Hooray! One time I read the Fleshbot RSS feed, and I've never been able to un-read it -- it just stays in my "Read items" queue.
Google Reader shutting down
641–650 of 726 posts
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#642This 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…
How many sites can a free account follow? The front page copy says 64, but when I log in it says I can only turn on 12.
It was 64 before this news. The site regained some functionality when it went down to 12. I chose to go to Feedly instead, which was prepared for this news and works perfectly.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#643Earlier 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…
I tried having my own domain's mail for a while, and got burned hard when my (cheap) webhost's servers were down for a couple of days. It's hard to argue with free, easy, and reliable when the alternative is costly, difficult, and more likely to go down.
You don't have to host the email yourself. Just grab your own domain, set up a free gmail account, and forward all the email from your domain to the gmail account. Configure gmail to always send replies as from you@yourdomain.com.
What this does is eliminate the biggest point of lock-in to gmail. In the worst case scenario you can switch to another email provider with the flick of a DNS entry, no worries about losing your email address.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#644Between the massive interest in this topic and the fact that many google reader competitors were crushed by load last night, I'm having a hard time believing use has 'declined' as much as Google is implying.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#645Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's insane. When they announced they were ditching ActiveSync because it's proprietary they were selling us on CalDAV support because it's a "standard". That kind of made sense and it was moving the world towards a better place. Now they're saying they don't like CalDAV either, so just use the Google Calendar API. I don't see how this is any different from the proprietariness of ActiveSync. Sigh, I'm not rea…
The downside of Google's product strategy of throwing things against a wall is becoming clear. This post is from 3 days ago: http://winsource.com/2013/03/11/caldav-and-carddav-support-f... So even as Microsoft is working to implement support for Google calendar syncing, Google pulls the rug out. This also leaves iOS users with no Google calendar syncing mechanism. If Google is open, they have a strange way of showing…
It just makes no sense at all. I don't get how they decide to do a complete u-turn on the CardDAV issue in just a couple of months. It's almost like they're doing this just to aggravate Windows Phone users.
I hope someone at Microsoft is paying attention. They should just step up to the plate now and announce IMAP + CalDAV + CardDAV support on their services for those who want it. I'd switch in a blink.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#646This 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…
How many sites can a free account follow? The front page copy says 64, but when I log in it says I can only turn on 12.
Found the commit, it was due to the load:
https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/commit/f5ec4fa37d0a81...
Hopefully it will go back to 64 once things get under control.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#647Google should open source it. Seriously. Donate the code base to the open source community, and let someone run with it. With some luck it'd attract enough developers to keep the project alive. Or maybe somebody would figure out a way to monetize the effort. Either option, it'd be much better than just let the service die. It's not unprecedented. Google did exactly this with Google Wave. Sadly, I don't think this wil…
I doubt that open sourcing it is going to be any help to anyone since it probably integrates deeply with Google's proprietary backends.
I wonder if Merchant Circle would be willing to sell the old Bloglines codebase seeing as they aren't using it.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#648Mixed emotions. I remember at the end of college and right after (I graduated in 2008), many of my close friends were on GReader and we would share and communicate directly through it about interesting things we were reading. It was an awesome way to interact, and nothing has replaced it for my group and me. Google's implicit (although I could be reading their intentions incorrectly) strategy of trying to route that…
I'd note that Readertron (readertron.com) was built by a guy who was frustrated when Google nerfed the sharing among friends feature. MIght want to give it a shot.
Sadly:
> You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Not even a description of what it is or why I want to give them my information.
Sorry, but /close
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the podcasting side, I began http://player.fm to manage podcasts in the cloud. Since then, Google has dropped support for its official Android app, Listen, and now Reader, which many people used for podcasts. It works from the browser, including mobile browsers, and native apps are coming. There's also an OPML importer, though currently experimental, and subscriptions can be consumed as OPML, RSS, etc.
Wow, didn't consider this until your post. Losing Listen would be a big hit. Can anyone confirm that the Android Listen app will cease to function (i.e. refresh your existing feeds) once Google Reader is shut down? Am pretty sure that it relies solely on Google Reader's "Listen Subscriptions" tag for refreshing your podcast feeds, so that's definitely another gap that needs filling.
Google Listen was killed off in August 2012:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/giving-you-better-goo...
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#650Are there any open source alternatives (I'm thinking Ruby/Rails/Sinatra) where I could throw up my own RSS read/sync server onto Heroku or something?
Have a look to see if there are any Planet type solutions for Ruby - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
I'm going to spend some time looking at the two main Perl solutions, Perlanet & Plagger (used respectively by http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org & http://perlsphere.net).
* Perlanet - https://metacpan.org/module/perlanet
* Plagger - https://metacpan.org/module/Plagger
Failing that I may produce a custom solution with a feed aggregator library (for eg. https://metacpan.org/module/XML::Feed::Aggregator).