23 ms·

RIP Google Reader

• danesparza 6y ago
  Still bitter about this. This helps my grief. Thanks.
• adkadskhj 6y ago
  I didn't use Google Reader much, what did it do for you that made it memorable? Or perhaps, what are other Readers failing to deliver?
  • martini333 6y ago
    No competition back then.
    • ambirex 6y ago
      The last interaction/version of Bloglines was really quite good, but at that point the user base has switched to Reader.
    • detaro 6y ago
      There were multiple options you could migrate your feeds to when it was shutdown. So I wouldn't say "no competition", but more some specific features that the competition didn't have.
  • selykg 6y ago
    For me, it wasn't so much Google Reader itself, it was a free feed sync source. So I could subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, then use a 3rd party app (like Reeder or any number of others) to view the feeds I was subscribed to, and it would provide all the tracking and syncing so to speak. It fills the gap of services like Feedbin, Feedly, and others. Except it was "free" and now I have to pay $50/yr for Feedbin. While this isn't a big deal, I don't track that many feeds so it's kind of unpleasant to pay $50/yr for the 10 feeds I track.
    • benhurmarcel 6y ago
      Feedly has a free tier that's more than sufficient for such light use.
      • selykg 6y ago
        Problem with Feedly, in my experience, has been the rate they provide updates to feeds. I may track these 10 or so feeds which is low, but I do want timely updates to those feeds in my RSS app. Seeing delays of multiple hours is a lot less useful to me in several cases. I realize I am sounding a bit whiny here. I just didn't have these problems with Google Reader and it sucks that the free option that worked well disappeared. At the end of the day though, $50/yr isn't a big deal, it's just a combination of everything becoming a damn subscription and how I'm sort of tired of subscriptions. Subscription fatigue is real for me.
    • pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
      > So I could subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, then use a 3rd party app (like Reeder or any number of others) to view the feeds I was subscribed to, and it would provide all the tracking and syncing so to speak. Can you explain what this means? What's involved here? How does it differ from dumping all your RSS feeds into an ordinary RSS reader?
      • selykg 6y ago
        Think of Google Reader as a 3rd party sync API, and a variety of tools use this API. lets use Twitter as an example. Google Reader is Twitter with their API Reeder (or your RSS reader with support for the API) is like Tweetbot. This isn't a great example, because read status of feed items and all that is handled by Google Reader. But it's close.
  • taeric 6y ago
    It actually had really good social integration with gmail. I could have conversations with close friends on items in my feed. Hilarious, as all replacements were trying to build a social interaction.
  • schuke 6y ago
    I had a great time with my friends on it. I've never had that much good discussions with my friends about anything since.
• prepend 6y ago
  Never forget. Never trust.
• theandrewbailey 6y ago
  "On March 25th, 2021 Google Reader will have been dead for longer than it was alive"
• liopleurodon 6y ago
  loyal feedly user. thanks feedly
• noman-land 6y ago
  A very sad day when this was killed. It was my favorite social/intellectual experience at the time. Really never recovered from it.
  • dccoolgai 6y ago
    The Web hasn't recovered from it, either. In retrospect, they obviously did it to pave way for AMP. Now that AMP is gone, maybe there's a small chance they could bring it back.
    • Reason077 6y ago
      I dunno. They easily could have integrated AMP into Reader, couldn’t they?
      • exikyut 6y ago
        It was a different time. Back then, people would have shot it dead for tech-astroturfing. Today, people wouldn't see the point since AMP is more convenient anyway. /s
    • rhacker 6y ago
      I'm guessing it's not coming back - it competes with google news which makes Google money where reader did not.
    • SquareWheel 6y ago
      AMP doesn't cause any issues for RSS readers. People are still using Inoreader, Feedly, etc just fine today. > Now that AMP is gone Why do you say that?
      • Reason077 6y ago
        > "Why do you say that?" Recently it was reported that Google will no longer give search-result priority to AMP pages. Which means any incentive for publishers to support them is gone.
• gdsdfe 6y ago
  I really do miss google reader from time to time ... I think I've stopped consuming RSS since it went away
  • emayljames 6y ago
    Yeah, folk will say "but use xyzRSS" and just not understand how well curated Google Reader was. It was immense for content.
    • jasonjayr 6y ago
      Is there anything integrating rss + the fediverse in the same way for curation?
      • emayljames 6y ago
        I tried many many others and the feeds just felt stale. You will maybe get some "but this is close", but because everyone in tech used GR, they will never have the same level of content.
• cletus 6y ago
  Whatever was said at the time, I’m convinced Google Reader was collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had social features (which I honestly never used) and anything social had to be G+. Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.
  • vanderZwan 6y ago
    Because Google Reader was the social network for people who don't like talking about themselves but about things on the web that they find interesting, and nothing since has ever come close to it.
