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.
People who cared enough did just that. I also don't think the main problem was Google Reader going away but the signal that it sent ("RSS is going away").
To be fair, the sites I care about all still have RSS support though.
Google reader was also an archive of all the RSS feeds you had subscribed to, or someone had subscribed to before you. So you could get things that were no long let online
I remember trying the alternatives back then (feedly, newsblur, etc) and they were just not as smooth, possibly because they were struggling to cope with the influx of Google Reader refugees.
I switched to different readers since then, but I'm still disappointed because 1. GR was in many ways just better and simpler (before they starting shoving sharing down the users throats), and 2. kind of sad the whole RSS feed subscription thing remained niche, seems like after that most large social networks/blogs started dragging users into their proprietary feeds, and then a lot if that got crushed by ads and dumbass "suggested for you" content which by now got so annoying I don't even want to use most services anymore. We've gone a long way from simple RSS/readers and not in a good direction : (
1. The retirement of Google Reader sort of signaled the death knell for RSS. No, every RSS feed didn't shut down immediately. Yes, there are still zillions of RSS feeds live today in 2023. But it was a sign that any RSS feed you cared about wasn't likely to be around forever.
2. Many did switch, but Google Reader had some basic (but nice) social features. I think about 99% of my friends never made the switch to something else. So I miss seeing what my friends starred.
The second point is so big. Almost all alternatives was not "just" an RSS reader but had some weird crufty garbage over it. The RSS feeds never went away (of course some blogs got quieter over time), but other feed readers that were online were way too much oriented around the social web. Serious RSS readers were available as desktop clients, but that comes with its own sort of clunkiness.
At the time Google Reader announced it's shutdown, alternatives didn't really exist -- the idea of creating an alternative and competing against a free product from Google didn't seem too economically feasible.
There were other RSS clients, but Google Reader's web-based, infinitely-scrolling interface was unique. Imagine any utility software you use daily, now imagine it being gone and having to use some alternative you know is inferior.
Fortunately a number of alternatives were quickly developed with different levels of success. But few were available the day the shutdown was announced.
That's because the goal of the whining is the whining - people feel emotionally slighted because someone didn't keep maintaining a free product just for them. This explains why paid alternatives didn't take off - people wanted FREE and they wanted GOOGLE to GIVE them FREE. It's modern developer entitlement at its best - it comes from the same place as all of the abusive attacks on opensource developers when they don't cater to the audience.
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.
I gave the entire gamut a chance back then, none was the same. They either cost a lot, didn’t offer the same UX or both. The fact that we are celebrating its anniversary today shows how irreplaceable it was so not sure if I’m the one wearing rose tinted glasses or if it’s the other way around where folks can’t acknowledge the magic some products capture that’s not easy to put in words.
Google Reader had an "outdated" UI, in the sense that it was really bare-bones and feature-less, and focused on its main function. If it survived to today, it would probably have been redesigned 7 times like gmail and become increasingly complex and slow. So while you're not exactly wearing rose tinted glasses, you're yearning for a time when the web was simpler and gave birth to Google Reader.
It had an information dense UI and was super fast and snappy to load. It was basically like Gmail--always there, dependable, easy to scan and quickly digest information.
All of the competition at the time of its demise was complete and utter garbage (sorry Feedly, I loved ya but you were slow and super unstable in the early days). Nowadays there are some worthy alternatives but the damage is done and RSS is just getting more and more obscure and blogging outside closed platforms like Twitter is basically dead.
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.
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.
RSS client apps can still connect to managed services, so not sure what you are talking about.
In my case I'm using Reeder and it's just talking to the Miniflux server. So the server keeps all feeds refreshed all the time and the client app just fetches them from there. Just like Email being fetched from the server over IMAP.
I used to use it to avoid the internet ads and the clean interface. I stopped reading RSS after that too, I currently have NetNewsWire, but don't use it as much.
But, that was the first Google product where it really hit home, to me, how even if a product is fantastic and useful, Google will kill it without a second thought.
It fundamentally changed my attitude toward Google and made me far more deliberate about what services I choose to rely on, especially from the big G.
I'm curious if Clayton Christensen's would add some exceptions to his follow up book to "The Innovator's Dilemma" [1] ("The Innovators Solution") where the solution to BigCo failing to innovate is because they can never comprehend/tolerate any business which might cannibalize their core business even in the slightest (like a niche RSS reader taking away views from Google News and Google SERPs) is to do "intrapeanuership". Which is where your side plays are isolated/insulated from the downward pressure of established powerful internal teams controlling the current pet business model.
I doubt Reader was ever going to be a serious business but maybe there should be a much more explicit execption for the side products your customers love that also don't fit perfectly into the parent companies main business/product dev strategy.
This. I also switched to Feedly, no biggie. But it made me take a hard look at what else I was dependent on Google for. About 5 years ago I excised Google from my life as much as I good, including sunsetting my gmail account.
I still use my Android phone, and use maps for navigation and browse youtube online, but I use as little 'account' features as is necessary. If I wanted to switch to iPhone tomorrow, there'd be next to zero migration headaches.
I also moved to Feedly, but the shuttering of Reader meant that many websites stopped posting RSS links, and some big sites stopped supporting it altogether.
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 kills stuff" is the moment it became unreliable, the moment I had to stop and consider whether their interests really aligned with mine rather than just assuming so. Or maybe I'm just bitter over nothing:)
Edit: Perhaps a better phrasing: Before, if you asked "will this useful Google product be here in a year", I would answer "yes". After, I could only say "maybe". And that made all the difference.
It also coincided with a persistent trend of HN itself no longer featuring random blog posts heavily but rather a) mostly popular news sites like NYTimes that finally started understanding the web demanded clickbait/Twitter-friendly high volume articles (where no one reads the article but shares the headline) and b) blogs that went viral via Twitter/FB/etc.
That was the new reality a decade ago. Social media apps was how you found blog posts, not RSS feeds.
I remember Reader dying and within a year finding a replacement but still moving on because the high noise-to-signal RSS simply wasn't doing it for me.
It's possible we all stopped using RSS because of Google but it's also possible we simply found replacements when prodded. Just like how us torrent obsessed pirates eventually moved on from harddrives full of MP3s to lazily curating Spotify accounts and from AVIs to Netflix. Google Reader was a far-too-early end of an era, but the fact we all didn't jump to a competitor like we did with Digg->Reddit was probably not just Google's fault.
Sure but I'm still speaking for the hundreds of thousands of tech people who didnt keep using RSS even when given alternatives. Feedly was around after Reader (started in 2008, the same year of my 14yr old HN account and 5 years before Reader shut down), even I used it for 6 months after Reader. You can pretend Google is why no one cares about RSS but I'm skeptical it's the root reason.
+1 (something else that was killed by google but still everyone knows that means)
I used freshrss, and got to this article via RSS as well. It's my only source of news. I'm usually the first to know about new stuff in my circle of friends because of my carefully curated RSS feeds.
The killer feature of Reader was sharing. Not only could one see posts by sites they "follow", but could also see whatever their friends shared and chose to either read that single article or follow the site.
Notice any similarities? We have moved, just not to another RSS reader, but rather to G+/facebook/twitter/whatever, platforms which had that social element. Coincidentally, it was a time when g+ was failing to gain expected traction.
At this point I see almost no content from my friends on most social media. It’s almost entirely ads or high-follower/influencer content guiding it. What stuff comes from friends is just reposts from influencer pages.
> That was the new reality a decade ago. Social media apps was how you found blog posts, not RSS feeds.
The big social media influencers at the time, however, were using RSS feeds to find the stuff they would take viral. So it still had a beneficial effect on the environment as a whole. The tool itself can be niche in its user base but punch well above its weight if the users are influential.
I think it was the first thing they'd killed which had been around for quite a while, still had devoted users, and Google didn't offer a replacement. If you look at the graveyard, the pre-Reader things they killed were things which had flopped (e.g. Buzz), things which were no longer relevant (e.g Gears), acquisitions, and mergers where they had two redundant products (e.g. Google Video).
Meh the ad business was pretty established well before 2013 when Reader shut down. RSS was declining well before that. Google acquired Doubleclick in 2008 aka what became the real Adwords in its prime.
