Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Reader shutting down

googleblog.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 726 posts

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#441

Post by hadem »

wpietri wrote: post #416
throwaway420 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the software any less useful because it's not created in a trendy language? One of the advantages that PHP has is that virtually any cheap web-host in the world can run it. It's not a bad choice to sell a self-hosted product in PHP because of this advantage. I'm not a huge fan of PHP for many types of projects, but I don't see how it benefits anybody to reflexively hate on something just because of a technology ch…

PHP was such a security nightmare for so long that I am very reluctant to enable it on any box I actually care about. (It could well be better. It's been a long time since I was sysadmining many boxes.) So for a project I have to do the hosting on, language choice still matters to me.

And you're a huge fan of Ruby on Rails right...?

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#442

Post by tmzt »

The really interesting product/service would be a datastore and RSS consumer like GR API is.

I think a lot of competitors spend time working on the UI and miss the power that is behind it.

(I would include Google in this list, even if they didn't have the front end UI the Atom API would still be a useful thing.)

I wonder if building something on elasticsearch would work.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#443

Post by bconway »

ak217 wrote: post #289
onan_barbarian wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on most points. And to be honest, if you're a real customer of Google (we use them for our business) you are treated worse than the "free service" (where you aren't the customer, you're the product). Our work accounts have a fraction of the functionality of our free accounts and the idea that this is somehow doing us a favor ("we only give you the very most stable of our services") is rather unconvincing.

What apps is this the case for? Our Google work stuff is identical to personal Google stuff as far as I can see.

Gmail for Apps still can't auto-add people to your chat list, even though the option is there.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#444

Post by MrTw3Tea »

Udo wrote: post #270
onan_barbarian wrote: post #40

Pretty irritated at the way Google takes moderately successful services that can't possibly cost them all that much to keep running and puts them down the memory hole, to foster the happy illusion that everything that everything that Google does turns to gold. I'm sure there's more engagement with Reader than Plus, with its millions of users who don't really use it (many of whom aren't even really aware that they are…

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…

> it starts with people like me who got to ask themselves honestly "why do I keep relying on these guys?".

Boy, you really summed up my own personal feelings on this. I'm beginning to rethink my own Gmail usage now.

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#446

Post by sigil »

klausa wrote: post #2

That's the first Google service shutdown that I'm affected by. Sad to see it go. What do you guys recommend for replacement? I know about NewsBlur [1], but I never liked it that much. I think I'm just looking for something that would emulate Reader's full-screen view as close as possible. [1] http://newsblur.com edit: Here's what I consider an absolute must-have in RSS app: - complete navigation with keyboard (j/k pr…

Based on your must-have list, a good low-tech solution might be an RSS to email gateway.

Then your mail client becomes your RSS client. Gmail has j/k key bindings, is relatively unadorned, and facilitates your skim / skip workflow. Excerpts might require some work, but perhaps you could coerce them into the subject line.

Aaron Swartz wrote a nice RSS to email gateway btw: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/

I have a crappier one that delivers directly into a Maildir, and I use it to read news in mutt: http://search.cpan.org/~acg/rssdrop-0.2/rssdrop

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#447

Post by kristopolous »

hadem wrote: post #441
wpietri wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP was such a security nightmare for so long that I am very reluctant to enable it on any box I actually care about. (It could well be better. It's been a long time since I was sysadmining many boxes.) So for a project I have to do the hosting on, language choice still matters to me.

And you're a huge fan of Ruby on Rails right...?

And he's also part of the Long Now Foundation and did volunteer coding for MediaWiki (Don't know the guy, just googled around).

No need to be mean to a nice guy. :-\

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#448

Post by peapicker »

tracker1 wrote: post #382
k3n wrote: post #298

I'll bet you anything the catalyst behind this is in some way related to G+, the introduction of which has led to a steady removal of features from Reader. This news is really rubbing me the wrong way; I've been a long-time Google customer, even a 'Google hipster' as my friends would say. I'm an early-adopter that often beta tests. I was the only one at work with GMail when it was released, and was always out of invi…

Without iGoogle, and Google Reader.. honestly, I don't have much use for Google over say DuckDuckGo. I signed into the Android/Google echosystem.. mainly for iGoogle, and Reader.. with both going away, I'm pretty close to out.

Until you brought it up, I didn't realize that those are really the only two products of theirs I use outside of search as well...

sigh

Re: Google Reader shutting down

#449

Post by fakeer »

There were apps and services. They starting shutting down. Never actually mattered. Not to me at least. Until a few were killed, like Google Reader, and I started understanding the frustration and sometimes disappointment shown by some of the users and fans. I feel the same now. This is one of the few services other than Gmail that I use(used) from Google's shop. Will have to settle for a good alternative now.

I guess I would rather to go a paid solution. It's for the same reason that I am thinking of this move that I went to Pinboard from Delicious for - advertisements were not my worry, it was the chance being shut down.

Was Google Reader bringing any revenue to Google? I mean I never saw any ads in there, so I doubt it but some of you might be knowing better.

Not sure they have killed for just being out there not bringing any money home or they will be focussing on Google Currents now?

But stuff like this http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.ht... is more sad than the news itself :(

Post reply on HN