    • addicted 6y ago
      Also because killing Google Reader single handedly killed a bustling and fast growing RSS based ecosystem. Google Reader was the first RSS client to incorporate social features with RSS. To that it added an extremely fast web client (I can't think of any web client that even existed before), and syncing across devices. A LOT of software in the RSS ecosystem relied on Google Reader for their syncing capabilities. It had basically become the defacto backend for the majority of RSS readers. As an example, I used NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and while I rarely (never?) used the Google Reader interface, NNN relied on my Google Reader account to backup and sync my feeds. Google Reader had basically become essential infrastructure in the RSS ecosystem.
      • giobox 6y ago
        While it can't have helped, I can't "single handedly" blame Google for the death of RSS. By 2013 RSS was already arguably dying all by itself. RSS was awesome in late 2000s during the Web 2.0 mania and it was common to see entire site's contents reproduced in their feed. By 2013 I'd argue many sites had realized giving their full text content away with no ads in the RSS feed wasn't exactly helping their bottom lines and started delivering ads and content snippets instead. The intent of course was to drive you back to the site where ads can be served more reliably. When these practices became widespread RSS quickly lost its shine for me and others I'm sure.
• davidhariri 6y ago
  RIP Reader. I use Feedly + NetNewsWire. Great combo.
  • criddell 6y ago
    I use NetNewsWire on my iPad and it's outstanding. Totally free (no ads) and open source (MIT). Brent Simmons is the project lead and he has a long history with RSS and clearly loves it.
• psanford 6y ago
  All these years later, I still use the Google Reader frontend (with newsblur as the backend). It turns out that Reader's UI assets were stand alone enough that you could just implement the backend API and it all would work. I saw this originally in a project for viewing your Reader Takeout data[1], and just built on that idea to make my own personal Google Reader experience. [1]: https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead
  • psanford 6y ago
    Actually, that project still has the nostalgia Reader interface online: http://readerisdead.com/reader/view/#overview-page http://readerisdead.com/reader/view/#overview-page
    • hopesthoughts 6y ago
      Wait, can I actually put feeds inside of it? I mean does it actually work? The question being does it support today's feed formats, like Youtube feeds?
  • tech234a 6y ago
    There was also a browser extension [1] that locally reimplemented parts of the Google Reader interface. It has since been removed from the Chrome Web Store. [1]: https://crxcavator.io/report/cemddjmmnfebpkpkonmbkdmakilpkcid/0.1.8 https://crxcavator.io/report/cemddjmmnfebpkpkonmbkdmakilpkci...
• ambirex 6y ago
  The real missed opportunity for Google was expanding reader's social/collaboration features into a more robust social network.It would have saved them from trying to ham fist Google+ for everyone. It could have been a home for Wave and Buzz type of tech. Instead they threw out the baby, be damn the bathwater. That being said, I have a found NewsBlur a great replacement.
  • EarthLaunch 6y ago
    I was aghast when they killed Reader in order to promote G+. It was obviously the kind of "strategic business" decision that I would only expect from a failing organization, which changed my view of Google. The organic, 'bootstrapped' way forward for Google would have been to carefully expand the social features of Reader, which had a large loyal following. Instead they forced it to stagnate then sacrificed it upon their stupid G+ altar trying to copy Facebook years late. SO lame.
• Reason077 6y ago
  I still miss it terribly. And it’s a constant reminder that no matter how useful or popular it is, any Google product/service/API/platform that you use or depend on could be shut down at any time.
• markappel 6y ago
  While I share the lament, I happily pay for https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ which innovated beyond what Google would have been willing to do. Highly recommended.
  • cecida 6y ago
    Ya, I signed up for it a few weeks ago based upon a recommendation here. It's a brilliant RSS reader. Has every feature I want.
• draw_down 6y ago
  For me, when I see old screenshots like this, it makes me realize how festooned with garbage UIs used to be. Just sooo much unnecessary shit. Everywhere. I also don't love the state we're in today, when useful things are hidden or just removed altogether. But man, I can appreciate how we got here.
  • tomc1985 6y ago
    Festooned with garbage? Nearly everything in that screenshot serves a purpose. Like is there a single thing in that screenshot that looks superfluous?
    • draw_down 6y ago
      Just because something could be used doesn't mean I need to be looking at it right this second. And it turns out that every single div doesn't need a border.
  • perryizgr8 6y ago
    > festooned with garbage UI Huh?! Can you point out a single UI element in that screenshot that doesn't serve a useful purpose? Reader's UI was basically perfect. I believe that's what proved to be the end of it at Google. There was no more changes to be made to it. So Google had to shut it down, because they absolutely have to be doing new stuff.
• harha 6y ago
  Let us also remember Inbox, haven’t been able to manage day through my calendar, tasks and email in one place as seamlessly since that one was sunset.