I personally don't expect tech conglomerates to be the ideal solution for niche markets. But I don't see many people providing good arguments why alternatives like Feedly didn't take off if there was really a strong market demand for RSS.
And I say that was an uber-fan of RSS back in the day.
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.
That's like saying "how is IRC dead today" when Slack/Discord/WhatsApp/Zoom/etc exists or Yahoo style portals when Google exists (yes Yahoo is still a real business) or "how are horses a dead transportation" when cars exist in 1930s America because horses can still walk on roads (aka takes a minimal investment to support).
Sure they still work and will continue to work but let's be honest it's a super niche technology and it didn't survive/flourish because it was flawed and fundamentally nerdy option people stopped caring about.
Supporting RSS takes the bare minimum of effort. Yet even in 2013 (aka a decade ago) RSS was declining in usage before Reader was killed.
I support open platforms but RSS had a super noise-to-signal UX and I personally don't miss it.
Google didn't kill RSS, they killed the best RSS product at the time and accelerated a dying protocol that would still be only used by HN's demographic and little else.
Why do I care if it’s a “niche” technology as far as other people subscribing if it is still supported by publishers? I can’t think of a single site that I go to and say “I sure wish this site supported RSS” and doesn’t?
Using NetNewsWire and subscribing to subreddits with NNW on one half of my iPad and the Reddit app on the other half is still a great experience for instance.
I click on the date on NNW and the post opens in the Reddit app.
> Why do I care if it’s a “niche” technology as far as other people subscribing if it is still supported by publishers?
If it is a niche technology it will fall out from requirements docs and from CMS implementations.
One can already see that many news sites only provide headlines, not even teasers in the feed and different site generator based blogs (using Hugo and such) forget to create feeds as well.
My feed reader still provides value to me, but I regularly stumble over sites providing interesting content irregularly but no feed. (For irregularly posting blogs it is especially important as manually checking is annoying)
One could also embed an image on the text or do textual ads in the article. However market is too small, thus they do the simple thing which is limiting the value of the feed, till nobody cares about it anymore and they turn it off.
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.)
It's much easier to whine about Google than accept trends in consumer behaviour.
Programmers get nostalgic about their pet technologies that even the majority of tech-denographic (and often themselves) don't even use when given the option. I don't blame them but they aren't always honest about their favourite niche tech simply being niche technology.
Attention was shifting from basement blogs and projects to professionally made content for the web. Which would only have one paragraph or a title on the RSS feed and the rest was on the site with ads.
I think the bug factor was Facebook. There were places making money selling ads in feeds but they weren’t making within an order of magnitude what Facebook promised. Google+ was a botched reaction to that but I do wonder what Google could have done embracing the open web instead and actually trying to monetize Reader or provide top-notch feed ads. It might not have made Facebook-level rates but it also wouldn’t have soured a generation on their business.
I wonder how feedly is doing, their higher tier plans focusing on enterprise/analysis/teams suggest the demand for rss still among power users / consumers.
Hi, this is Petr from Feedly, we're doing really well and yes, our focus shifted towards Enterprise - Threat Intelligence and Market Intelligence use cases. Individual users can use our Pro+ plan to access Feedly AI to leverage the power of searching through RSS feeds to get the signals more easily and quickly.
Despite the prior “more wood behind fewer arrows” announcement, it might be the first time Google killed something that was popular with Googlers. I think it was an “Elves leave Middle-Earth” moment for my friends on campus. Memegen was full of “we can launch (ultradoomed project) but can’t keep Reader alive?” snark, less good-natured than usual. I’ve heard it blamed on Vic and G+, actual security issues from scraping Javascript, or just falling behind on the promo-driven infra treadmill that threatens everything mature.
I haven't heard the phrase "more wood behind fewer arrows" before, but I am pretty sure that never in the history of the evolution of projectiles was that tradeoff ever taken in that direction.
That's what makes it so amazing!!! It was a delicious self-parody. I remember reading it and thinking it made absolutely no sense as a metaphor: just imagine the poor archer being told "instead of having 15 arrows to take with you today, we've decided to give you three really heavy arrows"... that was the announcement that really made Google product management feel like a laughing stock to me, and is what I return to thinking about every time they kill another project.
I always thought it was something like a comparison between ballistae with fewer shots and larger arrows (javelin size, really) doing more damage, and a storm of smaller regular arrows. Maybe I was being too generous with my interpretation.
> The background seems an oft-used phrase in Sun Microsystems by the former CEO, "all the wood behind a single arrow" which means focus on a single product and be the best in it.
> When deer hunting .. "Real men bring only one arrow. They know how to aim (and they remember to take plenty of time when aiming), and they put all the wood behind that one arrow."
They even managed to find a usage of the same space of metaphor from Apple!
> While the layoffs are intended to reduce operating costs, Apple said it trimmed its technology portfolio to streamline development efforts. “Time to market is very important to me,” Amelio said. “With the narrowing of our focus, we can put more wood behind the arrow.”
> —Stephen Howard, “Narrowing tech focus, Apple cuts 4,100 jobs,” MacWeek, March 17, 1997
The "more wood" is in the bow, not the arrows. A bigger, heavier bow will shoot arrows with more force, but will take more effort, strength, and time to operate, so shoot fewer arrows harder.
The force of the "more wood" is behind the arrow when pulling it back and shooting (and once you've released, the entire bow is behind it). I get what you're saying though.
I'm a fan of how the phrase gets dumber the more you think about it, and how it's just a way to try to make "put all your eggs in one basket" sound like a good thing. It's delightfully stupid.
Raise the mass of the arrow and it'll hit with more force. There's a sweet spot for piercing heavy cloth armor. If the arrows are too light, they'll bounce right off.
Well there's the other possible interpretation where wood refers to the bow instead of the arrows. Thus, the larger bow can impart larger momentum to each arrow
Well putting more wood behind fewer arrows in this case is desirable for them. The point is there doesn't have to be historical precedent for a figure of speech. It just has to effectively communicate something.
Well I did business studies aswell so it might be management speak.
In videos I've seen of tests of arrows against armour the shafts usually break, so that the weight of the shaft does not fully go into the penetration.
Stiffer shorter arrows have, therefore, a better chance. Thus the men fighting heavily armoured troops may choose crossbows, which with their long reloading time would literally trade number of shots for heavier shots.
The soda can anecdote made me realize that “We give you free soda and after-hours pizza, so you can ruin your health for the company.” matured unceremoniously into “If you want to ruin your health, pay for it like any other member of society.”
Realize it, and “embrace the warmth of leaving home.”
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.
Also its rollout was done in the most ridiculous way possible. For a product that relies on your workmates or friends to have access, they didn't let those workmates or friends have access. Then by the time they did, the hype had worn off, and people had moved elsewhere.
I can't tell if you're talking about internal rollout of public because the same problems existed internally. One person on your team would request it because they bought the hype but not everyone had access so only that one person would play with it and the social aspect of it just wasn't there. I tried to make it useful for a couple weeks but my impression at the end was the same as when they did the TGIF demo: mostly pointless fluff.
I stopped having a positive view of Google due to their poor explanation for shutting down Google Reader.
They explained they were shutting it down due to declining usage and they are pouring all of their energy into fewer product, however, as Google had a reputation for building cool and free stuff back then, it seemed reasonable to me that they could have maintain it in a frozen state or provide a longer transition period. This invited alternative theories about intentionally killing RSS for Google+.
I'm usually one for blaming the big company and arcane processes, but this squarely your fault. You missed emails asking for verification, and had your account suspended because of it. This will happen to you again on AWS or any other provider.
Stadia was disappointing, but they refunded everyone everything they had ever spent. Short of keeping the service running for free forever I'm not sure what more they could have done.
Did you saw the title of the email? "Important Information for your Account". It reads more like an informational email. How many important emails you've received this week?
Could've been worded "[Action Required]", "Account Suspension Notice" etc. And they didn't even drop a notification when my servers were shutdown.
"This will happen to you again on AWS or any other provider."
Can't really agree to this. I read all the horror stories and GCloud is the only one who would suspend you for something like this. I need to be very clear, the suspension is not due to fraudulent issue. It's due to "missing some paperwork". I've been paying using the same card for the past 4 yrs.
