5 ms·

I was a bit late to the Google party. I first heard about it when I was in my CS seminar in undergrad. Someone in class talked about a cool new search engine c

by Yhippa 10y ago

I was a bit late to the Google party. I first heard about it when I was in my CS seminar in undergrad. Someone in class talked about a cool new search engine called "googol" (what I thought it was called). I am not sure when but slowly I ditched Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves in favor of it and never looked back. Each time I try alt search engines like Bing or DDG I keep coming back. The second big Google moment I remember was when Gmail first came out. I wanted an invite so bad and eventually got one. I thought how cool is this that you can have a usable email client in the web browser. Not that it was the first one; I remember using Hotmail before that. But it had threaded messages! Of all the tech companies I've used in the past Google has treated me the best. They've done some unforgivable things like killing Google Reader but for the most part I'm happy with them.

ryanobjc 10y ago
the death of google reader was sad, but at the same time, RSS as a method of reading blogs and news has exited the building. Competing products have failed to provide the same kind of mindshare that reader apparently had. Social media has taken over, for better and worse. The internet has changed, and reader is one of those things that is solidly in the past.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Heavily disagree. I still use RSS constantly. Sure, I don't think RSS will be here 100 years from now, it'll die someday, but I've yet to see an actual alternative to it.
  - ryanobjc 10y ago
    Here's the issue, yes, you can disagree, and your workflow is different. But in general, most people get their news from social media now - mostly Facebook as it turns out. That is hardly a disputable fact. RSS is a technical detail of how sites publish, and in the end, people seem to not care about it. They care about end user features, which apparently includes their friends commenting. And that is what Facebook does. Yeah you could make an argument that Google Reader killed the promising RSS market, but I don't think that argument really holds a lot of water.

by Yhippa 10y ago

ryanobjc 10y ago

the death of google reader was sad, but at the same time, RSS as a method of reading blogs and news has exited the building. Competing products have failed to provide the same kind of mindshare that reader apparently had. Social media has taken over, for better and worse. The internet has changed, and reader is one of those things that is solidly in the past.

CaptSpify 10y ago
Heavily disagree. I still use RSS constantly. Sure, I don't think RSS will be here 100 years from now, it'll die someday, but I've yet to see an actual alternative to it.
- ryanobjc 10y ago
  Here's the issue, yes, you can disagree, and your workflow is different. But in general, most people get their news from social media now - mostly Facebook as it turns out. That is hardly a disputable fact. RSS is a technical detail of how sites publish, and in the end, people seem to not care about it. They care about end user features, which apparently includes their friends commenting. And that is what Facebook does. Yeah you could make an argument that Google Reader killed the promising RSS market, but I don't think that argument really holds a lot of water.