  • politelemon 6y ago
    I am still holding out naive, idiotic hope that someone will build an Inbox replacement. And not the box-ticking feature-parity that they still haven't delivered on, but the actual intelligent workflows, while maintaining a clean uncluttered experience, that Inbox was so good at. I do understand though, that a lot of people who didn't "get" Inbox will not understand this sentiment either. But there are dozens of us! The closest I'm finding now, strangely, is Outlook, and MS Todo. Through a combination of flagged emails and the archive function. Though it's still in multiple places and not one. SparkMail app helps as well with slightly advanced snoozing, but nowhere near the Inbox experience. I'm bitter now, thanks
    • PascLeRasc 6y ago
      I think I’ve tried basically every email client out there since Inbox shut down and haven’t found a satisfying replacement. I’ve found Twobird to be the closest though.
    • harha 6y ago
      Having To-dos and Calendar entries pop up at the right time, eliminating the need to switch apps in the daily flow, it was all such a work of genius. I never got used to Outlook, though I don't recall why, and now I'm back to what macOS has, even though it feels so basic and I sometimes end up unprepared for meetings or have them in the wrong time zone because I add them through Mail but can't edit them in Calendar. Inbox without Google would be such a great product, if I had a team to work with I would take on this problem (I'm a PM happy to contribute what I can if anyone is interested): - The main useful features don't have that many "smart" parts, I think it would take some translation layer into all the different protocols to appear seamless. That's probably the hardest part to implement given how ancient e-mail, calendar, tasks are (at least from a user perspective, I must admit, I don't know much about the protocols). - The "smart" features, such as trips could be implemented as plugins. - Add an interface for custom plug-ins and this would integrate so well both in individual workflows of power users and teams.
• progx 6y ago
  Welcome to killedbygoogle.com
  • seaman1921 6y ago
    typical - waiting all day just to bash Google on HN without any context. Reader was deprecated 8 years ago.
    • progx 6y ago
      Ok, sorry, killed by google 8 years ago. Better?
• vzaliva 6y ago
  I was first dissapointed when they close. Then I started using Feedly. It turns out quite well: I they are as powerfull, but I have one less entangelment with google ecosystem.
• ndr 6y ago
  I recently started to consume content via RSS again. It turns out, most of the blogs I care about have a working RSS feed. I'm using newsblur (no affiliation) and it's working quite well, I no longer need to poll the websites, or wait for posts to appear here or on Twitter. The nicest side effect is that checking newsblur before HN/Twitter limited my mindless scrolling, although this comment proves it didn't eliminate it.
  • vanderZwan 6y ago
    Newsblur also lets you subscribe to YT channels, which is much nicer experience than YT's own way of handling subscriptions
    • addicted 6y ago
      {RSS Reader} also lets you subscribe to {Feed based Service} which is a much nicer experience than {Feed Based Service}'s own way of handling subscriptions. ----- I've found that the above statement works for a very large set of values for {Feed Based Service}. One really great example was when I setup Redmine (open source Jira alternative) for my company's project management needs. Instead of having it email me notifications, having them in the Reader was amazing.
    • waterhouse 6y ago
      Hmm, interesting. Is it based on Youtube's raw RSS features? Because you can use RSS for an entire channel, or for a playlist, but the latter doesn't work if there are more than 15 (IIRC) videos in the playlist. Does Newsblur do something specific to Youtube to work around that? Also, does any RSS reader have some kind of regex filtering option? "I want all the items from this RSS feed that match the following regex". While I'm at it, how about getting the output of an arbitrary program? (Use case: websites that have a page with what I want—e.g. every article published by a certain author—but have no built-in RSS functionality. Ideally I would specify the program as "curl [URL] | egrep -o [stuff]", and it would generate new RSS entries anytime that output changed.) I know I can kludge together a cron job that runs such a program and generates a file, and point my RSS reader at the URL "file://path/to/output.xml", but is there anything with built-in functionality like that?
• ortusdux 6y ago
  I've kept my Google Reader bookmark next to my Gmail bookmark as a reminder to not get overly invested in their products.
• ChrisArchitect 6y ago
  geez, when was this made, recently/now? It's like come on, "dead longer than it was alive"..... there were so many contributing factors to the environment and shifts of the day when it happened -- this endlessly bringing it up shows like so much unawareness of surroundings/history and also, what other options took its place / fill the void / RSS is not dead! etc
• conesus 6y ago
  It was in the summer of 2008, three years after Google launched Reader and had at least 5 million users, when I decided to write my own RSS reader. There were just so many features I wanted that I knew Google would never build and for some strange reason I thought I could make money with my own opinionated take on a news reader. Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I'd heard the news. That was a difficult month as I scaled (and wrote about scaling[0]), since by then Google Reader had 10 million active users. After Reader was sunset, about 5 million found their homes on the news readers that remained. It's strange to think that naively competing with one of the big platforms paid off, but there's plenty of companies that did well in the wake of a giant choosing to ignore the ecosystem near their feet. [0]: https://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur https://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-s...
  • blakesterz 6y ago
    I've been with you since! Newsblur is still the way I keep up with the things I find important. I actually discovered HN on the suggested feeds thing on Newsblur!