Then voila they choose to suddenly dropped you an informational email and suspend you 10 days later.
How many saas apps are you using? 10, 20? Imagine if everyone pulls up something like this would you even have time to run your business?
See similar horror stories below. AWS doesn't pull this shit.
And lastly, when something like this happens, the minimal they could do is to get my servers back asap. But you know what? I've been trying all my means to get them to it back at least temp but nobody there gives a fuck. It's all the "none of my business" attitude between their teams.
Here's one more thing that I didn't mentioned. I replied to their verification team 3 times within an hour last friday. You know what happened? Their support team told me "their verification team" already replied to ask for more details when they haven't even read my replies (done all checks on my end can 100% confirm my msg was the last one out). And they've been dead silence over 3 days already. They don't give a fuck about screwing you and don't understand or care about the criticalness of their role.
Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information". I don't understand how that part isn't your fault. They even tell you that your account will be suspended in the email. How do you not have a special filter to route emails from critical service providers? And I don't agree that GCP is "the only one that will suspend you for things like this". AWS can and has suspended accounts for arcane reasons though support was reasonably helpful enough
I sympathise with the abysmal support though obviously. GCP has horrid support and deserve to be called out. I wouldn't recommend GCP to anyone
> Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information".
Because 99% of emails labeled "Important Information for your Account" get discarded by spam filters including the one in your brain. In most cases it's nothing more than just another bad spam/CEO scam/phishing attempt.
Clear communication is important - a proper subject line would be "Your GCE account #XYZ is going to be terminated unless verified until 2023/01/01".
Again, how is it that an email, that came from your cloud service provider, titled "Important Information Regarding Your Google Account" was ignored because of the "spam filter in your brain"? Again, this really sounds like an excuse for not reading important emails from your provider. It doesn't even seem to have been marked as spam by Gmail and is from Google Payments which should already have sent off alarm bells. I'm not saying that responding to their mail would 100% have led to your account staying on cause GCP is generally pretty shit but this part of your article is basically handing all responsibility of poorly handling important communication off to someone else
I suggest once you move to AWS you filter and route all emails from these "special" senders to a separate tag that always notifies you on incoming emails so you don't miss them
> but this part of your article is basically handing all responsibility of poorly handling important communication off to someone else
I'm not the person you replied to. Anyway, I'd expect of a company like Google to not word their e-mails in the same way cyber-criminals do - and for what it's worth, many cyber-security training programs actually teach that vaguely worded but "important sounding" subjects are a key indicator of something being fishy.
Ah sorry I didn't notice you weren't the same person
While the subject line could be better, the subject is not the only indicator of the importance of the email. It is coming from "Google Payments" and as a customer of GCP, why wouldn't you treat every email that comes from Google with an equal amount of importance even if there are false positives? As I said, having a filter of email addresses routed to a specific tag, all marked important and notifications for every email that lands there is one of the most basic things you can do to not avoid important notices
I don't see the issue with the subject line. I get the general rule to not mark everything important but in this case the mail IS important
> I don't see the issue with the subject line. I get the general rule to not mark everything important but in this case the mail IS important
In a world where people get sometimes hundreds of emails a day, on top of a constant onslaught of spam, scam, phishing and otherwise malicious email, it is basic netiquette of summarizing what exactly you want from the receiver.
Additionally, a lot of people seem to have taken buzzfeed-style clickbait headlines as the role model for communication and that may be a factor here as well.
How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time. If the subject line reads like spam, I'm not looking at who sent it. I just delete it out of pure muscle memory.
Again, not saying this is a good habit, but it is an understandable habit.
> How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time.
by that logic, you shouldn't trust any email unless it's signed and you've verified the sender. If the sender is your cloud provider, you read the email and decide from there whether or not it's worthwhile.
Doesn't matter. Not only does the title say "Important Notice...", the sender is Google Payments. Even if it is a false positive, why would you not pay attention to every email coming from Google when you're a customer of GCP?
I get “IMPORTANT!” in headings from products I brought online. They’re not important at all. You’re aware of this being normal misuse too, because you use the internet.
Suspension, banning or deletion warnings should be labelled clearly as such in the title. Procedures need to reflect the actual environment.
My work email is treated very different to my personal email though, and my work email with external organisations I work with is treated differently to email I receive internally.
"Important Information for your Account" is a marketing email 99% of the time. Emails which are actually important normally tell you why they're important in the subject.
I did, and I saw who it was from. There's absolutely no way that I would ignore an email from my cloud provider like that.
> I need to be very clear, the suspension is not due to fraudulent issue. It's due to "missing some paperwork". I've been paying using the same card for the past 4 yrs.
You're putting words in my mouth here. I never said it was due to fraud, it's due to you not filling in the paperwork they asked you to do in a timeframe, where they clearly state what will happen if you don't follow the instructions. Again, many providers will ask for extra information (your bank for example), and if you don't follow the procedure, you'll have your services suspended.
> See similar horror stories below. AWS doesn't pull this shit.
> And lastly, when something like this happens, the minimal they could do is to get my servers back asap.
I disagree - you were told what was going to happen if you didn't do it. It's not their fault you didn't read your email. The minimal _you_ can do is read the email from your cloud provider.
> And they've been dead silence over 3 days already.
In all honesty, spam has taught me to ignore any email that has a subject line like "Important information about your account". Not saying it's good, but it's deeply trained into me and automatic, like ignoring things that look like banner ads.
Ok, so putting that aside, they haven't replied in 24 hours by time of us writing, because it's a weekend in between. Do you pay for support on Google cloud?
> Verdict: Never ever trust Google Clown Platform with your business
I would be more inclined to trust Google than people who make digs at their service providers publicly, to be honest.
Yikes. Inspite of leadership changes by hiring from Oracle, it’s clear GCP will be stuck in 3rd place for a while. You can’t treat long standing customers (even with a modest spend) like dirt and hope to somehow edge out Azure or AWS.
Google Reader was a publish-subscribe platform with chronological/per site newsfeed whereas Google+ was a peer-to-peer platform with an algorithm newsfeed. I didn't appreciate the difference at the time, but the philosophy was completely different and I couldn't come up with any idea that could fit Google Reader into the Google+ vision.
This strikes me as similar to the spirit of Reader, though of course without the site-specific subscription of RSS. Conceptually, the idea of including RSS results in the stream wouldn't have been much of a stretch.
Regardless, that feature was axed pretty early in G+ history.
What irked most about the forced amalgamation of G+ and other Google services was the context sheer and violation of boundaries and social significance of various activities. In particular, suddenly G+ conversations based on YouTube links were now listed at YouTube under the video's comments, and comments from YouTube now appeared in G+ discussion streams. I responded by deleting all my own G+ posts of YouTube links, and deleting all content from the linked YouTube account (I'd used it little regardless).
When G+ finally merged G+ and YouTube profiles, after about a year of my repeatedly stating "no, don't do that", and based solely on the fact that I'd used the same email address to register for each, it was a tremendous violation. Numerous other people felt similarly.
The three top stories on HN that day were about the forced merger. Two of them were links to my own posts on G+. The original links are of course now dead, though I archived nearly all my own posts at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
I understand you completely. For me also it was a turning point, but the real nail in the coffin was when they shut down Inbox. That was when it went from a new Google product being interesting and getting in there early to every Google product being eyed with distrust and reluctance.
I had the same. After Reader, I was a bit grumpy but, well, found other alternatives.
After Inbox tho... I went through the 5 stages of grief and started degooglifying my life. Made an okay setup with neomutt (and TripIt*) which I can trust would stay around longer than any Google ad-focused product.
For me the killer feature was the way emails were (automatically) contextually organized. Instead of your inbox being chronological, it would create "bundles" of emails that were related based on sender, or subject line, or content. You'd have a bundle for each of: your JIRA emails, github emails, bank emails, cron messages, threads with your boss or coworkers, travel emails, receipts, etc. Bundles were created automatically and accurately. Labeling like in gmail would let you create custom bundles if needed. You could archive/label/refile/mark-read an entire bundle of emails at once. It was extremely efficient.
IMO there's too much context switching when your email is sorted chronologically. Much easier to deal with all emails of a certain type at once. You can (manually) organize your email with labels or folders, and go through each one, but it's just not the same.
