6 ms·

Ugh, Google Reader wasn't a "huge part of the web," it was a product offered by a company. If GR and RSS were basically equivalent then Google was right to conc

by beaner 8y ago

Ugh, Google Reader wasn't a "huge part of the web," it was a product offered by a company. If GR and RSS were basically equivalent then Google was right to conclude that RSS wasn't popular. RSS is an open standard and GR never had any compelling competition even though it should have if RSS were used widely at all. That people are still angry over this shows how out of touch many developers are with the real world / average consumers.

ucaetano 8y ago
Yeah, ask anyone outside of hacker news if they ever heard of Google Reader. Or RSS. Nobody.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Well RSS you know plenty of devs have... At least hears of it... I hope...
- ksk 8y ago
  Isn't this entire site dedicated to discussing things 'nobody' has heard about?
- CharlesW 8y ago
  > Yeah, ask anyone outside of hacker news if they ever heard of Google Reader. Consider that because of your highly-technical background, you may be underestimating the popularity of Google Reader and overestimating the popularity of Hacker News among the general internet-savvy population at the time.
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    Are you replying to me? That's exactly what I'm saying. Google Reader was an irrelevant product to the general public, only adopted by a very small niche of users, just as Hacker News is largely irrelevant and unknown to the general public.
    - pdonis 8y ago
      > Google Reader was an irrelevant product to the general public Do you have any numbers to back this up? From what I remember, it had at least several million users.
      - ucaetano 8y ago
        No hard numbers, but here are some estimates: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-reader-data-points.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-reader-data-... While CNN and Engadget had 24M and 7M RSS subscribers (which include Google Reader), the numbers drop quickly, with the 3rd one having 1.7M (NYT). Also, apparently the Google Reader Android app had <5M downloads at time of shutdown. Given that distribution and how fast it drops, I'd expect Reader to have had a couple million daily active users at time of shutdown, a tiny drop in the Internet & Google ocean. And you can go around and ask people who don't work in tech: nobody will have heard of Google Reader.
ehsankia 8y ago
Also, Google literally has hundreds if not thousands of products, but everyone just loves going back to the one decade old example of Reader being shut down. Also Reader was nothing special; there were dozens of other just as capable RSS readers before and many more since.
- smt88 8y ago
  They've killed or neglected many others. Google Voice and Hangouts seem to be on life support. Play Music will be killed soon too.
- csydas 8y ago
  Reader is a convenient example of a product with a large following that met a simple need. Google is notorious for product and feature churn; being one of their paying customers is exceptionally frustrating as you're basically at the mercy of the Product Management's whims when it comes to features in the product. (Either having them added or removed) No one is denying that other products have a similar issue, but with many other products, you have the option to not update or to stick to a version that meets your needs. With Google, there is no choice. ou Similarly, with their free-in-exchange-for-data products, you can't really count on anything being around that long because it's entirely built in Google's world. Any other standalone product, it works even if the company goes belly-up. Whether or not there are alternatives is kind of irrelevant -- not all alternatives are built equally, not all are cross-compatible for some functionality, migrating out of a product is not always simple, nor is migrating into a product. Google burns good-will with every product they off; the numerous iterations of chat application is a perfect and current example of this, as I don't doubt that there's probably already a new Google chat product in the works in some department that will be pushed out to Android shortly.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > being one of their paying customers How many of the "large following" of Google Reader were paying customers? As far as I can tell, the answer is basically zero. And that's the problem: Google has no idea how valuable its various apps and services are to their actual users, because the actual users are not the ones paying for them.
onli 8y ago
That does not really follow, nor is it a good point. A product offered by a company can be a huge part of the web, and if RSS and Google Reader were equivalent it still could've been popular. One can dispute both, saying that it was only known in a small circle even back then, but none of those points speaks to that. > That people are still angry over this shows how out of touch many developers are with the real world / average consumers. I'd rather see it as a lesson on how long developers remember if they feel betrayed by a company. Google Reader + Google Plus real name policy + its integration into Youtube was like a perfect storm to undermine Google's popularity, and then came Snowden. But it began with Google Reader, and I think that is why people remember. PS: Given who the author is I think no one can fault him to give in his reasoning much importance to RSS.