  • ecliptik 6y ago
    Thank you for Newsblur, it's one of my essential apps and I use it for almost everything; RSS feeds, reddit, youtube, twitter, newsletters, even gemini:// via proxy. It's a solid product, and the amount of work you've put into it shows and I plan to remain a customer for years to come.
    • conesus 6y ago
      Then you'll be excited to see the upcoming redesign that I have yet to publicly launch (but want a few users on to test the waters early): https://beta.newsblur.com https://beta.newsblur.com
      • ecliptik 6y ago
        Looks awesome, replaced my pinned tab with the beta version and will put it through it's paces. Thank you!
• petercooper 6y ago
  I find https://feedbin.com/ https://feedbin.com/ almost identical (Feedly feels a bit too different for my liking, but is clearly the most popular) but it also feels like times have moved on and I don't find myself using it in the same way. The blogosphere isn't quite what it was back in the late 00s.
• slk500 6y ago
  No more drama. Emacs + elfeed is the savior
• ava1ar 6y ago
  Was a huge disappointment when google made a decision to close it. I remember lots of services appeared pick up the audience. I switched to BazQux back then and still using it (bought lifetime license after several years and enjoying it every day).
• Glench 6y ago
  Shout out to https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com, a modern Google Reader replacement and the only SaaS I pay for. I'm not affiliated, just really love it. It's been solid and awesome for me for over 7 years now.
  • listenallyall 6y ago
    Best G.Reader replacement by far!
  • jonpurdy 6y ago
    Shout out to Feedbin! It was created shortly after (I think) Google announced the Reader deprecation. I signed up around the first day and have been a subscriber since then. It even has a well-documented and supported API. I hope Ben keeps running it for many years to come.
    • sjs382 6y ago
      Same. It's definitely the SaaS that I'm happiest using.
• xiphias2 6y ago
  Complaining about Google killing Reader and Google's monopoly power in the same page is strange. Actually killing reader made Reader competitors the chance to develop, didn't it? I think there was a trend for content providers to share content on multiple platforms directly instead of with RSS, that's what people may not like.
  • Uehreka 6y ago
    Not a Reader user, so maybe I’ve got this wrong, but I think what many people are complaining about boils down to something like this: Google, with their monopol-ish resources, created a free reader app that was so good that it was hard for other RSS readers to match them (on features, and certainly on price). As a result they consolidated most of the market around RSS readers (even though RSS remained an open protocol). So when they killed Reader, it may have made it possible for other RSS readers to finally compete openly, but it also shook things up so much that many Reader users may have just dropped RSS entirely, shrinking the RSS community and the audiences of RSS-based blogging. Sure, in an efficient market customers would simply flow from the large and killed product to the new alternatives. But in our inefficient world, it’s possible that the barrier of having to export and import feeds was too high for a lot of users (even with things like Reader Takeout). One might argue that if that’s the case, then perhaps all those RSS audiences weren’t actually all that engaged in the first place. But I’d argue that it’s actually quite possible for genuinely good things to be very fragile.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• richardjs 6y ago
  I was a heavy Google Reader user and mourned it for years. At some point, though, I discovered Miniflux [1], and haven't really missed Reader since. What I do miss from the Reader days, though, is widespread RSS support. I wonder if the death of such a prominent RSS reader gave sites "permission" to stop supporting RSS, and pushed RSS into further obscurity. Anecdotally, it feels like RSS is a feature often not carried over after a site redesign. [1] https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/
• drzaiusapelord 6y ago
  I believe this was just a money decision. You really can't run all those fancy tracking ads and other engagement/conversion tricks within RSS readers, or if you did, people would just switch to readers that didn't support ads and tracking. RSS was, mostly, just content that you could format and read as you like and that's a pretty big threat to operations like Google who rely so much on ads and tracking. Reading mode in browsers is the middle ground that sorta works. We still get presented with ads and tracking but get the option to view things in a sane format. Of course, we don't get the neat all-in-one aspect we had with RSS. We still, somehow, are using the bookmark system for visiting and consuming the web.
• Element_ 6y ago
  Seeing that screenshot makes me remember how much I miss the original simple HTML UI used in all Google Apps. So fast,light weight, and it just worked.
• dbrereton 6y ago
  As someone who was born too late for Google Reader, I genuinely don't understand why people bring it up every 5 minutes. There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, some of which have the branding of "it's just like Google Reader", so what am I missing here?
  • outime 6y ago
    Nostalgia and attacking Google (or almost any big corporation) is usually very welcomed here.
    • twelve40 6y ago
      Well in this case it's fully deserved. I was in shock when G started nudging me to share my photo albums. They came pretty close to scamming me into sharing random crap I would never imagine sharing (reminiscent of Linkedin scraping and blasting your entire address book), all for the sake of promoting stupid, closed-off G+. And Google Reader, which I used on a daily basis until its death, probably fell victim to the G+ effort. I use Newsblur as a replacement (thanks conesus!) but Google could have used their influence to promote RSS and make the web much more consumer-friendly, now without that everyone crawled off into their own walled garden like Facebook, etc. A number of people I read ended up only on Facebook unfortunately. RSS, while still around, never really took off to its full potential, and the G+ fiasco contributed to that.