EDIT: there were other neat features like pinning and snoozing that have since made their way into gmail and other apps, but IMO they worked better with the bundle system than they do without
And location based unpinning. I was traveling between two cities for work and there were certain stuff that I wanted to focus on one city, other stuff in the other (also private stuff at hometown).
The bundling worked really well. It was time based as well, so you'd end up with this weeks "Updates" bundle and last weeks, which meant I could then scan last weeks to make sure I had everything then delete the whole bundle.
Somehow the way it dealt with notification emails was also really good. I was able to keep on top of github notifications and the became useful rather than noise. A combination of the bundling + displaying the most pertinent link and info instead of the subject line.
Yes, it was something I used, but also I think Reader was what drove the linkblog ecosystem, behind the scenes. Linkbloggers subscribed to interesting feeds, and amplified whatever they thought was interesting.
By interfering with that ecosystem I think Google received out-sized negative feedback. They would have been much better off just leaving it running.
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.
If Google cared about RSS, they would have had RSS support in Chrome. They don't have it to this date. When Chrome launched other browsers had RSS support of some sort.
Are you sure? I distinctively remember them announcing it and being promptly mocked by people asking when was the date they were going to kill it. Did they abandon the desktop version before a stable release?
I believe you (I don’t use Chrome) but that doesn’t mean the support isn’t there. It could just be that it’s not on by default or that you need to add feeds manually.
> I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically
I think I share the feeling. I feel more and more disconnect from their stuff every day. Same thing with their hardware. Original Google Wifi was great, the Google Nest Wifi Pro is not. You cannot listen Rage Against The Machine's Bullet in the Head in their Youtube Music Premium without popups, that you cannot disable. The only answer from their customer support seems to be: "please, unsubscribe". The search engine feels also worse and worse. If you put anything more specific, all the links lead to fake sites. Youtube is still quite good, mostly because of the content not found elsewhere. In general I care Google a lot less these days, and I feel it is a mutual feeling.
Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits.
It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.
Even now, 10 yrs on, that makes no sense (their justification, not yours). How do you convince a bunch of blog authors to switch from 'free-to-air' and searchable everywhere RSS feeds, to move into closed social media platform?
It seems like idiotic management making idiotic decisions completely out of touch with the userbase has been with us since the dawn of the web. Just this week, Spotify are turning the mobile app into a stinking pile of TikTok.
Monetising by adding ads to a content, they fetched from other sites was a questionable back than. So, they couldn't just add ads to the reader easily.
They were believing google plus would be popular.
So, having a closed social network, where they could control everything and put ads without any complains makes sense.
Besides, Reader was not that popular among the general public.
it doesn't matter that it wasn't that popular amongst the general public, they should have viewed it as having an enthusiastic user base and since sharing and commenting was part of reader, would be a way to encourage people to add content to google+. A social network is only as valuable as the content that gets placed on it. Killing reader shut off a mechanisms for sharing. I went from sharing articles I saw on RSS feeds via reader to a group of friends to sharing them on facebook.
I miss the leisure of just clicking a button to flag "hey look at this" and having a backlog queue of things by friends also thought was interesting. Nothing has really come around and recreated that simplicity and UX.
>How do you convince a bunch of blog authors to switch from 'free-to-air' and searchable everywhere RSS feeds, to move into closed social media platform?
I don't think the idea was to convince bloggers to switch, but rather to stop one good distribution channel from potentially competing with social media. Google kept Blogger alive, because people can still publish there AND distribute links via social media.
Speaking of blogs, I wonder if the death of Google Reader led to the death of blogs in general. It was about that time that people seemed to stop writing blogs and moved to Facebook/Twitter and their generally far shorter (and to me, less interesting) postings.
In hindsight, it seems that Google Reader could have offered a continuing alternative to social media. If Google had kept throwing resources behind it, they could have held a unique advantage against Facebook. It never would have gotten as big, but they still could have pushed it as an alternative and made more money than they ever got from Google+.
So? You just unsubscribe from any that are shit. Unlike on google where you can't delete a site from the search results (which you can on kagi btw, which is great).
This was a solved problem in 2012. Ads are stories and can easily filtered skipped. Duplicate story checkers filter based on title/content similarity. Software available for iOS can be limited compared to windows or linux.
And there are websites that let you pay for add free.
The original point is simply that RSS would have gone the way of the web, in terms of the presence of advertising, had it become mainstream.
There being workarounds or other models possible doesn't change that and it also applies to the web today. As another commentor pointed out, RSS would have unique difficulties for adblockers as well.
It can only be empty if every website joined your plot. You might be shocked to find out how many respectable publishers are still out there.
But lets stick to the technology, first things first, how are you going to get me to subscribe to your feed? I just don't see it happening. Finding subscribers is incredibly hard.
You might be able to get one feed into my aggregator but I just press delete?
There are many fine RSS readers, but what I miss most was the social and community features.
The communities that spring up around things like GReader are like lightning in a bottle. Perhaps the companies that can afford to build things like that have concluded that other forms of social media are more profitable.
There still are niches of the internet that operate like a book club for excitable nerds, but they can be short-lived. Most eventually succumb to politics, lecturers, eternal September, and/or a zero-sum debate-team mentality.
On the other hand, I never used a thing in Google Reader other than subscribe to feeds. It's probably inevitable though that it would have become more of a social media product over time.
> It's probably inevitable though that it would have become more of a social media product over time.
Personally I would have welcomed that.
Google Reader did essentially become a social media product over time. By the end it was the primary social network for many of the people in my research area. I was mystified when they shut it down to redirect resources to yet another Facebook clone rather on building on a successful foundation that was already present.
By now most people realize that this is just how Google operates, by shuffling resources around in a blind panic. But many people can point to the first product shutdown that crystalized the realization for them. Google Reader was mine, and judging by the comments in this thread it served the same purpose for others as well.
Perhaps, but they were one more thing to log into, and the Reader/Gmail integration was unparalleled. Also, for those of us who really liked the simple Reader UI, nothing really ever replaced it. Not even the explicit attempts to mimic it.
I never used Reader but I see this question a lot, and feel that the framing of it clouds insight.
The problem isn't making things, it's all of the barriers to entry. For example, say it takes 2 weeks to make something. Since most of us have to work, that means a 1 year commitment to save enough to do it over a vacation. Which is really a 2 year commitment until a vacation, or 1 year of grinding, or the sacrifice of vacations altogether, or nights and weekends for an indeterminate amount of time. On top of that, most people struggle to save 10% of their income. So if a project has even a $10,000 budget, that requires $100,000 of income. The numbers quickly become so insurmountable that an adult will almost never find the time that they had as a teenager. A decade may pass in the blink of an eye with no forward progress on life goals (that's happened to me twice now). And most projects take 6 months to 2 years or more..
So major projects can only really happen through a corporate structure or with outside funding. Then the problem becomes organizational, or founders spend most of their time fundraising. Sure, occasionally someone makes something. But traditionally there are 100 failures we never hear about. Today that number might be more like 1,000 or 10,000.
Google axing projects on a whim is power imbalance. They hold all of the cards, have almost unbounded potential, but are so hyper-focused on profit today that they can't seem to innovate on anything. Major corporations today are basically black holes sucking up all available capital and talent, performing no better than small 2-5 person teams would if they had adequate resources.
I'm sure someone will react vehemently against what I'm saying. But we're discussing this on Y Combinator's website, a startup accelerator founded on the idea that small teams can pivot faster than the biggest companies. After writing this out, it seems that only startups can save us. Are any working on a Reader alternative, I wonder.
Also I dream of the day when the musical chairs of competition stop and we move to a post-scarcity society. I thought that was going to happen around the year 2000, but if anything we've slid backwards since wealth inequality is the highest it's been in human history.
One reason, which I don't see mentioned a whole lot, is that far fewer places offer a real RSS feed (complete with the article / post in question) than once did. If they offer an RSS feed at all.
I looked at aggregation options for news recently, and discovered that walled gardens and the use of custom CMS's by news organisations have made RSS aggregation of say breaking news all but impossible.
Sure, you can still get blogs, reddit, hacker news etc. But the days of essentially every website having an RSS feed are gone.
