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It was the reason they killed it for me. Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits. It was killed because Google decided Fa

It was the reason they killed it for me. Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits. It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.

dpe82 4y ago
AFAICT Reader was a casualty of Vic Gundotra consolidating and growing his empire within Google as king of all things social. Only two good things came out of the Google+ era: consolidated login across all Google apps, and Photos.
- esperent 4y ago
  > consolidated login across all Google apps This makes great business sense for Google. Personally though, it's the reason I decided to de-Google. I was running some dev stuff from my personal account, - just messing around and too lazy to set up a separate dev account. Then I started to hear stories of people getting locked out of their google account because they did... Something. Something totally unknowable that triggered some flagging system and boom, everything is gone. So I started looking alternative services, one company per service. The last things I use Google for are Maps, Photos, Android backup. The only data I care about are my contacts and photos, and I keep a separate backup of both. I was satisfied with this, but a few months ago I set up a new gmail account for a business. I hadn't set up the real business email yet so I used this email so sign up a bunch of other services that our business needed. Tripadvisor, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Google maps (registered with our actual verifiable business address), Google webmaster/SEO stuff with our actual real website. I spent a full day doing this. Then I was busy for a week on other stuff and when I went back to use this account it was permanently locked. No recourse, just a message saying the account violated something and was permanently locked - with a text box to write a complaint if I felt this way unfair. Of course, I did write the complaint, as politely as possible, including my business details and personal email. But I never heard back and I assume no one actually reads those. I permanently lost access to the TikTok account (no big deal except that I had got a good name. But I made the account under duress from my business partner anyway). I was able to gain access to the Facebook easily. Tripadvisor took me most of a day to regain access. Google maps still, several months later, has the wrong name for our business. Moral of the story: if you're using Google as a primary service for anything without keeping backups elsewhere, maybe... Don't.
shaftway 4y ago
It wasn't killed in favor of Google+. It was killed because nobody wanted to work on it and nobody wanted to fund it. Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do that migration and solve some of the underlying problems. Nobody wanted to work on it because there wasn't anything in it you could use for promo. "Kept Reader running" on your perf packet would get you a Meets Expectations at best. It might be seen negatively by some. To get a promo you needed big sexy new features. And at the time there was a promo factory that was sucking up all of the prime engineers (cough Google+ cough). It was also popular among employees, and there was a "Save Reader" campaign, but nobody cared enough to actually try to transfer in. No director wanted it either. It wasn't profitable. It wasn't driving traffic to other Google properties. It was basically a money sink and nobody wanted to be tied to it as a failure. Source: I was on Google+ (it was a promo factory). My team worked on a number of features that were meant to be used by third parties to tie into Plus. One of those was the comments system. Before the Google+ YouTube comment debacle there were plans to offer that comment system directly to third parties (similar to Disqus). We pitched Google+ taking over Reader and using it as a proving ground for that comment system. As a side bonus, blogs that signed on would already have a (hopefully) vibrant comment history. Management didn't see the value. Google+ comments rolled out to YouTube, it was a disaster, and all those lines of code were lost in time, like tears in rain.
- 6510 4y ago
  > It wasn't driving traffic to other Google properties. It wasn't driving measurable traffic. If the choice is A) people loving one of your products or B) people hating your brand. Behind which door is the money?
- marssaxman 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing the inside story. It's always seemed strange to me how singularly obsessed Google culture seems to be with the idea of promotions. All the weird things Google does seem to come down to "that's what gets people promoted". But... why? It doesn't seem like Googlers are systematically underpaid, so why is promotion such a focus? Maybe this is part of the reason my own stint at Google didn't work out so well.
m-p-3 4y ago
If the intent of killing Google Reader was to push me towards Google+, then it was a terrible miscalculation on their part. I steered clear from it until it finally died. I jumped to Feedly, then I switched to Inoreader for a UI closer to Google Reader.
DrBazza 4y ago
Even now, 10 yrs on, that makes no sense (their justification, not yours). How do you convince a bunch of blog authors to switch from 'free-to-air' and searchable everywhere RSS feeds, to move into closed social media platform? It seems like idiotic management making idiotic decisions completely out of touch with the userbase has been with us since the dawn of the web. Just this week, Spotify are turning the mobile app into a stinking pile of TikTok. Don't be evil. Just be stupid I guess.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  Speaking of blogs, I wonder if the death of Google Reader led to the death of blogs in general. It was about that time that people seemed to stop writing blogs and moved to Facebook/Twitter and their generally far shorter (and to me, less interesting) postings.
- Breza 4y ago
  In hindsight, it seems that Google Reader could have offered a continuing alternative to social media. If Google had kept throwing resources behind it, they could have held a unique advantage against Facebook. It never would have gotten as big, but they still could have pushed it as an alternative and made more money than they ever got from Google+.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Who was in charge of killing it?
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Brian Shih would know, but would he ever tell?
- octacat 4y ago
  Monetising by adding ads to a content, they fetched from other sites was a questionable back than. So, they couldn't just add ads to the reader easily. They were believing google plus would be popular. So, having a closed social network, where they could control everything and put ads without any complains makes sense. Besides, Reader was not that popular among the general public.