  • kleer001 6y ago
    Read the full comments and you should get it. > There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, Sure, but Reader was basically the first. If you've never lost something you've loved it's impossible to understand.
  • bluedays 6y ago
    Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything. Now they get rid of things left and right. It was basically the beginning of the end.
    • 6y ago
• BuckRogers 6y ago
  I never did use Google Reader, having been used to Firefox Live Bookmarks. Today I'm using the Livemarks extension. Just taking a brief look at alternatives, because Livemarks was a very early response to Mozilla removing Live Bookmarks in 2018, Feedbro looks to be even more popular and more Google Readerish. It's more than I'm looking for but it looks good for the Google Reader crowd. On my phone (iOS) I use Inoreader.
• thrower123 6y ago
  I still pay for theoldreader, for some reason, though I don't really keep up with my RSS subscriptions anymore. Twitter chews up the time I used to spend on blogs, and I don't even get through the emailed newsletters that I used to check on daily.
• baxter001 6y ago
  When I'm bored and looking for distraction, I'll often get as far as reader.goog in the address bar before I remember :(
• lcfcjs 6y ago
  I hated Google Reader, it always favored right-wing news outlets, no matter how I messed with it.
• sdfjkl 6y ago
  Will you stop crying about Google Reader already and move on please. RSS is alive and well if you want it to be. I've switched to theoldreader.com when Google pulled the plug, imported my feeds and have been there ever since. I'm subscribed to 125 feeds, 72% of which had new posts in the last year (following super low volume things is one of the many advantages of RSS). Most of the inactive ones have simply atrophied or ceased to exist entirely rather than turn off their RSS feeds. I never log into YouTube but follow many channels via RSS instead. There's also Twitter gateways, although the one I've used stopped working and most everyone I care about has moved on to Mastodon anyways, so I haven't bothered with finding another. I still regularly subscribe to new blogs, Youtube channels and other stuff via RSS and don't really know any other sane way to follow such things. I'll certainly not go and bookmark a bunch of sites and then click on them to see if they have posted something new or not - that would be insanity. So yes, Google took a big dump on RSS, but then that's what Bigcorp does. Get on with it - RSS is fine. Build more feeds into your webthings because if it doesn't have RSS the grumpy old nerds like me will probably not look at it twice! :-P
  • fbnlsr 6y ago
    I quickly glanced at theoldreader.com front page, and it looks nice. I tried setting up a new account and it immediately proposed to try out 14 days free "premium". Not only do you have to click on a tiny link to discover what the premium brings, but there is no information on how much the premium plan costs. That's a really bad UX.
    • bpodgursky 6y ago
      Dunno why they don't advertise it, but this is what I pay: > Description: $25 per year - Up to 500 feeds
• memechunk 6y ago
  There are two internet services in my lifetime that I was devastated to see shut down (at the time): Google Reader and lala.com.
• GNU_James 6y ago
  I've been using Thunderbird as my RSS reader for years. Who in their right mind trusts Google?
• tommoor 6y ago
  Going to take this opportunity to tell everyone that NetNewsWire has gotten really good – it's free, looks great on Big Sur, syncs via iCloud, I can't recommend it enough.
• kepano 6y ago
  A few folks here are asking why old timers still mourn Google Reader when there are so many good alternatives available now. I agree, there are. It even opened the door for many more tools in the space. I love using Feedly, Reeder, and NetNewsWire. But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue to fray. At the time Google felt like an important part of the open web, and RSS was part of the glue that held it together. Discontinuing Google Reader felt like an admission that Google did not stand for those values anymore.
  • kawfey 6y ago
    Why are you using 3 different readers?
    • kepano 6y ago
      I use Feedly for sync, Reeder for iOS and NetNewsWire for Mac
  • ghaff 6y ago
    >But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue to fray. That's really the thing. People lash out at Google because it's a concrete target. And probably one of the worse examples of Google killing something that seemed clearly in the purview of an early mission to organize information. I'm often a bit surprised that Blogger has survived. But it's also emblematic of the fact that a fairly niche open web activity was becoming even more niche.
• misiti3780 6y ago
  Does anyone know why google didnt open source it?
  • mattmcknight 6y ago
    Guessing that it was dependent on too many internal services.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• buss 6y ago
  I don't understand the hagiography. Any one of us can build a replacement instead of lamenting reader's demise. If you miss reader so much then rebuild it.
  • dr-detroit 6y ago
    The point is these elites' lives are so comfortable they expect everything to be effortless, familiar, and bad things should be relegated to the realm of other people.
• aasasd 6y ago
  So basically, one can begin slapping together a competitor as soon as Google rolls out a service—because the service is likely to go the way of the Reader in a few years.
