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RIP Google Reader

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#391

Post by pauljonas »

I miss Google Reader.

Migrated to Feedly & Feedly has been OK but recently, soured on Feedly as they capped the number of feeds. And I've written my own RSS readers, pre-Google-Reader & now in 2021 (though it a work in progress & starting to buckle with a 300MB sqlite DB file on a shared host ;)). Those limits might not rankle many subscribers but I don't view RSS as a "I must consume every item" but as a stream to wade in, and a filtered repository to query.

The technology of a RSS reader is banal & simple in the basics. But here is where the value is for me -- the history of all the stuff that scrolls off from the most recent 10, 25, 50 posts that are available on a RSS feed. Having a large collection of subscribed feeds is like having a filtered search window into only those web sources that you assign great relevance. Even in 2021, a even more pronounced chasm to Google (or DDG or $yourFavoriteSearchEngine) searches, given all the botification / content farm hijacking / general cruft / copied content / etc. -- to search in your own set of collected RSS feeds, that go back years, even if disappear off a site's current feed XML. Or even if the site goes poof, or worse, is reappropriated by a domain harvester to siphon ad generated revenue on boiler plate content.

Google Reader, if it was championed by Google, could have served this role masterfully. (There still is, oddly, in existence Google Custom Search Engine where you can specify a collection of URLs but it doesn't to seem to work as well as searching RSS history, in my experience at least).

Re: RIP Google Reader

#392

Post by arantius »

conesus wrote: post #109
ecliptik wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for Newsblur, it's one of my essential apps and I use it for almost everything; RSS feeds, reddit, youtube, twitter, newsletters, even gemini:// via proxy. It's a solid product, and the amount of work you've put into it shows and I plan to remain a customer for years to come.

Then you'll be excited to see the upcoming redesign that I have yet to publicly launch (but want a few users on to test the waters early): https://beta.newsblur.com

Everything (in the UI) just seems smaller and harder to read? With slightly more space between everything?

Re: RIP Google Reader

#393

Post by pax »

enobrev wrote: post #280
vanderZwan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Google Reader was the social network for people who don't like talking about themselves but about things on the web that they find interesting, and nothing since has ever come close to it.

The social aspect is the part I missed most. It was a good rss reader, to be sure, but plenty others exist. But the surrounding conversation was strictly with people who I followed. I may be misremembering it a bit, but I recall that most of the comments I saw under any article were by people I knew, which was ideal. I like reddit and this site enough to visit almost daily, and it's important to get opinions from str…

This. The gReader feed was manually curated & annotated by sources we trusted and their friends. Less ramblings, no pushy algorithm suggestions. The UI was snappy but it was essentially about the community.

After Google Reader got plugged off, I haven't stuck with any of the alternatives, as the community wasn't there.

Wishfully thinking, if enough VIPs would turn to a similarly structured platform, we could have our feed back.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#394

Post by conesus »

prepend wrote: post #128
sofixa wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off. The costs of storage and bandwidth of something as popular as Google Reader probably weren't negligible.

They probably were negligible. Billions of links, maybe some content cache that they already had since Google indexes and caches most of the web. Bandwidth was born by the user and content server. Checking RSS feeds is mostly a bunch of 304s. The newsblur dev is in this thread and he runs a good reader and could probably say what the storage and bandwidth was.

Storage and bandwidth are pretty negligible. I'm under Digital Ocean's quota for bandwidth and NewsBlur is pretty aggressive in keeping feeds up to date. I don't keep an archive of every story ever published, but most feeds don't publish all that much and I could probably invest in storing everything with a cheaper archival DB.

Although the 80/20 rule is in effect, and when I query the DB I find that 80% of feeds have only a single active subscriber and 20% of feeds have 2+ active subscribers (activity in the past 30 days). But that's still quite a bit one-to-many fetching savings. And the majority of fetches are 304s.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#395

Post by conesus »

pfd1986 wrote: post #298
conesus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you'll be excited to see the upcoming redesign that I have yet to publicly launch (but want a few users on to test the waters early): https://beta.newsblur.com

Is there (plan for) a "read it later" feature? Sometimes I find a good link that I just want to be able to find and read at a later time. Thanks!

The saved story feature does a great job of that, since it also allows you to filter saved stories by feed and by tag, so saved stories are easy to find again.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#396

Post by Digit-Al »

vmladenov wrote: post #119
basch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular retrospective opinion, but given how stagnant Reader was before its death, the boon of Reader Replacements to arrive on the scene after its demise was worth its disappearance. The race to be the replacement made a metric ton of competing products better.

Do you have a favorite? I have a Feedly account but I don’t use the site much, and the Reeder app added local subscriptions recently.

I tried a couple and ended up settling on Feedly.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#397

Post by hattar »

ip34162 wrote: post #232
btouellette wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you could follow friends who could republish from their feeds onto a feed you could subscribe to and eventually it supported comments on those items which would allow discussion within their community. Discoverability and community which hasn't been replicated with the scattered userbase after it was killed.

Wow that sounds awesome.

It was

Re: RIP Google Reader

#398

Post by efreak »

mxfh wrote: post #308
blakesterz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you had to be there? "it's just like Google Reader" means it's NOT as good, but close enough. GR was solid and we LOVED it, especially the search. I think RSS readers are one of those things that some of us LOVE and we're still bitter that Google took it away. Maybe it was the first big thing Google cancelled? I know for me it was, and I've not trusted anything new from Google since. Maybe that's it... before…

I miss search the most, no other replacement came even close. Like a searchable corpus of your curated library of stuff you're interested in.

Why does nobody else benton the feature that local rss readers can't duplicate: the full history of the entire feed starting the first time it was indexed. Start up Google reader and for most feeds you've got the full history from day one.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#399

Post by henhouse »

skinkestek wrote: post #382
kybernetikos wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used it for architectural discussions and exploring ideas. I'd be hard pressed to think of something that was better for that.

For some reason I never saw it working. Does anyone have a link to a video of it actually being in use?

https://youtu.be/eKUAqNGVwX0

Re: RIP Google Reader

#400

Post by subsaharancoder »

KMag wrote: post #368
WorldMaker wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google got a lot of early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of proprietary sec…

Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known. Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm…

Does "Ascorer, Amit's Scorer" have anything to do with Amit Singhal, he who led Google Search for many years?
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