amelius 4y ago
If it still existed it would have been killed by advertisements anyway.
- xattt 4y ago
  It’s a blessing in disguise that the protocol didn’t go more “mainstream” and get exploited to death by opportunistic assholes.
  - boxed 4y ago
    RSS isn't vulnerable to such attacks though.
    - AlecSchueler 4y ago
      Put an advert in the feed, make the post nothing but a link to the web url etc There are plenty of anti-patterns to follow in RSS. We just didn't see them because only techies were using feeds.
      - masklinn 4y ago
        DF has been putting ads in feed forever.
      - boxed 4y ago
        So? You just unsubscribe from any that are shit. Unlike on google where you can't delete a site from the search results (which you can on kagi btw, which is great).
        AlecSchueler 4y ago
        So if RSS took off with the general public and this was your plan you'd very quickly be left with an empty feed reader. The point is that RSS was/less overrun by advertising than the web because of cultural reasons, not thanks to something inherent to the technology.
arthur_sav 4y ago
What stops anyone else from building another reader?
- zackmorris 4y ago
  I never used Reader but I see this question a lot, and feel that the framing of it clouds insight. The problem isn't making things, it's all of the barriers to entry. For example, say it takes 2 weeks to make something. Since most of us have to work, that means a 1 year commitment to save enough to do it over a vacation. Which is really a 2 year commitment until a vacation, or 1 year of grinding, or the sacrifice of vacations altogether, or nights and weekends for an indeterminate amount of time. On top of that, most people struggle to save 10% of their income. So if a project has even a $10,000 budget, that requires $100,000 of income. The numbers quickly become so insurmountable that an adult will almost never find the time that they had as a teenager. A decade may pass in the blink of an eye with no forward progress on life goals (that's happened to me twice now). And most projects take 6 months to 2 years or more.. So major projects can only really happen through a corporate structure or with outside funding. Then the problem becomes organizational, or founders spend most of their time fundraising. Sure, occasionally someone makes something. But traditionally there are 100 failures we never hear about. Today that number might be more like 1,000 or 10,000. Google axing projects on a whim is power imbalance. They hold all of the cards, have almost unbounded potential, but are so hyper-focused on profit today that they can't seem to innovate on anything. Major corporations today are basically black holes sucking up all available capital and talent, performing no better than small 2-5 person teams would if they had adequate resources. I'm sure someone will react vehemently against what I'm saying. But we're discussing this on Y Combinator's website, a startup accelerator founded on the idea that small teams can pivot faster than the biggest companies. After writing this out, it seems that only startups can save us. Are any working on a Reader alternative, I wonder. Also I dream of the day when the musical chairs of competition stop and we move to a post-scarcity society. I thought that was going to happen around the year 2000, but if anything we've slid backwards since wealth inequality is the highest it's been in human history.
- dbspin 4y ago
  One reason, which I don't see mentioned a whole lot, is that far fewer places offer a real RSS feed (complete with the article / post in question) than once did. If they offer an RSS feed at all. I looked at aggregation options for news recently, and discovered that walled gardens and the use of custom CMS's by news organisations have made RSS aggregation of say breaking news all but impossible. Sure, you can still get blogs, reddit, hacker news etc. But the days of essentially every website having an RSS feed are gone.
dontlaugh 4y ago
Which is particularly silly, since Reader comments & sharing had already become a social network.
Reason077 4y ago
Imagine if, instead of simply shutting down Reader, Google had gradually and subtly integrated it more and more in to Google+ over time. Things could have turned out very different!
- RamenJunkie_ 4y ago
  Imagine of Google+ had had a proper API for automatic posting. If I remeber right, there still wasn't one when Pages dropped. So unlike Twitter and Facebook, I couldn't just set up my Wordpress site to feed all my posts to Google Plus. I had to go and manually post them. They also had the real names policy still, so I have to post as my real name instead of the name I post online with everywhere else. Plus was so poorly mishandled because Google does not understand people at all. You can't boul everyone down to a handful of easy categories to make it easier for alogrythms to manage.
paulcole 4y ago
> It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them (citation needed) This really feels like your (and a popular) reading of the situation, but isn’t as unequivocal as you make it seem. To me it’s more like the iMac not having a floppy drive or no USBA ports on the newer MacBooks. Google saw that the web was trending away from blogs and written content. They removed one of the tools that people used to keep up with blogs and written content and accelerated the decline of blogs and written content. People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right.
- thr717272 4y ago
  I'm fairly sure someone here can provide you with a proper citation, but in the meanwhile I was very much online here and elsewhere during that time and IIRC it was common knowledge at the time and AFAIK nobody came up with a better hypothesis.
  - paulcole 4y ago
    If someone doesn't comment on their reasoning for a decision they made, everybody else's best guess doesn't become the truth.
- svachalek 4y ago
  The use of passive voice here is a little comical. "The lion noticed that the gazelle was headed for its stomach, and it turned out to be right."
  - paulcole 4y ago
    I don't think I used passive voice in my comment at all. Can you quote the part that is passive? Only part that might be slightly confusing is: > People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right. "They" in that sentence refers to Google, which should make it more clear. But it is still all in active voice.
- miguelazo 4y ago
  > but they were (for the most part) right And yet here we are, discussing things on a platform that is very akin to the web that Reader advanced. There was always going to be a market for non-Web 2.0 social media junk, albeit smaller. And frankly, trying to copy already successful iterations almost always fails (Google+). The resources that would have been required to maintain or even update Reader were minimal-- they were already wasting money on far more expensive dead end projects that were never going to make money.