  • arcticbull 6y ago
    Indeed, Google's launch validates a market, creates enthusiasm, and once they shut it down you can be there to catch the users.
    • javajosh 6y ago
      This is the VC cycle in a nutshell: venture capital does some PoC, business/tech R&D, and when it fails (usually does!) the lessons are still available to others. It's no different even if the (defunct) startup has a patent: IP law doesn't really matter when the IP doesn't have any money behind it.
      • londons_explore 6y ago
        > It's no different even if the (defunct) startup has a patent Not true - VC's are scared of giving money to anything that directly infringes a patent. If the company ever does wildly well, you can be sure whoever bought that patent for cents will be trying to collect millions...
        • javajosh 6y ago
          I don't think VC's care about patents, they care about risk. A patent without any money behind it isn't a risk. A company that isn't making money to steal also isn't at risk. But if you have money, and the patent holder has money, then let the legal fireworks begin, and as a happy side-effect, the patent attorneys get to pay for their kids' college, and maybe an investment property or two.
      • thayne 6y ago
        > IP law doesn't really matter when the IP doesn't have any money behind it. But that IP could end up owned by a patent troll that does have the money to enforce it in court, or at least threaten to do so.
• dpeck 6y ago
  Those of you who don’t understand why people were attached to Reader: Please keep in mind that it’s generally not the death of the tool that we lament after all these years. It is the destruction of our communities there that we’re still sad about. Imagine your favorite coffee shop, bar, church or social club ceased to be. You’d still see some of the previous members at other places, but the community as it existed is gone.
  • crazygringo 6y ago
    Wait, what was the community? I thought it was just an RSS reader. This is the first I've ever heard of a Reader "community". I'm looking it up and it doesn't appear there were forums or anything. What was the community aspect?
    • seaman1921 6y ago
      there was no community aspect, they probably mean to say that it was their favourite hangout spot, like a library
      • dpeck 6y ago
        Nope, I don’t mean that at all. See sibling comment of yours for details.
        • seaman1921 6y ago
          thanks for clarifying!
    • mattmcknight 6y ago
      It allowed you to share and discuss items with a closed set of friends. It was really good for that. http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/reader-and-talk-are-friends.html http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/reader-and-talk-are... http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-control-over-comments-on-shared.html http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-control-over-c...
• sogen 6y ago
  Fraidycat [0] is a very good substitute, plus, it's more streamlined. [0]: https://fraidyc.at https://fraidyc.at
  • jdauriemma 6y ago
    Fraidycat is great; I can't wait until they release a mobile client
• Jackim 6y ago
  * { letter-spacing: 1px; }
• TimTheTinker 6y ago
  On this day, March 25 2021, Google Reader has been dead for longer than it was alive. source: https://twitter.com/ZackMaril/status/1365834285463257091 https://twitter.com/ZackMaril/status/1365834285463257091
• rodolphoarruda 6y ago
  Google Reader was my favorite web app by a wide margin and I can remember how well informed I was back then. Social networks were not part of my life yet, so free time was spent on Reader. RIP. Now I work the best I can using IFTTT to pull news from the feeds that are still functional and then pushing results into an Evernote notebook I nostalgically named Reader.
• vishnu_ks 6y ago
  I have been building an RSS reader for developers called https://diff.blog https://diff.blog. It's havily integrated with GitHub. For example, when you sign up, it automatically follows the blog of developers and organizations you are part of. I have been working on it in my spare time during the last 2 years and it has been growing steadily. It has over 1200+ users now. Do give it a try!
• geerlingguy 6y ago
  I think the reason things like this just don't die is we all long for the days (long past) when Google was a leading force in making the web nicer, and having a very positive reputation, from making search a thousand times better than [Yahoo|Ask Jeeves|etc.], making maps amazing (compared to MapQuest/etc.), building a good, free email service (we've since learned the cost of 'free'), and building products everyone knows and loves like Reader.
• thefz 6y ago
  I found peace with Tiny Tiny RSS on a small and cheap VPS. It has all the features I need and I use it daily. Hardly any problem with it, 200+ feeds.
• tomcooks 6y ago
  Remembering a tool that killed useful technology, for what reason? If there's one thing that should be remembered is RSS itself, and shouldn't RIP but come back to life. Google is not your friend, don't praise gigacorps - especially when they kill stuff that works.
• tarkin2 6y ago
  Killing Google Reader has to be one of the worst developer relations disasters at Google. It killed A LOT of goodwill.
• rasfincher 6y ago
  I still miss Google Reader almost every day. I now use Inoreader but for some reason it just doesn't feel the same.
• Hezkore 6y ago
  Does anyone have a good RSS reader suggestion? I'm looking for a desktop application (Linux preferably). I'd really like one that does download all the feeds, but lets me tag words and topics that I'm interested, and get a notification based on that. Maybe I need to write my own...