Kalium 8y ago
Google Reader was a huge part of the web experience for a small number of rather vocal people. It was a social network for many of them, and they feel like they lost something they built and owned. Myself, I used google reader. But only for RSS. So I just moved to a different reader and I've been fine ever since.
- RIMR 8y ago
  I guess I just don't see the point of complaining when a company shuts down their own product. It was a free product. It came with no guarantee. Just because you liked it doesn't mean you were entitled to it, and it doesn't mean Google did anything wrong by shuttering it. If you are still using RSS, you need to get with the program. RSS aggregators are out of style for a reason...
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    What are you saying? That we should use Atom instead? There is no important difference between the protocols. Or are you saying that we shouldn't use "simple syndication" anymore? Why, so we can let Facebook tell us what to look at? Yeah no thanks.
    - Kalium 8y ago
      I believe parent is saying that RSS became something publishers publishers did not prefer to Twitter, Facebook, and real-time search. Simple syndication might be preferable to users, but it is not for publishers.
      - jessaustin 8y ago
        Sure, but I don't see how that's a criticism of RSS? "Nobody uses it because users prefer it!" Besides it still drives e.g. podcasting; apparently those publishers are still making money.
        Kalium 8y ago
iuguy 8y ago
Lets look at technologies Google has captured then adversely affected either the adoption or implementation thereof. * Google Reader and RSS * Google Talk and Jabber * Gmail and self-hosted mail (not exclusively Google, but one of the big mail senders) The post's point was not that this is malicious, it's about what happens in big corporations with big ideas, big roadmaps and big reorgs. The fact that this has happened quite a few times is unsurprising.
- citrablue 8y ago
  I disagree on the third point. It was spam and scams that ruined self-hosted email. Gmail (and other large providers) became the solution to that because the network effects of centralized spam filtering made for an increasingly valuable service to users.
  - pasbesoin 8y ago
    Which started with their purchase of Postini, IIRC. One of the premier commercial spam identification and filtering services. Checking this, a quick search finds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postini Oh, and, perhaps a bit ironically with respect to recent conversation and concerns around Google and its acquisitions: In September 2011, Google announced it would discontinue a number of its products, including Google Web Security, which was acquired by Google as part of Postini.[7] On August 21, 2012, Google announced it would be shutting down all of Postini's web services and folding the service's users into Google Apps. I recall that, but it was no longer in my conscious memory.
- cwyers 8y ago
  How did Google adversely affect Jabber?
  - iuguy 8y ago
    They implemented Google Talk, which was fantastic and opened it up to the world with XMPP support, again, fantastic. Implemented Jabber federation which again was great. One of Google's stated goals was interoperability[1]. Because of this a lot of people moved from running their own Jabber servers to Gtalk. Google then started to add non-standard extensions[2] and in 2014 dropped all interoperability in favour of Google Hangouts integration, meaning that with a Gtalk account you could no longer talk to Jabber accounts. If this was Microsoft, the term that would be used would be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but it's probably more along th lines of team reorgs and changes in strategy. Google claimed trouble with spam XMPP federation, but this[3] article sums up some of the feelings at the time, and it's more likely that with a bunch of different products Google needed to consolidate efforts and the new team had different prioritie (like hangouts and wave at the time). [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk#History_of_interoperability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk#History_of_interop... [2] - https://developers.google.com/talk/jep_extensions/extensions https://developers.google.com/talk/jep_extensions/extensions [3] - https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-moves-away-from-the-xmpp-open-messaging-standard/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-moves-away-from-the-xmp...
yesiamyourdad 8y ago
Beg to differ. The RSS Reader landscape had many, many competitors, then Twitter happened and Facebook opened up to non .edu domains. And then Google Reader happened. RSS wasn't even the point. RSS as a standard is still in use. It's just that we've come to a point where it's a battle of platforms, and platforms mean money. Do you use Facebook, or Twitter, or IG, or Snapchat? I'd still like a unified experience, but none of those companies want to be a party to it. They want to take as much of the pie as they can get.