Imagine if, instead of simply shutting down Reader, Google had gradually and subtly integrated it more and more in to Google+ over time. Things could have turned out very different!
Imagine of Google+ had had a proper API for automatic posting. If I remeber right, there still wasn't one when Pages dropped.
So unlike Twitter and Facebook, I couldn't just set up my Wordpress site to feed all my posts to Google Plus. I had to go and manually post them.
They also had the real names policy still, so I have to post as my real name instead of the name I post online with everywhere else.
Plus was so poorly mishandled because Google does not understand people at all. You can't boul everyone down to a handful of easy categories to make it easier for alogrythms to manage.
> It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them
(citation needed)
This really feels like your (and a popular) reading of the situation, but isn’t as unequivocal as you make it seem.
To me it’s more like the iMac not having a floppy drive or no USBA ports on the newer MacBooks. Google saw that the web was trending away from blogs and written content. They removed one of the tools that people used to keep up with blogs and written content and accelerated the decline of blogs and written content.
People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right.
I'm fairly sure someone here can provide you with a proper citation, but in the meanwhile I was very much online here and elsewhere during that time and IIRC it was common knowledge at the time and AFAIK nobody came up with a better hypothesis.
And yet here we are, discussing things on a platform that is very akin to the web that Reader advanced. There was always going to be a market for non-Web 2.0 social media junk, albeit smaller. And frankly, trying to copy already successful iterations almost always fails (Google+). The resources that would have been required to maintain or even update Reader were minimal-- they were already wasting money on far more expensive dead end projects that were never going to make money.
This makes great business sense for Google. Personally though, it's the reason I decided to de-Google. I was running some dev stuff from my personal account, - just messing around and too lazy to set up a separate dev account. Then I started to hear stories of people getting locked out of their google account because they did... Something. Something totally unknowable that triggered some flagging system and boom, everything is gone. So I started looking alternative services, one company per service. The last things I use Google for are Maps, Photos, Android backup. The only data I care about are my contacts and photos, and I keep a separate backup of both.
I was satisfied with this, but a few months ago I set up a new gmail account for a business. I hadn't set up the real business email yet so I used this email so sign up a bunch of other services that our business needed. Tripadvisor, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Google maps (registered with our actual verifiable business address), Google webmaster/SEO stuff with our actual real website. I spent a full day doing this. Then I was busy for a week on other stuff and when I went back to use this account it was permanently locked. No recourse, just a message saying the account violated something and was permanently locked - with a text box to write a complaint if I felt this way unfair.
Of course, I did write the complaint, as politely as possible, including my business details and personal email. But I never heard back and I assume no one actually reads those.
I permanently lost access to the TikTok account (no big deal except that I had got a good name. But I made the account under duress from my business partner anyway). I was able to gain access to the Facebook easily. Tripadvisor took me most of a day to regain access. Google maps still, several months later, has the wrong name for our business.
Moral of the story: if you're using Google as a primary service for anything without keeping backups elsewhere, maybe... Don't.
It wasn't killed in favor of Google+. It was killed because nobody wanted to work on it and nobody wanted to fund it.
Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do that migration and solve some of the underlying problems.
Nobody wanted to work on it because there wasn't anything in it you could use for promo. "Kept Reader running" on your perf packet would get you a Meets Expectations at best. It might be seen negatively by some. To get a promo you needed big sexy new features. And at the time there was a promo factory that was sucking up all of the prime engineers (cough Google+ cough). It was also popular among employees, and there was a "Save Reader" campaign, but nobody cared enough to actually try to transfer in.
No director wanted it either. It wasn't profitable. It wasn't driving traffic to other Google properties. It was basically a money sink and nobody wanted to be tied to it as a failure.
Source: I was on Google+ (it was a promo factory). My team worked on a number of features that were meant to be used by third parties to tie into Plus. One of those was the comments system. Before the Google+ YouTube comment debacle there were plans to offer that comment system directly to third parties (similar to Disqus). We pitched Google+ taking over Reader and using it as a proving ground for that comment system. As a side bonus, blogs that signed on would already have a (hopefully) vibrant comment history. Management didn't see the value. Google+ comments rolled out to YouTube, it was a disaster, and all those lines of code were lost in time, like tears in rain.
> It wasn't driving traffic to other Google properties.
It wasn't driving measurable traffic. If the choice is A) people loving one of your products or B) people hating your brand. Behind which door is the money?
It's always seemed strange to me how singularly obsessed Google culture seems to be with the idea of promotions. All the weird things Google does seem to come down to "that's what gets people promoted". But... why? It doesn't seem like Googlers are systematically underpaid, so why is promotion such a focus?
Maybe this is part of the reason my own stint at Google didn't work out so well.
I think there's a complicated answer to that, with a ton of potential reasons and side effects. I can boil my reasons down to 3:
1.) I was L5, and while there were a ton of great L6s, there were not an insignificant number of ones who were terrible. I think L6 would have been the right level for me; L7 was beyond me at the time. People at higher levels don't really seem to work any harder. That translates to the feeling that I'm getting less pay than I deserve. This is why I ultimately left, and I immediately found a job at L6 equivalency.
2.) My manager pushed me towards promotion. My manager was L6, going for L7, and he had way too many direct reports (more than 20). His plan was to move up and have me fill in the vacuum behind him. Without someone to take on that role he was getting denied his promotion.
3.) I wasn't a Google lifer. I wanted to work for a smaller company where I have more of an impact on the bottom line, and I cared about what I was working on, maybe a startup. Unfortunately I have the three deadly "M"s for startup founders (Marriage, Mortgage, and Munchkins). My plan is to wait until the kids are out (1 "M" down). I could get the house paid off by that point with the extra equity that comes in a promotion (2 "M"s down). And I supported my spouse when she started her own business; she wants to support me in mine (that's all 3 "M"s). TL;DR - A promotion would have allowed me to close out all of my debts, freeing me up to not work at Google.
But I think on top of all of that, you have to get people to want to work on your project. Some projects are fun or have social clout, but come with no chance of promotion (I worked on Memegen for 4 years because it was fun). Some projects suck, but they come with promo opportunities. Projects that suck and don't come with a promise of promo don't get engineers applying to transfer in (this is what killed Reader).
Hey, just wanted to say I appreciate you sharing this insight. I still miss Reader even though it's been 10 years (10 years, holy crap), but this at least explains the 'why'.
If the intent of killing Google Reader was to push me towards Google+, then it was a terrible miscalculation on their part. I steered clear from it until it finally died.
I jumped to Feedly, then I switched to Inoreader for a UI closer to Google Reader.
Yes, this is why I've never considered Google Cloud and have kept everything on AWS. (Even when a client says the choice is Azure or Google... I'll take that Microsoft poison.) I have zero confidence anything Google produces will be around in a few years.
This is too bad too, because I have used Google's Cloud offering for some hobby projects (specifically related to Gmail and spam filtering, because... why would Gmail's spam filtering function?) and it seems really good.
I had someone a few years previous say they had never seen a bigger Google fanboy.
With the death of Reader I pretty much slowly pulled away and barely use Google anything these days.
Another commentor mentioned, it was the reason. This was right in the middle of the push for Google+.
It was never explocitly stated as a reason, but Google+ Pages rolled out just before or after Reader qas killed and its clear that the intention qas to drive content producers to run Pages for their blogs and websites instead of just letting people use RSS. Also, they wanted to encourage users to go to Plus and Pages to get feeds, bot RSS.
Google had killed a lot of other products but this was the first that clearly felt incredibly malicious and was the start of the end of "Don't be evil."
Nixing Wave was the beginning of the end for me. I know it was supposed to be some kind of failed experiment, and some features got rolled into Drive, but I had a bunch of Waves with my roommates and I miss it now.
Oddly enough, this was a watershed thing for me as well. It was when I finally had it driven into my head that it's mistake to rely too much on anything Google offers.
I say "oddly enough" because I never really used Google Reader. I did (and still do) use RSS heavily, but I use a different reader for it. But Google's actions struck me because RSS was such a fundamental aspect of the way things worked that axing Reader without offering a replacement seem to me like them axing search itself without offering a replacement.
If Reader can suffer such a fate, anything Google does can as well.