• bsharitt 6y ago
  I miss pre-Google+ Google Reader. It's social features(shared feeds and comments) make it the only social network I've really enjoyed using without any serious dislikes.
• simonw 6y ago
  Something I find really interesting about the closure of Google Reader is that it affected a relatively tiny proportion of people - the vast majority of humans have never heard of RSS and would have no idea what the product was even for. But... those ten million users are incredibly influential. Today they are in positions where they make cloud computing purchasing decisions on behalf of huge organizations. And they haven't forgotten. I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent loss of trust and sales.
  • sagolikasoppor 6y ago
    I am one of those guys that make sure my company will never chose anything google hosted partly because of this reason.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • Fordec 6y ago
      Same. I'll never put GCM on my backend options list when building products after Reader. I can't operate with that level of EOL risk exposure. Will be migrating off Gmail now too with so much risk of account cancellation in the Android Dev community but that's going to be a longer project. Such thought processes has already saved me from wasting my time on AMP.
  • batpangolin 6y ago
    This sounds more like a fantasy based on questionable ideas of karma or natural justice than an actual business consideration for Google.
    • horsawlarway 6y ago
      Reader wasn't the breaking point for my company, but there's a clear trend in Google products - They will break your API contracts, and break them often. - They will likely be end-of-lifed, usually 2 to 5 years after implementation (perfect timing for the devs at your company that did the original implementation to have mostly moved on to a different company, so lots of domain knowledge loss right before a major product shift) - They often look shiny but run like absolute fucking dogshit. I don't know if you've loaded GCP console (or hell, even just gmail)_recently, but prepare to spend 30+ seconds waiting for the initial pageload to finish. ---- I have influence on which products we purchase and use. We do not use Google for anything in production (with the exception of our Android app, for fairly obvious reasons). Again, reader didn't break the camel's back, but it sure added some weight.
• jdauriemma 6y ago
  It still hurts
• thayne 6y ago
  I never really used google reader, and there are plenty of other RSS clients out there. What I mourn isn't Google Reader specifically, but the decline of RSS generally, which to be fair may have been accelerated by the end of Google Reader.
• webscout 6y ago
  Not an RSS reader by design, but I'm with https://upstract.com https://upstract.com — Made by the original Popurls inventor.
  • twobitshifter 6y ago
    Wow, that’s a bold default color scheme. If you sign up can it be changed?
• Applejinx 6y ago
  "when there were more than five websites and we could log off without missing anything." In my experience, when you get fed up and quit things like Facebook and Twitter (also, pruning other things like YouTube channels that try too hard for 'engagement'), you magically return to a time when you can log off without missing anything. It's nice. I get that it's scary, but it seems worth mentioning that it is possible. I'm not at all sure that I'm suffering for the decision. If I was, that would imply that there's a give-and-take and that being wired to that addictive armature had a chance of giving you meaningful attention. I no longer believe there's significance in attaining the attention of folks who are there because they're glued to the machine. It's the activity of twitter-scrolling or what have you, that they're pursuing, not you. If they're deeply enough sunk into it, they've got nothing left for any real connection with anybody. Seems like Google Reader was a bit like 'real connections with people', at a manageable pace.
• approxim8ion 6y ago
  It's interesting how impactful Google Reader was that not an insignificant number of people bounced off RSS entirely when it died. Most RSS readers/providers have been at least serviceable for me. On newsboat now, trying elfeed occasionally too.
• Emendo 6y ago
  Google created a popular free RSS reader, stopped innovating it, and then declared to the whole world that usage of Reader (and by extension, RSS) had decreased so much that it isn't worth it for Google to keep on life support. It didn't have to happen like that. I argue that Google unintentionally did an embrace and extinguish on RSS. That's what people were unhappy about.
• CA0DA 6y ago
  I've been using "Feedbro" Firefox extension as a Google Reader replacement. Pretty good!
  • ryanmcbride 6y ago
    I was about to ask this thread what people use as an RSS reader because I really can't stand Feedly. I'm going to check this out, thanks.
• smusamashah 6y ago
  I believe it's chrome that killed RSS altogether. Even today, there is not native RSS support in chrome. Before chrome all major browsers had native RSS support. You could just subscribe to any website. The killed RSS, then the reader. It's all on Google for demise of RSS.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ryanmarr 6y ago
  I miss it so much.
• pikseladam 6y ago
  I suggest Fraidycat
• Semiapies 6y ago
  The cherry on top is the complaint about how users only go to five sites anymore...by the very community of people who started the death-of-RSS myth because Google stopped providing the app they used.
• arbirk 6y ago
  I miss Reader every day. Curated, tagged and verified news sources and watched pages should be valuable to google, no?
• tibbydudeza 6y ago
  And don't forget Google Wave.
• swiley 6y ago
  Google doesn't want the google reader users. They're the sort of people that don't scroll through ads.
• jazzido 6y ago
  Paraphrasing from a tweet that I saw a while ago: "You don't miss Google Reader. You miss your life as it was when you used Google Reader. You miss being young".
