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

Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

googleblog.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 354 posts

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#91

Post by pirsquare »

js4ever wrote: post #16

This is probably the inflection point in history where I lost all trust I had in Google. I don't know how much they saved by shutting it down (probably nearly nothing) but I know that for me and people around me it was a such terrible signal that I never trusted again Google for anything serious/business. Well done guys

Yes in my case I was a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud and they abruptly shutdown all my servers last friday.

Any decent human being would at least try to rectify things ASAP, except for Google. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution.

They're the most dysfunctional organization I've seen in my life. It's like communications between teams goes with a "none of my business" attitude.

Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#92

Post by zedadex »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10

I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…

For me it was Google Talk. It hit the sweet spot of a lightweight chat app that didn't take any configuration or convincing for my non-techie friends. I still miss it.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#93

Post by vpilcx »

scarface74 wrote: post #77
pvorb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I think what really killed RSS was a change in people's behavior. Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites gained traction as link sharing communities and RSS became less relevant after that. Instead of subscribing to an RSS feed, you could just follow your favorite sites on Twitter, for example.

How is RSS even dead today? I can’t think of a useful site that doesn’t still have an RSS feed - including Reddit.

I think it's 'dead' in comparison to the way it used to be used.

I was actually just looking for RSS feeds for some of the top news sites, and a lot of them have specialized RSS feeds for a certain category but not for the entire site. (I had to eventually settle for Newsweek)

I genuinely don't know, so this is an honest question. Nowadays, outside of podcast feeds, what's the incentive for media outlets to provide RSS feeds? Isn't it just a fringe assortment of techies still using it? (To be clear, I'm part of that fringe.)

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#94

Post by thaumasiotes »

dewey wrote: post #14
ramraj07 wrote: post #7

I literally stopped reading literature the same way after that. With GReader I used to consume the ToC of 15-30 journals without missing a single abstract. I just gave up on reading that way after that, no other tool came close.

Which part of Google Reader was the one that no other tools came close to? There's almost as many good and different RSS reader clients as Todo list apps, so this somehow seems like seen through rose-tinted glasses.

Google Reader was a lot better than an RSS client. I went away on vacation once and left Thunderbird running to capture RSS feeds. When I came back, my computer had shut down.

That didn't happen with Reader.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#95

Post by saurik »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #47
nirui wrote: post #42

> While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Back when Google was an underdog company in the market, they were desperately capturing the market share, and their strategy was basically throwing a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks (in a calculated way). I'd say Google Reader was one if the lucky coincidence they hit. Sadly,…

No the real reason Google Reader was shut down was because it was competing with Google Plus, their failed social network/Facebook compete. Vic Gundotra was the head of Google Plus product and was not shy or hiding that Google Reader had to go--at the time Reader had its own social features like the ability to subscribe to your friend's starred RSS feeds/stories and share them, comment on them, etc. It was purely a c…

Google is extremely bad at increasing the scope of existing projects. Like, rather than kill Google Reader to support Google+, maybe they should have merged Google Reader into Google+ and evolved it as the onramp to convince people that Google+ was awesome. Only, no: the people who work at Google fundamentally don't seem to understand product design, and so they consistently introduce a new unrelated project (or multiple at the same time) and deprecate, kill, and finally delete the old one (which will experience the same fate), often with no transition or migration plan for end users :/.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#96

Post by dewey »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #94
dewey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which part of Google Reader was the one that no other tools came close to? There's almost as many good and different RSS reader clients as Todo list apps, so this somehow seems like seen through rose-tinted glasses.

Google Reader was a lot better than an RSS client. I went away on vacation once and left Thunderbird running to capture RSS feeds. When I came back, my computer had shut down. That didn't happen with Reader.

You are comparing a managed service running on a server to a locally running app on your computer that somehow malfunctioned?

That's a very apples to oranges comparison. If you want to compare that you'd have to compare it to a service also running on a server like Feedly, Miniflux or any other managed service.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#97

Post by scarface74 »

vpilcx wrote: post #93
scarface74 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is RSS even dead today? I can’t think of a useful site that doesn’t still have an RSS feed - including Reddit.

I think it's 'dead' in comparison to the way it used to be used. I was actually just looking for RSS feeds for some of the top news sites, and a lot of them have specialized RSS feeds for a certain category but not for the entire site. (I had to eventually settle for Newsweek) I genuinely don't know, so this is an honest question. Nowadays, outside of podcast feeds, what's the incentive for media outlets to provide R…

Having specialized feeds prevents the whole “sipping from the firehose”.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#98

Post by mft_ »

chaosite wrote: post #70
wyclif wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that Google Wave had a lot of unrealised potential, in addition to Reader. Still sorry they killed that, too.

But Wave was not a mature product when it was killed, it was still basically a tech demo. Killing it just wasn't as painful.

Indeed; it felt magical, but was a solution in search of a problem... which was ultimately found in Google Docs having very similar live editing ability.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#99

Post by scarface74 »

raizer88 wrote: post #82
scarface74 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.

I never understood why Google doesn't hire B teams to do the maintenance work, or outsource it. It's normal that if you hire only top players that no one wants to be stuck doing tickets.

It’s not about hiring top players. It’s about the incentive structure of getting ahead. From all of the leveling guidelines I’ve seen at major tech companies, “coding quality” only comes into play to differentiate an entry level dev to a mid level dev.

I can’t think of any good measurable incentives that Google could use,

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#100

Post by goodpoint »

wmf wrote: post #6

I still don't understand why people couldn't switch to a different RSS reader. The Google Reader narrative seems like it was just as helpful as the bank run we just had.

The damn google reader had a unique ecosystem of users resharing/starring interesting items.
Post reply on HN