7 ms·

In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how Google was perceived. There were grumblings before that but Google was still the darling of the web.

• mumblemumble 6y ago
  It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the social media giants.
  • atmosx 6y ago
    ... so everything consolidated in G+?
    • macintux 6y ago
      Certainly that was Google's intention. Thank goodness they failed.
      • pantalaimon 6y ago
        But they didn't even try very hard. G+ didn't event have a way to create events. Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar. But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.
        • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
          First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with that material design, and it all was very confusing
          • waheoo 6y ago
            I swear material design was the result of one too many post-it note sessions.
        • Godel_unicode 6y ago
          This is a great illustration of the problem G+ had; events in g+ were amazing but nobody (apparently) knew. Setting them up was easy, inviting people was easy, privacy for events made sense from the UI, etc. If you set things up correctly, everyone who was invited would have a shared photo album that they would be able to share pictures to with one click. I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album created this way; to this day they swear that if it had been marketed better g+ events would have put wedding photographers out of business...
          • pantalaimon 6y ago
            Maybe they added it later? When it launched there was no such feature, I think they added events after a year or so, but by then all the hype had already died down.
          • olliej 6y ago
            Did people have to have G+ accounts to receive invites? I know Facebook requires it, but if they just used standard calendaring events (maybe with an info link to g+?) that would seem a winner
        • eythian 6y ago
          G+ had events, I used to use them all the time. And then they removed them from communities, which was a large portion of how people (in my circles at least) used them. So that made it a lot less useful.
    • llarsson 6y ago
      I still remember being swept away by Google Wave. Such a cool idea at the time, I thought. That was such a good idea compared to Google Plus. Your content, your comments, just aggregated. They could have pulled it off, too, I am sure. They just didn't want to.
      • cheschire 6y ago
        Maybe I'm just remembering poorly, but Wave seemed super buggy and laggy to me at the time.
        • edoceo 6y ago
          It was crappy but it's intention was good.
        • kybernetikos 6y ago
          We used it for architectural discussions and exploring ideas. I'd be hard pressed to think of something that was better for that.
          • skinkestek 6y ago
            For some reason I never saw it working. Does anyone have a link to a video of it actually being in use?
            • henhouse 6y ago
              https://youtu.be/eKUAqNGVwX0 https://youtu.be/eKUAqNGVwX0
        • eythian 6y ago
          It wasn't the fastest, but I think that now browser (and CPU) tech has moved on since then, it'd probably be a lot smoother. I remember using it once to coordinate specs on a small contract job and it worked pretty well for that.
      • atmosx 6y ago
  • CA0DA 6y ago
    Some people are trying to build a community here: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
    • Apofis 6y ago
      I can't believe that website is still around. I just got teleported to the 90's.
      • mumblemumble 6y ago
        Neocities isn't that old. Perhaps you're thinking of Geocities, the '90s vintage website that inspired it?
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • Apofis 6y ago
          I realized later that it's Geocities v2; essentially. Still a fun thought that sort of service is still a thing. I think Medium.com is probably the best offspring that I can think of.
      • skinkestek 6y ago
        Sign up is free and easy. Those who want and for whom $5 is pocket change is encouraged to make a paid account to support it. (Happy supporter, otherwise unaffiliated.)
  • TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    And it's not just the web. It's everything. Every company in our capitalist utopia just keeps growing and growing. Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their offerings. But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same. Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it. And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former management's objectives for the site to run more closely to my interests than Microsoft's.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2021/03/23/microsoft-discord-purchase-10-billion-analysis/ https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2021/03/23/microsoft-discord...
    • cacarr 6y ago
      Not that many people who use Linux are clamoring for it, but it's interesting that GitHub does not provide an official desktop app for Linux -- even though it's a frickin Electron all. And that's totally GitHub's doing. Meanwhile, at the parent company, Microsoft offets VS Code for Linux. And it's nice.
      • markogresak 6y ago
        You can get it on linux: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/github-desktop-bin/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/github-desktop-bin/ (mentioned in the official docs) or https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop. What I dislike about Linux in general is how often the mentality for an app is “you’re using Linux, just find the repository and figure out how to get the release to your system or build it yourself”.
      • DocTomoe 6y ago
        Why would I need an "official desktop app" for anything, if I got a perfectly good git, and with git being perfectly integrated in modern IDEs (should I need a more GUI approach?)
• fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  Yeah, I noticed this too: I think Google Reader was heavily used by the right sort of people (devs, bloggers and media types) that, when Google killed it, it created a lot of bad will with the people who shape opinions.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • Semiapies 6y ago
    Who then went and told everyone else that RSS was dead because Reader was gone.