  • corobo 6y ago
    I miss how the internet was when I was young. I don't miss being young. I found the internet to get away from being young haha. I do not miss that life.
• threeboy 6y ago
  I found out about this post via RSS through Feedly.
• ykevinator 6y ago
  It was the best ever, I haven't found anything even close.
• antiquark 6y ago
  inoreader.com turned out to be a pretty good replacement.
• mastrsushi 6y ago
  This site can't go a month without complaining over the long overdue extinction of RSS and it's prehistoric software clients.
• kazinator 6y ago
  Wasn't it pretty silly to need an online application in order to subscribe to and monitor RSS feeds? It's almost anti-RSS. It's like requiring an online application to browse the web. An RSS reader is just a browsers that has a list of bookmarks. Those bookmarks point to specially formatted XML documents. It automatically refreshes those document and notices new items, which it presents somehow, perhaps an mail-inbox-like interface.
• MithrilTuxedo 6y ago
  Why isn't there a federated clone? This seems ideal for the fediverse. I think the server would just need to host your feed URLs, save a little read state info, and host your favorites/starred feed that other users can subscribe to. It doesn't seem like much overhead on the server side. Then we get to the client and I don't know what I'm doing.
  • corobo 6y ago
    Cause there's more people in the world asking why things don't exist than there are people making those things
• jd3 6y ago
  Google Reader was great! Similarl to what I felt when Google Reader shut down, I was saddened when Mozilla removed RSS/Atom support from Firefox. I believe the decision had something to do with maintenance/performance/security concerns. As usual, there are no WebExtensions which match the functionality of the original feature. https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/ https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement... Luckily, Thunderbird (and, by extension, SeaMonkey) still allow you to subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds for the time being. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feeds-and-blogs https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...
• wslack 6y ago
  I moved to newsblur, but Reader was a product near and dear to me.
• MaxwellM 6y ago
  Using Google Reader felt like hanging out and having a beer with my favorite friends. It was teeming with conversation threads waiting to be pulled. Seeing a new share was like getting a tiny intellectual present, filled with all the right connotations - "Here's this thing I think you would find interesting," "I care about your opinion, what are your thoughts on this," "It's not important, but it is entertaining," "not trying to share this with the world, just you, my friend." Google Reader was our company's post-lunch ritual. A way to balance a mornings worth of engineering effort and soporific pad thai with a jolt of fresh news and virtual office banter. RIP.
• Waterluvian 6y ago
  I must be misunderstanding the value prop of Google reader. How hard can it be to just clone it if people love it so much?
• Aboh33 6y ago
  Don't Read Evil
• tumblewit 6y ago
  You can check an app on iOS called elytra for rss
• twsted 6y ago
  As others have said, I also think that this was a turning point in how Google was generally perceived. But anyway, there is nothing to miss about it, even if it was not clear at that time: having a news aggregator on the cloud owned by google itself, or any other company FWIW, it is not something we should aim for. Why should we give all this information about our preferred readings or favorite news to anyone?
• pixelbath 6y ago
  I installed FreshRSS on a server and imported my Google Reader feeds. I love having an RSS client that won't go away, and it's at least taught me that I should never rely on Google keeping something available, so it was a valuable lesson as well.
• pauljonas 6y ago
  I miss Google Reader. Migrated to Feedly & Feedly has been OK but recently, soured on Feedly as they capped the number of feeds. And I've written my own RSS readers, pre-Google-Reader & now in 2021 (though it a work in progress & starting to buckle with a 300MB sqlite DB file on a shared host ;)). Those limits might not rankle many subscribers but I don't view RSS as a "I must consume every item" but as a stream to wade in, and a filtered repository to query. The technology of a RSS reader is banal & simple in the basics. But here is where the value is for me -- the history of all the stuff that scrolls off from the most recent 10, 25, 50 posts that are available on a RSS feed. Having a large collection of subscribed feeds is like having a filtered search window into only those web sources that you assign great relevance. Even in 2021, a even more pronounced chasm to Google (or DDG or $yourFavoriteSearchEngine) searches, given all the botification / content farm hijacking / general cruft / copied content / etc. -- to search in your own set of collected RSS feeds, that go back years, even if disappear off a site's current feed XML. Or even if the site goes poof, or worse, is reappropriated by a domain harvester to siphon ad generated revenue on boiler plate content. Google Reader, if it was championed by Google, could have served this role masterfully. (There still is, oddly, in existence Google Custom Search Engine where you can specify a collection of URLs but it doesn't to seem to work as well as searching RSS history, in my experience at least).
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    yeah I myself don't view RSS like email. It's an archive where you can pick what you want to read and leave the rest. If you have a lot of feeds, and the reader is limiting and/or removing feeds and/or unread items, this annoys me, because I like to keep everything in an archive. Time for a VPS for you?
• hopesthoughts 6y ago
  Oh man, I still miss Google reader a lot! No one has gotten the interface 100% perfect.