The service feed.ly, even its free version, seemed have implemented most of GReader's functionality. That said, somehow the vibe offered by GReader is gone, and I started to visit feed.ly less and less often.
2013 They delete everyone's subscriptions AND everyone's subscribers. Blogs come and go every day in large numbers. No more subscribers means it is time to let it go and go do something else. After years building an audience google moved in to embrace, extend, and extinguish. At the time I had many thousands of RSS subscriptions (in my own aggregator), I could see the post frequency decline and the comments dry up by the thousands.
2011 They killed blog search.
2007-2009 They hired Kevin Marks, Technorati's lead architect. And in 2014 Technorati died.
2005, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo created an initiative to help kill the eco system of organic links in comment. They chose to promote the Nofollow attribute to portray everyone and their references as spam. Spam is defined here as not obeying their webdesign orders. We might have gone a bit over the top with etiquette and "rules of civility" say 200 years ago but instruction to treat your guests as spammers??? Punishment if you don't comply!
You may link to a limited number of things from your article/blog post but it must be approved materials following their instructions. Sometimes one needs to point out others are wrong on the internet. It is arguably what we do online? I write down my thoughts, you tell me I'm wrong? The idea one should not link to the "wrong" publication is not constructive to the dialog.
But you can still post your articles to google wave and knol and to your google pages (joking) How about under that amateurish cookie banner defacing blogspot or google groups? usenet?
They are endlessly tinkering with the search algorithm trying to find worthy results, dictating how we should shoot web (or else!), but everyone and their mum already gave up making websites for fun. Even developers who could put something together in a few hours at best have websites with just their resume on it.
Its like.. Google talk > google hangout > google chat. Ahh, they finally stopped talking.
To me, Google Reader was the best social media site that I ever used. A lot of my friends used it: we followed each other and we would be sharing articles that showed up in our feeds that we found interesting. So most days I had these curated suggestions in my feed. We could also see each other's comments. It was awesome.
Reader hit personally, hangouts / circles, convincing friends to move to failed google ventures hit socially. Nexus hardware also didn't help. While I still use a lot of google products, I would never recommend google services to anyone again.
Yep, that was also the point when I started distrusting Google. I was a big Google Reader user and have some dozen geeky friends and we used to share our favourite posts (using the friends following feature).
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
Ironically, for me it was probably when they shut down Google+ that I finally changed my views on Google.
For me Google+ was a lot like HN:
Peaceful, quiet and beautiful and lots Open Source content and smart people.
I still look once or twice a year but it seems everyone who are into building social media wants to copy not only the very limited functionality of Twitter, down to its dumb limitations, but also its UX and aestheti.
The exceptions I am aware of are Hubzilla (which lools seriously interesting but just confuses me and has no obvious way to enter - and yes, I can create my own instance but I cannot find anyone else), Diaspora (which I think copies Facebook and which is also confusing) and MeWe (which superficially look like Google+ but insist on repeating Googles mistake WRT real name policy).
The trickle in invitation system with which they made it public was such a glaringly obvious mistake it still makes me mad.
So many people I knew had accounts there but stopped using it because their friends weren't there or by the time they could join their friends had already left because in turn their friends weren't there.
Yeah: they essentially deleted the early Android community and all of the knowledge and history that was built up around it, because all of those people were organized on Google+. And I think it is also important to note that shutting down that particular service felt like a particularly frustrating insult given how they had essentially rammed it down everyone's throats and forced it to get integrated into every single Google product in confusing and sometimes horrifying ways... and then it failed anyway.
The absolute obliteration of online groups was inexcusable, most especially as there were not provisions made for exporting or supporting contact, and in fact active obstruction of attempts to the same.
While this was a pretty monumental moment in how most of us viewed Google, and was probably bad for things like RSS adoption (it's fallen a lot since), I can't but help think that Google moving out of this field opened it up for some actual improvements
I use inoreader, and it's got features Reader never had, and probably never would have grown. If Google was still king of the castle, it probably wouldn't exist today
Jeez. Google really tarnished the hearts and minds of people everywhere when they shut this down. 10 years on, and people are still talking about it. I used it daily, too, and nothing really came close except maybe Feedly. I use Feedly now.
What angers me even more is that this was done in a push to get more people to use Google Plus to share news. Even though people shifted to other readers the network effect was killed. We are seeing this happen all over again with Twitter.
To echo many others, killing reader is when Google jumped the shark for its technical fans.
The love was so high, and the cost of maintaining it so (presumably) low, that it was nothing but a slap in the face. I've been de-googling myself ever since.
Does anyone here use the free Feedbro extension? I'm asking because it's working really good for me and I've never seen it mentioned here when it comes to RSS feed clients.
I think now it's better for us, because we discovered self-hosting RSS platforms, and other ways to use the RSS, but Google has missed a business opportunity to make some money, for example offer only 100 feeds to free plans and illimitate feeds to who bought Google One, or a cheap illimitated plan like $2-3/month. Indeed I'm paying Feedbin for the (great) service ($4,5/month)
> 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, after Google stabilized at it's market position, they no longer need these loss leader products, so they just removed it. A completely normal business decision, if you give it a look today.
I often use this as a reminder when I found myself developed a fan-altitude towards a company, so I can convert my altitude to "Nice product, I hope it make money" then proceed to use their product with an understanding that maybe one day I'll jump to another ship.
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 calculated move to kill Reader so people had to use Google Plus for sharing stories and commenting on them. This would goose the number of active Google Plus users and ensure Vic hit his targets for getting fat bonus payments.
This absolutely was not a case of "the product was finished and did all it needed to do"... people were pissed at what was happening and didn't want to move over to Google Plus (which completely lacked the core feature of reading RSS feeds, despite Gundotra claiming they would eventually implement it (shocker! they never did)).
The story of Google Reader's demise is purely a power grab by a mad exec/product leader that ran his product to failure and eventually was forced out of the company under allegations of being a sex pest to employees. Google Reader died for no good reason other than getting that piece of garbage some bonuses.
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 :/.
There's so much "that was the day Google died" sentiment in this thread, while in the same ten years the share price of GOOG has gone up from $19.87 to $90.63 (adjusting for splits), wildly outperforming the rest of the market. Goes to show that the company considers a much wider audience than just the tech crowd when making key product decisions.
You are confusing "the day Google died" with "the day the old Google died".
For a long time there Google was a cool company that was more than just something to make money. It was doing all this other stuff that didn't make money but made the world better.
These days it does about the same amount of "good" as any other company in the Fortune 100.
I don't know if you noticed, but the economic system you've built outright punishes companies and their CEOs if they don't extract maximum value and follow the herd.
Reading that post you can really see how little Google cares about the end users. They are closing products and removing features without providing a replacement and providing ridiculously short timelines for changing.
This always seemed like one of Google's worst decisions to me, and given that I remember the time they tried to spend $6 billion to buy Groupon, that's saying something. It was a plain unforced error.
Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sorts of influencers. If they had viewed Reader as a marketing expense, keeping it online would've been a no-brainer.
But instead, they instead viewed it as a consumer tool that didn't have a path to profitability, and they were 100% right, but then over the next few years, it became clear how many later Google efforts would've benefited from Reader existing. Google+ would've meshed well with it. That little Google "stuff you maybe want to see" panel on Android phones that would frequently make little notices like "hey, we think you like this site, there's a new article," and that was probably really involved to build, and also it absolutely sucked compared to just having Reader.
Ultimately I have to assume that it's a business org problem. No engineer was going to get a promotion keeping Reader alive. No manager was going to be able to grow Reader's audience 10x. No director would want to give up a half dozen of their engineers to keep Reader running just because it would significantly hurt Google to turn it off. And no executive cared about a product that small. The org structure didn't lead to someone incentivized to want to keep Reader going, despite its popularity inside and outside the company.
> 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,
Rational beings typically act according to the incentives they are provided, so if coders don't want to work on Reader for this reason, and management don't want to keep it around, it does point to the incentive structure being part of the problem. But it therefore follows that many of Google's bad decisions could be partly traced back to how the company is organised - probably the interlinked combination of the incentive structure, and success metrics.
What's interesting is that even the most biased insider must see that Google really sucks in some domains - and recognising (and/or generating) user value seems to be one of them. Several times, they've either spent big on products which just missed the mark from day one (Plus/Currents, Stadia, multiple text/chat apps), or killed products which already had major engagement (Reader, Inbox, Orkut).