    • jessaustin 6y ago
      Spotify wants you to believe it, but it's not true.
• ufmace 6y ago
  Interesting perspective. I had long tended towards the viewpoint of, "Jeez guys, it's just an RSS reader, there's 50 better ones now, why do we have to whine about Reader getting cancelled every 5 minutes?". This is the first good explanation I've found for why it could be considered a bigger deal.
  • llampx 6y ago
    Yes, for me that's when I started to develop a negative opinion if Google. I still use Android but aside from that my life has drastically been de-googled since then.
• pradn 6y ago
  Is there evidence that Google+ caused the demise of Google Reader? Couldn't a simpler explanation be that the VP in charge of this product wanted to put headcount toward something more profitable? One problem with talking about a large company is that decisions, even major ones, are often made without other functions having much of a say, and yet every decision is attributed to the company as a whole. And just because Google+ was happening at the same time as the Reader shutdown doesn't mean you can create a causal link between the two.
• xnx 6y ago
  Though very disappointed, it is not surprising in retrospect. Google doesn't want to make a niche application for a handful (relatively) of nerds. They want to make unduplicatable AI/big-data services for billion+ users. Anyone can make a feed reader. No one else has been able to create a search engine, translation service, or email service (spam filtering, auto-complete) nearly as good.
  • input_sh 6y ago
    I mean they could've easily sprinkled in some AI to decide which specific unread items to prioritise, and turned the homepage into a social media feed with sharing and commenting, while presenting RSS feeds similarly to Facebook's pages. It had all the potential to become the basis of Google+, but Google just prioritises building products from scratch instead of improving existing ones (hence 50 or so IM / video call apps).
    • xnx 6y ago
      That would've been a good way to go. It's a shame they haven't gotten social to catch in any of their many attempts (Buzz, Plus, YouTube, Reader, etc.) because I'd prefer anything from Google over Facebook. I'm cautiously optimistic that Google is slowly recognizing the error prioritizing hot new projects over continuous maintenance and improvement of existing ones. Google Chat seems like it might finally be a proper successor to Google Talk after dozens of half-baked services: Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Duo, Messages, etc. etc. etc.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Your information is a few years out of date, there is a new translation engine on the market that seems to be objectively better (deepl.com) as well as more GDPR-friendly ;) The search engine I can't disagree with. The email service... email is email to me, Google doesn't offer any features that Thunderbird doesn't already have && that I want. If you mean the search function inside of gmail, then yes, but that's kinda also just search. Or if you mean deliverability, that's not a function of skill but a function of being huge and if my mail server does something wrong then nobody is going to believe me if I say it's google's fault and google definitely isn't going to fix it. Or if you mean spam filtering, that's again because they just throw you out (into the spambox, but because google users rarely look there, that's out) and force you to use some (other) bigcorp for delivering just to them. The power that comes with being super huge.
• WorldMaker 6y ago
  I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google got a lot of early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of proprietary secrets), it certainly seemed like the slippery slope towards evil in the "extinguish" part of the triple-E "bad guy mentality" most often referenced when talking about 90s Microsoft. Google Reader was built top to bottom on RSS and OPML (and Atom), which were open web standards. You could import an RSS feed from just about anywhere and read in in Reader. You could export your list of feeds back out as OPML which a bunch of other readers supported. Google+ was much more a walled garden with proprietary everything. It happened in other areas too, such as Google moving away from the XMPP/Jabber-standardized (and federated!) Talk system to ones entirely proprietary. Wave was announced and designed to be XMPP-backed and federated as well. It seems like Wave died as much because they wanted to lock that down too. You can't just subscribe to Google Docs as a federated XMPP user and run a custom Google Docs frontend, Google Docs is just another proprietary walled garden now.
  • nextaccountic 6y ago
    > I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now" This and when GTalk moved off XMPP.
    • squarefoot 6y ago
      And when they removed the discussion filter from searches, so that looking for opinions on a product from blogs/forums suddenly became next to impossible without being inundated by results of shops advertising that product. The technical cost of leaving that filter in place would have been zero, but apparently there were other priorities; that was the day everything cool I associated with Google ceased to exist.
  • KMag 6y ago
    Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known. Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm not sure if learn-to-rank is still considered Ascorer, or its replacement. I left before Amit, but seeing the things that came out leading to his departure, I'm sure it's no longer called Ascorer. (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)
• alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  > In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how Google was perceived Yep. That was the point for me wehere Google went from startup I would like to work for sometime in the future to the ranks of IBM and Oracle