dpe82 4y ago

AFAICT Reader was a casualty of Vic Gundotra consolidating and growing his empire within Google as king of all things social. Only two good things came out of the Google+ era: consolidated login across all Google apps, and Photos.

esperent 4y ago
> consolidated login across all Google apps This makes great business sense for Google. Personally though, it's the reason I decided to de-Google. I was running some dev stuff from my personal account, - just messing around and too lazy to set up a separate dev account. Then I started to hear stories of people getting locked out of their google account because they did... Something. Something totally unknowable that triggered some flagging system and boom, everything is gone. So I started looking alternative services, one company per service. The last things I use Google for are Maps, Photos, Android backup. The only data I care about are my contacts and photos, and I keep a separate backup of both. I was satisfied with this, but a few months ago I set up a new gmail account for a business. I hadn't set up the real business email yet so I used this email so sign up a bunch of other services that our business needed. Tripadvisor, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Google maps (registered with our actual verifiable business address), Google webmaster/SEO stuff with our actual real website. I spent a full day doing this. Then I was busy for a week on other stuff and when I went back to use this account it was permanently locked. No recourse, just a message saying the account violated something and was permanently locked - with a text box to write a complaint if I felt this way unfair. Of course, I did write the complaint, as politely as possible, including my business details and personal email. But I never heard back and I assume no one actually reads those. I permanently lost access to the TikTok account (no big deal except that I had got a good name. But I made the account under duress from my business partner anyway). I was able to gain access to the Facebook easily. Tripadvisor took me most of a day to regain access. Google maps still, several months later, has the wrong name for our business. Moral of the story: if you're using Google as a primary service for anything without keeping backups elsewhere, maybe... Don't.

