 months ago. Now is the time to market an existing solution. Citing the great gretzky quote, the "puck" is already here.

Check out Frontpage, its an RSS reader that lets you browse all your feeds right from your lock screen. No inputting passwords or fumbling through multiple apps.

We've been working on it for the past few months.

http://www.frontpageapp.com

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#350

Post by taproot »

viraptor wrote: post #117
andyl wrote: post #10

Curse this decision - I use Google Reader every day. What is the best alternative RSS reader ??

Just imported my feeds into http://theoldreader.com and it seems to work ok. Just keep in mind that importing takes a while - I saw only the first entry for a minute or two, then others started joining in.

This is looking like the best straight up switch out for reader. Imports are currently limited, and adding a sub takes a while. I'm sure it will settle down in a couple of days.

Message when clicking "import": Hey! Because of the huge load we started seeing from lots of concurrent feed import operations, we had to limit the number of imports active at any given time. It looks like right now there are no available slots left, so you might want to visit this page some time later. Meanwhile, feel free to subscribe to feeds manually. Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience.

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