by beaner 8y ago

ucaetano 8y ago

Yeah, ask anyone outside of hacker news if they ever heard of Google Reader. Or RSS. Nobody.

giancarlostoro 8y ago
Well RSS you know plenty of devs have... At least hears of it... I hope...
ksk 8y ago
Isn't this entire site dedicated to discussing things 'nobody' has heard about?
CharlesW 8y ago
> Yeah, ask anyone outside of hacker news if they ever heard of Google Reader. Consider that because of your highly-technical background, you may be underestimating the popularity of Google Reader and overestimating the popularity of Hacker News among the general internet-savvy population at the time.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  Are you replying to me? That's exactly what I'm saying. Google Reader was an irrelevant product to the general public, only adopted by a very small niche of users, just as Hacker News is largely irrelevant and unknown to the general public.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > Google Reader was an irrelevant product to the general public Do you have any numbers to back this up? From what I remember, it had at least several million users.
    - ucaetano 8y ago
      No hard numbers, but here are some estimates: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-reader-data-points.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-reader-data-... While CNN and Engadget had 24M and 7M RSS subscribers (which include Google Reader), the numbers drop quickly, with the 3rd one having 1.7M (NYT). Also, apparently the Google Reader Android app had <5M downloads at time of shutdown. Given that distribution and how fast it drops, I'd expect Reader to have had a couple million daily active users at time of shutdown, a tiny drop in the Internet & Google ocean. And you can go around and ask people who don't work in tech: nobody will have heard of Google Reader.

ehsankia 8y ago

Also, Google literally has hundreds if not thousands of products, but everyone just loves going back to the one decade old example of Reader being shut down. Also Reader was nothing special; there were dozens of other just as capable RSS readers before and many more since.

smt88 8y ago
They've killed or neglected many others. Google Voice and Hangouts seem to be on life support. Play Music will be killed soon too.
csydas 8y ago
Reader is a convenient example of a product with a large following that met a simple need. Google is notorious for product and feature churn; being one of their paying customers is exceptionally frustrating as you're basically at the mercy of the Product Management's whims when it comes to features in the product. (Either having them added or removed) No one is denying that other products have a similar issue, but with many other products, you have the option to not update or to stick to a version that meets your needs. With Google, there is no choice. ou Similarly, with their free-in-exchange-for-data products, you can't really count on anything being around that long because it's entirely built in Google's world. Any other standalone product, it works even if the company goes belly-up. Whether or not there are alternatives is kind of irrelevant -- not all alternatives are built equally, not all are cross-compatible for some functionality, migrating out of a product is not always simple, nor is migrating into a product. Google burns good-will with every product they off; the numerous iterations of chat application is a perfect and current example of this, as I don't doubt that there's probably already a new Google chat product in the works in some department that will be pushed out to Android shortly.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > being one of their paying customers How many of the "large following" of Google Reader were paying customers? As far as I can tell, the answer is basically zero. And that's the problem: Google has no idea how valuable its various apps and services are to their actual users, because the actual users are not the ones paying for them.

onli 8y ago

That does not really follow, nor is it a good point. A product offered by a company can be a huge part of the web, and if RSS and Google Reader were equivalent it still could've been popular. One can dispute both, saying that it was only known in a small circle even back then, but none of those points speaks to that. > That people are still angry over this shows how out of touch many developers are with the real world / average consumers. I'd rather see it as a lesson on how long developers remember if they feel betrayed by a company. Google Reader + Google Plus real name policy + its integration into Youtube was like a perfect storm to undermine Google's popularity, and then came Snowden. But it began with Google Reader, and I think that is why people remember. PS: Given who the author is I think no one can fault him to give in his reasoning much importance to RSS.