shaftway 4y ago

It wasn't killed in favor of Google+. It was killed because nobody wanted to work on it and nobody wanted to fund it. Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do that migration and solve some of the underlying problems. Nobody wanted to work on it because there wasn't anything in it you could use for promo. "Kept Reader running" on your perf packet would get you a Meets Expectations at best. It might be seen negatively by some. To get a promo you needed big sexy new features. And at the time there was a promo factory that was sucking up all of the prime engineers (cough Google+ cough). It was also popular among employees, and there was a "Save Reader" campaign, but nobody cared enough to actually try to transfer in. No director wanted it either. It wasn't profitable. It wasn't driving traffic to other Google properties. It was basically a money sink and nobody wanted to be tied to it as a failure. Source: I was on Google+ (it was a promo factory). My team worked on a number of features that were meant to be used by third parties to tie into Plus. One of those was the comments system. Before the Google+ YouTube comment debacle there were plans to offer that comment system directly to third parties (similar to Disqus). We pitched Google+ taking over Reader and using it as a proving ground for that comment system. As a side bonus, blogs that signed on would already have a (hopefully) vibrant comment history. Management didn't see the value. Google+ comments rolled out to YouTube, it was a disaster, and all those lines of code were lost in time, like tears in rain.

6510 4y ago
> It wasn't driving traffic to other Google properties. It wasn't driving measurable traffic. If the choice is A) people loving one of your products or B) people hating your brand. Behind which door is the money?
marssaxman 4y ago
Thanks for sharing the inside story. It's always seemed strange to me how singularly obsessed Google culture seems to be with the idea of promotions. All the weird things Google does seem to come down to "that's what gets people promoted". But... why? It doesn't seem like Googlers are systematically underpaid, so why is promotion such a focus? Maybe this is part of the reason my own stint at Google didn't work out so well.

m-p-3 4y ago

If the intent of killing Google Reader was to push me towards Google+, then it was a terrible miscalculation on their part. I steered clear from it until it finally died. I jumped to Feedly, then I switched to Inoreader for a UI closer to Google Reader.

DrBazza 4y ago

Even now, 10 yrs on, that makes no sense (their justification, not yours). How do you convince a bunch of blog authors to switch from 'free-to-air' and searchable everywhere RSS feeds, to move into closed social media platform? It seems like idiotic management making idiotic decisions completely out of touch with the userbase has been with us since the dawn of the web. Just this week, Spotify are turning the mobile app into a stinking pile of TikTok. Don't be evil. Just be stupid I guess.

jhbadger 4y ago
Speaking of blogs, I wonder if the death of Google Reader led to the death of blogs in general. It was about that time that people seemed to stop writing blogs and moved to Facebook/Twitter and their generally far shorter (and to me, less interesting) postings.
Breza 4y ago
In hindsight, it seems that Google Reader could have offered a continuing alternative to social media. If Google had kept throwing resources behind it, they could have held a unique advantage against Facebook. It never would have gotten as big, but they still could have pushed it as an alternative and made more money than they ever got from Google+.
orangepurple 4y ago
Who was in charge of killing it?
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Brian Shih would know, but would he ever tell?
octacat 4y ago
Monetising by adding ads to a content, they fetched from other sites was a questionable back than. So, they couldn't just add ads to the reader easily. They were believing google plus would be popular. So, having a closed social network, where they could control everything and put ads without any complains makes sense. Besides, Reader was not that popular among the general public.

amelius 4y ago

If it still existed it would have been killed by advertisements anyway.

xattt 4y ago
It’s a blessing in disguise that the protocol didn’t go more “mainstream” and get exploited to death by opportunistic assholes.
- boxed 4y ago
  RSS isn't vulnerable to such attacks though.
  - AlecSchueler 4y ago
    Put an advert in the feed, make the post nothing but a link to the web url etc There are plenty of anti-patterns to follow in RSS. We just didn't see them because only techies were using feeds.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      DF has been putting ads in feed forever.
    - boxed 4y ago
      So? You just unsubscribe from any that are shit. Unlike on google where you can't delete a site from the search results (which you can on kagi btw, which is great).
      - AlecSchueler 4y ago
        So if RSS took off with the general public and this was your plan you'd very quickly be left with an empty feed reader. The point is that RSS was/less overrun by advertising than the web because of cultural reasons, not thanks to something inherent to the technology.

arthur_sav 4y ago

What stops anyone else from building another reader?