What's interesting is that if they made user engagement the only major metric that mattered and incentivised accordingly, it would likely drive interesting behaviour - a real focus on user needs, iteration to optimise engagement in the longer term, improvements in customer service, etc.
Because if the product is not in red (pretty sure Google Reader was in green), closing it burn user trust. I know about opportunity costs, but I'm not sure Google is in a position where it bleeds money so bad that need to rationalize things.
And having one more product helps you synergize strategies across the board.
99.9% of Google users are completely unaware of their reputation around closing down products. Closing Google reader a decade ago is a cause that nerds like us on HN care about, but virtually no one else. And the same nerds like us also care enough about our online presence to not use Google products for a hundred other reasons anyway
Does gmail make a profit? Does search make a profit?
Neither of them are paid services, but they allow a huge advertising business to be built on top. Reader could have been the same
Whoever's maintaining and updating Blogger should be involved in picking that team. People keep declaring it dead, and they keep putting out major improvements and modernizations at least every few years.
Ok, that's great, because those are the people most likely to break a good thing. Maybe we can instead hire at least a few people (and given that Google uses shared database storage, build engineering, deployment, etc. I can't imagine we need many such people) who care more about things like a predictable schedule working on a low-stress product so they can have good work/life balance, to essentially just keep working software working correctly?
And then they get laid off and when it comes time for the behavioral interviews at their next company, they can’t discuss anything they did significant in STAR format.
And their skills are too rusty to pass the DS&A section of the interview and they didn’t do anything significant to show off their system design skills.
I work at $BigTech in the cloud consulting department (cloud app dev/“application modernization”) and the equivalent of “doing tickets” is being put on a project where you aren’t actually doing “consulting”, you’re doing “staff augmentation”. I avoid those like the plague.
Even though I’m not chasing after a promotion, I want to have something to show for the time I spent here when it comes to my next job either inside the company or outside.
That's the same problem, though, isn't it? Like, you are clearly not one of those people (based on your response there). And that's great: Google probably needs as lot of people like you to care to come up with new features and products. But the vast majority of jobs in this world--including ones that pay quite well, such as "doctor"--are not activities that are going to involve "scope and impact": they involve doing maintenance work using the established protocol--preferably with careful, predictable performance--on an existing system that someone designed or scoped potentially a long long time ago... one would expect most of software engineering would be the same way.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that a lot of people make “enough” so that they feel like the extra stress of worrying about getting ahead isn’t important as long as they keep up with inflation. I’m at that point.
But, I’m not at the point where I can quit working. I’ve been around long enough to know that you always need to be interview ready when it’s time to look for your next job.
Being a “maintenance developer” is a sure fire way to get caught up in the “expert beginner” trap - “1 year of experience 10 times” and make yourself unemployable .
Yes but as with roads and other infrastructure, building is easy and shiny, but what makes them useful in the long term is maintenance. A very boring and seemingly unprofitable task. But the essence of being.
Which describes for me everything that is wrong with Google these days. How can someone build a good product, if they are not even able to maintain a good product.
That is actually a very important observation about Google: products that Google engineers wouldn't elbow each other in the face to work on will eventually shrivel up and die.
If you have a server and are in the market for a new RSS reader service, try FreshRSS. The killer feature: ability to scrape the full article content with CSS selectors when only a truncated feed is offered.
It took me ten years to get back into using an RSS reader. Over that time, I found individual blog posts to read via links from Twitter. And there were a few that I subscribed to over email. But now with the whole Twitter debacle, a month ago I looked around to find a good RSS reader and installed NetNewsWire. It's nice to be back.
after ten years I would say it turned out to be a good decision, at leats for me.
Google Reader was "just a reader" and nothing more. They did not invest in it, it was stagnated but as it was working ok, I didn't have motivation to look for alternatives.
When Google Reader was announced to be shut down, it gave a great motivation to other reader's authors to develop their products. I would never replace current Inoreader with its insanse features with Google Reader again.
I imagine there's a small but significant overlap between the people who are still annoyed about the Google Reader Shutdown a full decade later and the people who are today making large scale cloud computing purchasing decisions.
I doubt Google took into account how damaging for their reputation is would be to shut down a product that had an audience that was small but extremely online and influential, both at the time and into the future.
So much this. I was lied to and strung along for weeks by Huawei support about a missing feature that should have been in their personal 4G dongles. Guess who blacklisted all Huawei gear in the last company I worked at. Guess who's now working in government IT procurement.
Not everything is numbers and loss centers. Don't lie and do the right thing. Treat people with honesty and respect. It's not that difficult.
I am not in charge of the biggest buys in the world, but that describes me. I have chosen AWS or Azure everytime over Google Cloud mostly because Google Reader shutdown.
I often wonder how much data they would have accumulated with Google Reader and Google Code that would now be a gold mine for training AI. Short sighted management!
No kidding, being able to know the exact type of content that interests you would make Google Assistant much more powerful, not to mention their other projects.
I finally managed to create a habit out of RSS after years of trying. What worked was,I know this may sound obvious, using a phone based reader instead of a desktop. It's like a categorizable, algorithmless social media feed now, full of content that people spent more than a few minutes writing, and it's great. Aside from regular feeds I feed in HN through hnrss.org, YouTube directly, and the odd twitter account through nitter.net.
How did you procure a list of feeds worth following? I really enjoy RSS, but I have had trouble finding enough content to fill a feed I can regularly check.
I realised that I was already browsing the web in a repetetive way, so RSS basically let me automate that. The daily loop would be something like...
- theguardian.com for UK news
- democracynow.org for US and world news
- various blogs for Emacs things (irreal, planetemacs, sachachua)
- ianvisits and londonist for London curios
- a few youtube accounts that I care about
- a friend's flickr
- websites of some NGOs I care about
- HN front page and replies to my comments (like yours!)
Better to start small and add to it bit by bit than drown yourself in feeds that you don't find you care about.
Good suggestion about Bartosz Ciechanowski's excellent site - will add it now.
Edit: looking at your post history, to add that I too have ADHD and this has helped me focus and keep ontop of web updates way better than I have done before. News websites like the guardian feel like they're designed to obliterate your concentration.
Well it's comfortable, newspaper- or magazine-style reading, right? For me, RSS is now inextricable from my iPad, I can't imagine reading news any other way.
A bit funny how Apple tried so hard with their Newsstand thing, and then later Apple News+ or whatever. The solution was RSS all along.
I pay for Feedly even though I had access to a very generous free plan. Their product is reliable and I use it every day, so it only seems fair to pay.
It was the social graph that made Google Reader great not the basic RSS functionality. That was really the game changer. It tapped into your friends feeds, what they liked and read.
You could follow other peoples recommendations, and the user belonged to a network of other users. It also made finding widely shared news items stand out and interesting blogs to follow easier and strengthened the network by doing so.
All the replacements afterwards didn't have this social aspect (or if they did they lacked the network needed for it) so they were like a graveyard socially.
Can't believe that has been 10 years. I had loads of interesting RSS feeds that I flicked through each morning, I think I exported them all to some other service but for whatever reason it just didn't work as well for me and I've never bothered with RSS since.
I've seen a few people mention FreshRSS so I might give that a go
Google reader died because Chrome to this date don't have a native RSS support. When Chrome was taking over the world, other major browsers (I only remember Firefox and opera) had native RSS support.
As people moved to Chrome, they started to forget and use RSS less and therefore the decline and the death of reader.
After 10 years im still puzzled how they could kill this product.
Absolutely minimal costs to run, free data for their search business and even the possibility to monetize their tool with ads.
They could have incorporated news and build a whole platform on it.
And what did Google do ... they replaced it with NOTHING.
A terrible business decision. It killed blogging and concentrated content into a handful of silos. They probably thought Google+ would be one of those but that failed miserably. Now search is something you do inside an app or website, not on google.com.
I remember when they shut it down and I haven't found one that I've loved like Reader. Reader was beloved to the level of apps like Notion and Figma and nothing has come along to replace it in a way that works for today's content content landscape. A lot has changed in ten years, content has exploded in volume and decreased in average quality and every app started to feel as noisy as my social feeds.
