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O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

theawl.com

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Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#51

Post by TorKlingberg »

interfixus wrote: post #11

There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]

RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother. And not just the proverbial grandma, most techies don't use RSS either. Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button.

RSS certainly solves a real problem, so I think there is an opportunity for reinventing RSS with better UX. Don't ask me how though.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#52

Post by [deleted] »

James_Owens_7 wrote: post #14
interfixus wrote: post #11

There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]

I usually don't visit websites that don't have RSS and tell that to the website owners. You should do the same. How else will they know that people care about feeds?

[deleted]

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#53

Post by dsr_ »

adrianN wrote: post #49
dsr_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you google "twitter rss" you will discover four sites that will do that for you as a free service and a node program that will do the conversion for you as well... on the first page of results, anyway. I switched from Reader to TT-RSS. Now there's no fear that anyone will start analyzing my subscription list, send me personalized ads or suddenly stop serving me.

I think there is a qualitative difference between a company officially supporting an open standard, vs the availability of third party tools that translate from whatever the company chooses to produce to the open standard.

Would it be better if Twitter produced RSS feeds? Yes.

In the meantime, don't let the best be the enemy of the good.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#54

Post by genmon »

thomasahle wrote: post #44
WA wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You meant: More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with their stupid 'sign up via email to receive updates' nonsense.

Sounds like you should be able to make an adaptor for these? That would be a nice service. You get an email address, which you use to sign up to news, and the service converts the most promising links in the emails into rss.

Feedbin does this! (Though not with as much cleverness as your suggestion.)

https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...

"You can now receive email newsletters in Feedbin."

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#55

Post by wccrawford »

janvdberg wrote: post #3

I've been using http://theoldreader.com ever since. As the name implies, it does a pretty good job of mimicking Google Reader.

Since this seems to be the thread for alternatives...

Someone at the time of Reader's demise recommended Selfoss, and I've been running it ever since. It's not quite as good, but it does what I wanted from Reader.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#56

Post by sean_the_geek »

Talking about RSS reader, I was becoming (almost!) fan of digg reader until they updated their iPad app and then links to sites won't open! How crazy is that! Uninstalled immediately, deleted digg account and I am a happy feedly user since then. No regrets so far.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#57

Post by wslh »

interfixus wrote: post #11

There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]

They are not the same. With Google Reader you had a virtually infinity history of the feed while with feed clients you only receive articles from the current and past feed files seen. An article about this topic: http://blog.databigbang.com/tag/google-reader/

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#58

Post by matt4077 »

steve_w wrote: post #33
interfixus wrote: post #11

There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]

I've been using Facebook to subscribe to websites mainly because I know I'll check Facebook more often. I keep forgetting to check my Feedly account. However I've discovered that after liking a few pages and joining a few groups the quality of information in my Facebook news feed is getting watered down. I'm missing more of my friends updates. Currently my Facebook feed has a duel personality which makes it a bit use…

> a duel personality

One of these insightful typos :)

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#60

Post by kristianc »

RSS was and still is great for following a few blogs that were relatively infrequently updated. If I follow Rands, DF or Marco, it works quite well. I receive timely, relevant content at a pace I can cope with and digest.

The problem with RSS is that it scales incredibly badly for large, content heavy sites. I don't really want to see everything that Gizmodo publishes. I certainly don't want to see everything that HuffPo, Buzzfeed or any of the other content mills publish. Sure, you can choose granularity - a 'US Politics' RSS feed for example, but that puts too much of the onus on me and I'll end up missing some stuff I'd like to see.

For those large content mills, Facebook actually does a quite good job of bubbling stuff up through my network that I care about. Twitter served that function for a while before it became more about noise and snark.

The death of Google Reader probably had a role in the decline of the small independent publisher (how many new sites have appeared on that scene recently?), but it's probably not to blame for the rise of BuzzFeed et al, which RSS was never really suited to handle anyway.

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