Kalium 8y ago

Google Reader was a huge part of the web experience for a small number of rather vocal people. It was a social network for many of them, and they feel like they lost something they built and owned. Myself, I used google reader. But only for RSS. So I just moved to a different reader and I've been fine ever since.

RIMR 8y ago
I guess I just don't see the point of complaining when a company shuts down their own product. It was a free product. It came with no guarantee. Just because you liked it doesn't mean you were entitled to it, and it doesn't mean Google did anything wrong by shuttering it. If you are still using RSS, you need to get with the program. RSS aggregators are out of style for a reason...
- jessaustin 8y ago
  What are you saying? That we should use Atom instead? There is no important difference between the protocols. Or are you saying that we shouldn't use "simple syndication" anymore? Why, so we can let Facebook tell us what to look at? Yeah no thanks.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    I believe parent is saying that RSS became something publishers publishers did not prefer to Twitter, Facebook, and real-time search. Simple syndication might be preferable to users, but it is not for publishers.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      Sure, but I don't see how that's a criticism of RSS? "Nobody uses it because users prefer it!" Besides it still drives e.g. podcasting; apparently those publishers are still making money.
      - Kalium 8y ago

iuguy 8y ago

Lets look at technologies Google has captured then adversely affected either the adoption or implementation thereof. * Google Reader and RSS * Google Talk and Jabber * Gmail and self-hosted mail (not exclusively Google, but one of the big mail senders) The post's point was not that this is malicious, it's about what happens in big corporations with big ideas, big roadmaps and big reorgs. The fact that this has happened quite a few times is unsurprising.

citrablue 8y ago
I disagree on the third point. It was spam and scams that ruined self-hosted email. Gmail (and other large providers) became the solution to that because the network effects of centralized spam filtering made for an increasingly valuable service to users.
- pasbesoin 8y ago
  Which started with their purchase of Postini, IIRC. One of the premier commercial spam identification and filtering services. Checking this, a quick search finds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postini Oh, and, perhaps a bit ironically with respect to recent conversation and concerns around Google and its acquisitions: In September 2011, Google announced it would discontinue a number of its products, including Google Web Security, which was acquired by Google as part of Postini.[7] On August 21, 2012, Google announced it would be shutting down all of Postini's web services and folding the service's users into Google Apps. I recall that, but it was no longer in my conscious memory.
cwyers 8y ago
How did Google adversely affect Jabber?
- iuguy 8y ago
  They implemented Google Talk, which was fantastic and opened it up to the world with XMPP support, again, fantastic. Implemented Jabber federation which again was great. One of Google's stated goals was interoperability[1]. Because of this a lot of people moved from running their own Jabber servers to Gtalk. Google then started to add non-standard extensions[2] and in 2014 dropped all interoperability in favour of Google Hangouts integration, meaning that with a Gtalk account you could no longer talk to Jabber accounts. If this was Microsoft, the term that would be used would be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but it's probably more along th lines of team reorgs and changes in strategy. Google claimed trouble with spam XMPP federation, but this[3] article sums up some of the feelings at the time, and it's more likely that with a bunch of different products Google needed to consolidate efforts and the new team had different prioritie (like hangouts and wave at the time). [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk#History_of_interoperability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk#History_of_interop... [2] - https://developers.google.com/talk/jep_extensions/extensions https://developers.google.com/talk/jep_extensions/extensions [3] - https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-moves-away-from-the-xmpp-open-messaging-standard/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-moves-away-from-the-xmp...

yesiamyourdad 8y ago

Beg to differ. The RSS Reader landscape had many, many competitors, then Twitter happened and Facebook opened up to non .edu domains. And then Google Reader happened. RSS wasn't even the point. RSS as a standard is still in use. It's just that we've come to a point where it's a battle of platforms, and platforms mean money. Do you use Facebook, or Twitter, or IG, or Snapchat? I'd still like a unified experience, but none of those companies want to be a party to it. They want to take as much of the pie as they can get.