Our users at Upnext (https://www.getupnext.com) are saying the same, so we're moving into the space with our next major release. Upnext 2.0 will allow you to follow anything on the web (Newsletters, sites, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc). If you're interested in trying out the beta you can sign up here: https://upnexthq.typeform.com/to/MYfd4pcK
In the meantime, I'd love to hear what folks are using today and why they miss Google Reader.
I can recommend https://feedbin.com/ as a great replacement. It's $50 a year, but in return you get a service that is rock solid with an owner who is luckily very good in >> not << implementing features: no feature creep, no breaking changes, dead simple interface, no BS.
There was a very common character in many '90s movies, a sad old man who kept going on and on and on about 'Nam. Everything they said was about 'Nam, everything that happened reminded them about 'Nam, they kept telling the same story over and over again. Think Walter from The big Lebowski, Ned from South park, etc. The thing is it was only about 20 years between the end of the war and when these characters were created, ie not that long.
It's been 10 years folks, it's time to Let it Go. If you don't, sometime over the next 10 years you're going to become that character. I've already seen it happen too friends of mine with the Iraq war (not participating, protesting) it's not a good look.
Google Reader's shutdown made it realize that google didn't understand communities and platforms.
OK, you want to push Google+? Isn't google+ supposed to be a platform (and not simply an application). Let google reader be an application on top of the Google+ platform.
i.e. facebook is valuable because people share things on it. Why would you kill an app that is causing people to share things with each other. Leverage that user base.
Reader should have simply been one app built on top of the Google+ platform. Yes, this would involve rewriting it to some extent, but better to do things that maintain your user base, than do things that give people reason to leave.
Google has repeated this error over and over again since then, especially with their chat/messaging strategies. Don't give people reasons to jump ship. If you force them to migrate to something new, they can just as easily migrate away from you.
> OK, you want to push Google+? Isn't google+ supposed to be a platform (and not simply an application). Let google reader be an application on top of the Google+ platform.
They actually did start to integrate them. Google Reader had native sharing functionality for several years. Then in 2011 they suddenly removed it and replaced[1] it with sharing through Google+. My small network of Reader-using friends were split over wanting to join Google+, so that mostly killed our practice of regularly sharing links with each other.
"Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall. So starting today we'll be turning off friending, following, shared items and comments in favor of similar Google+ functionality."
i.e. reader could be used to add content to google+ but not to use google+
I could share a link on google+ but couldn't see any of the interactions unless I went to google+. If google+ was meant to be a platform, I should have been able to see the comments or other peoples shared items from within the google reader app. It should just have been one way to interact with google+ amongst many.
RSS is only dead to those who don't know how to use it or lack imagination, what a weird thing to say really.
Personally I've been using it for a myriad of things ever since 2007, just recently I discovered you can add .atom to GitHub releases e.g. https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy/releases.atom for a nice list of updates.
I like how neatly I can keep track of everything in one place without having to run around the web and deal with all the madness. If the feed is full of crap I can filter it out with www.feedrinse.com
RSS brings order to chaos, it keeps the signal-to-noise ratio under my control in a world bent on exploiting my web usage
I self host a yarr[1] instance. I love it, and it's pretty cheap to do so. RSS is still ubiquitous, if underground. Sometimes the feed links are hard to find but they're usually there.
It is wild to me how many people view this event as the divider of two eras of Google. And the same is true for me. Before this, I loved Google products - I was a fan of everything they did, I had an Android phone, things were working great. After they shuttered Reader, I never trusted anything they built the same way again.
It's wild to think that something that was not really used for me for work or education had such an impact on my perception of a company. But I'm not exaggerating when I say this had a bigger impact on me than Microsoft's three red lights issue on my XBox 360 or their PlaysForSure debacle.
Still mad about this too, like so many others here. I’ve been using Feedly since then, and it works for the RSS part. But I really miss the small community of people I discussed things articles with in Google Reader. Most of those people I no longer talk to. It was a unique form of sharing and commenting that just worked for us in a way no other products did.
Fast. $0. Straight-forward UI. As mass-market as any RSS Reader got.
Arguably it was The RSS Reader.
Killing Google Reader effectively killed RSS, shifting the gravity of the big tech companies from a fundamentally open & interoperable consumer web to a fundamentally closed silo.
Some people just liked the UI and features, but I think major reason why people are so butthurt about Reader, is that its existence was a very important symbol: it was a mainstream product from a well-respected company that elevated RSS to being a normal feature of websites, not just a niche protocol of open-web-loving bloggers.
And conversely, shutdown of the Reader was a wakeup call that big corporations exist to make money, and things that don't monetize well are not going to survive.
That was just past the peak of "Web 2.0" frenzy that used free public APIs for all kinds of "mashups". The APIs didn't even require developer keys and didn't have stringent rate limiting. Everyone was giving away their data for free! It's hard to believe now.
Around the time of Reader shutdown, Twitter locked down their API, significantly curbed 3rd party clients. Facebook and Google abandoned XMPP. Later Google Maps became serious about monetizing their API, and all those mashups and RSS feeds started dying down.
So in short, shutdown of Google Reader was the beginning of the end of Web 2.0.
Google Reader was killing Google Ads, so they decided to shutdown this service. RSS readers don't show ads in the same way of navigating in their websites.
My concern with this shutdown goes more with the data than the web app: in Google Reader you can go back in the feed even when the RSS doesn't contain all the articles.
Funny, I was at the O'Reilly conference in 2005 (Etech) when Google Reader was *launched*, and wrote a blog post about it[1].
Here was my take on the launch:
> At first I wondered if this would be the product that pushes RSS aggregators to the mainstream, but I'm beginning to think that a full-featured RSS reader won't ever cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream. A product like My Yahoo suits the purposes of a huge percentage of the mainstream audience, so unless their needs change significantly, there's no incentive to change to another aggregator.
Sadly this seems to be true: My Yahoo didn't make it, but the FB/Twitter/Insta/TikTok/Google News algos serve as curated feeds where non-nerds prefer to get their news. There was a lot of anger amongst the digerati when Google Reader shut down, but in retrospect it seems to have been the right move.
I probably gave up on using a feed reader about then. Instead, I subscribe a few things I care about by email, and hear about some things passively through social media.
The idea is that I can't keep with via email, I don't have time for it. For a while, I used "feed to email" for the services that didn't offer an email subscription, but I've since let that go.
Now I feel like I don't have time for "one more place for news" to add back a feed reader into the mix.
But I'm open to being convinced I should give Feedly or something else a try!
I tried several alternatives (including one which tried to be exactly like Reader), but I didn't get used to them. Up until then I always knew what was happening in tech and global news. Since Reader was killed I ended up relying on news websites and I find features by accident, not because I read updates on blogs/media. I feel I got disconnected from the bleeding edge of the web that day.
It's interesting you should say that, because I was up and running on an alternative platform pretty quick. RSS was and is so core to how I gather and consume information from the web that I'd be considerably unhappier without it.
Then I guess that also means I've now been using newsblur.com and its Android app for 10 years.
NewsBlur (and a handful of other RSS feed aggregators/reader apps) have continued to survive and offer some really useful functionality. None have really caught on in terms of discovering, sharing, commenting, and the other "social" functions of Google Reader. But they're still useful tools for those of us who like to read widely for both professional and personal reasons.
Ten years on and these threads still get hundreds of comments. This must be the world’s biggest salt mine. Ten years ago, millions of nerds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly compelled to moan about the loss of their favorite RSS reader for eternity. The volume of the protests are out of alignment with the value that any RSS reader could possibly give, so I assume the nerds are all crying out for the loss of their innocence.
In these threads I see a lot of RSS reader recommendations, but never the one I use, which is in fact the only personal software I pay for: https://bazqux.com
It started around when Google Reader shut down and had all the exact features Google Reader had. I migrated around 10 years and have been using it ever since. It's blazing fast, always available, and never changes. I just bought a lifetime subscription a few minutes ago because I plan to use it for another 10 years.
I remember it being a brilliant product I loved back then.
Killing it was a foolhardy move on GOOG's part. In part, due to the loyal fanbase it had, but just to keep something running that doesn't cost as much, and gets you a lot of goodwill was a false move.
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