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If Google reader had never existed, I feel like RSS could have become the foundation of the modern web.
by gbrown 5y ago
If Google reader had never existed, I feel like RSS could have become the foundation of the modern web.
- urda 5y agoIt honestly amazing we had e-mail before the messes of today. Otherwise we'd be stuck with a dozen different "mail" apps.
- toper-centage 5y agoAnd all those apps want to become E-Mail.
- knorker 5y agoThe 90s had competition here. There was MSN, FirstClass, Internet, Compuserve, AOL. The Internet won, but no it's not as simple as "we already had email". It didn't start out unified. I'm talking about for the consumer. Sure, the Internet sure had a leg up on winning, in retrospect, because it was open and built by schools too. But imagine if Microsoft had successfully pushed MSN as "the" network for high schools? These competitors were point-and-click easy for nontechies long before the Internet was.
- ronenlh 5y agoNot familiar with google reader and its impact on rss. Could you explain? Thanks I tried many times to use rss but found the ecosystem to be terrible.
- totetsu 5y agoTook over the ecosystem the stopped its service.
- mattowen_uk 5y agoGoogle reader leveraged Googles search index to allow users to easily find RSS feeds on any topic, and build a personal feed of all the articles from their chosen topics. Think a Gmail type interface, but for RRS with a built in RSS search. Then one day, Google just killed it, and over night millions of RSS feeds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
- aequitas 5y agoGoogle Reader disappearing certainly had an impact, but I think there is another factor that contributed to companies abandoning RSS: user tracking & advertising. For example: our country's version of eBay used to have a great RSS service where you could set up a feed for search queries on their site. I would skim through all the feeds once a day to see if there where any deals I liked. But now they have replaced it with an email service, which requires me to visit their website to see the results of the queries (every query also has it's own notification email). Which means they get data on the things I am potentially buying and how engaged I'm with them (since the email is coupled to my account, the RSS was not). It would also give them an opportunity to present some ads, because I have to visit their site every time I want to see if there are any interesting results.
- dilippkumar 5y ago> I tried many times to use rss but found the ecosystem to be terrible. If you are in the apple ecosystem, I would recommend giving it a try with NetNewsWire + A feedbin subscription. NetNewsWire has an iOS and a macOS client and has a clean UI. FeedBin's killer feature is that they provide an email address that you can use to subscribe to newsletters - being able to read these along with other blog updates is a game changer. I have found that the best content is from people who write their own newsletters or blog on their own platform. After experiencing the internet liberated from all pop ups, pay walls, advertisements, GDPR harassment and google AMP, I don't think I can ever go back.
- mkotowski 5y agoCare to elaborate? Why an existence of a popular RSS reader has to do with preventing a protocol it is using from being more recognized?
- moritonal 5y agoNot op, but my guess is that by creating a centralised service which abstracted RSS away, it meant that when Google killed the reader it damaged the ecosystem as a whole, including the underlying protocol.
- gbrown 5y agoExactly
- grozzle 5y agoGoogle making Reader very good, and it becoming the most popular method of using RSS (for reading articles, at least - not for podcasts), and then suddenly killing it, can be seen as pretty much an "embrace, extend, extinguish" move.