zackmorris 4y ago
I never used Reader but I see this question a lot, and feel that the framing of it clouds insight. The problem isn't making things, it's all of the barriers to entry. For example, say it takes 2 weeks to make something. Since most of us have to work, that means a 1 year commitment to save enough to do it over a vacation. Which is really a 2 year commitment until a vacation, or 1 year of grinding, or the sacrifice of vacations altogether, or nights and weekends for an indeterminate amount of time. On top of that, most people struggle to save 10% of their income. So if a project has even a $10,000 budget, that requires $100,000 of income. The numbers quickly become so insurmountable that an adult will almost never find the time that they had as a teenager. A decade may pass in the blink of an eye with no forward progress on life goals (that's happened to me twice now). And most projects take 6 months to 2 years or more.. So major projects can only really happen through a corporate structure or with outside funding. Then the problem becomes organizational, or founders spend most of their time fundraising. Sure, occasionally someone makes something. But traditionally there are 100 failures we never hear about. Today that number might be more like 1,000 or 10,000. Google axing projects on a whim is power imbalance. They hold all of the cards, have almost unbounded potential, but are so hyper-focused on profit today that they can't seem to innovate on anything. Major corporations today are basically black holes sucking up all available capital and talent, performing no better than small 2-5 person teams would if they had adequate resources. I'm sure someone will react vehemently against what I'm saying. But we're discussing this on Y Combinator's website, a startup accelerator founded on the idea that small teams can pivot faster than the biggest companies. After writing this out, it seems that only startups can save us. Are any working on a Reader alternative, I wonder. Also I dream of the day when the musical chairs of competition stop and we move to a post-scarcity society. I thought that was going to happen around the year 2000, but if anything we've slid backwards since wealth inequality is the highest it's been in human history.
dbspin 4y ago
One reason, which I don't see mentioned a whole lot, is that far fewer places offer a real RSS feed (complete with the article / post in question) than once did. If they offer an RSS feed at all. I looked at aggregation options for news recently, and discovered that walled gardens and the use of custom CMS's by news organisations have made RSS aggregation of say breaking news all but impossible. Sure, you can still get blogs, reddit, hacker news etc. But the days of essentially every website having an RSS feed are gone.

dontlaugh 4y ago

Which is particularly silly, since Reader comments & sharing had already become a social network.

Reason077 4y ago

Imagine if, instead of simply shutting down Reader, Google had gradually and subtly integrated it more and more in to Google+ over time. Things could have turned out very different!

RamenJunkie_ 4y ago
Imagine of Google+ had had a proper API for automatic posting. If I remeber right, there still wasn't one when Pages dropped. So unlike Twitter and Facebook, I couldn't just set up my Wordpress site to feed all my posts to Google Plus. I had to go and manually post them. They also had the real names policy still, so I have to post as my real name instead of the name I post online with everywhere else. Plus was so poorly mishandled because Google does not understand people at all. You can't boul everyone down to a handful of easy categories to make it easier for alogrythms to manage.

paulcole 4y ago

> It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them (citation needed) This really feels like your (and a popular) reading of the situation, but isn’t as unequivocal as you make it seem. To me it’s more like the iMac not having a floppy drive or no USBA ports on the newer MacBooks. Google saw that the web was trending away from blogs and written content. They removed one of the tools that people used to keep up with blogs and written content and accelerated the decline of blogs and written content. People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right.

thr717272 4y ago
I'm fairly sure someone here can provide you with a proper citation, but in the meanwhile I was very much online here and elsewhere during that time and IIRC it was common knowledge at the time and AFAIK nobody came up with a better hypothesis.
- paulcole 4y ago
  If someone doesn't comment on their reasoning for a decision they made, everybody else's best guess doesn't become the truth.
svachalek 4y ago
The use of passive voice here is a little comical. "The lion noticed that the gazelle was headed for its stomach, and it turned out to be right."
- paulcole 4y ago
  I don't think I used passive voice in my comment at all. Can you quote the part that is passive? Only part that might be slightly confusing is: > People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right. "They" in that sentence refers to Google, which should make it more clear. But it is still all in active voice.
miguelazo 4y ago
> but they were (for the most part) right And yet here we are, discussing things on a platform that is very akin to the web that Reader advanced. There was always going to be a market for non-Web 2.0 social media junk, albeit smaller. And frankly, trying to copy already successful iterations almost always fails (Google+). The resources that would have been required to maintain or even update Reader were minimal-- they were already wasting money on far more expensive dead end projects that were never going to make money.