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At its peak, Google Reader had 30M users but no executive support
- vogon_laureate 3y agoToward the end, many people working on the Reader team, which was a dozen people at its height, were poached for the now defunct Google+.
- prepend 3y agoAlso Reader was a competitor to google+ as it had the feature of finding and reading content, but in a much more user pleasing way and that made google way less money.
- zhte415 3y agoA lot happened around the time of Google+. Whether because of it I cannot say, but it was in nothing but a pipe dream a substite for: Google Wave chaos collaboration brilliance vs the conventional Google+ was killed prior to Google+. Free GMail/limited apps for Domains. This was killed for new domains in 2012, and merging/destroying through failed merge via single sign on to YouTube/other services. Generic services weren't a good substitute for 'owning' a name via domain. XMPP was killed by G+ Hangouts in 2013. Reader, of course. It seemed like G+ killed anything that it could, in any fractional way, be deemed a substitute for. The memory I have of these products were of functional things. The memory I have of G+ is a large whitespace screen with an avatar and exceptionally mediocre half solutions. G+ was not fun, it wasn't social, it wasn't even average.
- vogon_laureate 3y agoI could never get my head around G+. It felt like almost every decision and element of it was sociopathic rather than social.
- GauntletWizard 3y agoHangouts, in the original form of "Real time, unstructured video call" was pretty cool. The rest was insane.
- influx 3y agoI thought circles was a great way to interact socially.
- reaperman 3y agoYep, that was a wonderful design. I wish it took off, and I wish it hadn't been a harbinger of the downfall of so many other wonderful Google products.
- kalleboo 3y agoYeah someone made a clone of the circles UI to put your Facebook contacts into Friend Lists which I used for a while, always wondered why Facebook didn't just steal that to get around people being worried about their parents seeing their party pix (back before the youth had 100% abandoned Facebook)
- vogon_laureate 3y agoTwitter has Twitter Circles which I think it similar. I'm not really sure how many people actually use it. I remember the G+ circles at least had the novelty factor but it still felt like an effort to manage.
- sf4lifer 3y agoThere is an amazing alternative with far more features and thoughtfully designed in https://feedly.com/ https://feedly.com/
- vogon_laureate 3y ago+1 Been a happy user for years.
- influx 3y agoI'm happy with https://feedbin.com/ https://feedbin.com/
- RamblingCTO 3y agoLooks nice, but the value proposition sucks for 5 bucks a month
- janfoeh 3y agoAs a customer of theirs for probably around two years, I could not disagree more. As far as online services go, Feedbin is absolute perfection. They offer a clearly defined service. I give them money and they provide said service. It is rock-solid. One invoice email every month, and _absolutely nothing else_. No changes. No feature creep. No upselling. No customer satisfaction surveys. Zero bullshit, zero annoyances. None. Zip. Zilch.
- OJFord 3y agoI used to pay for it but it there was slow response to bugs and no appetite for new features. You might call it feature creep, but there were feeds I wanted to read that it couldn't render, and OSS that could.
- janfoeh 3y agoI would call that maintenance, not feature creep. And sure, I would expect those problems to be resolved, too. It's just something I have not encountered myself.
- jiveturkey 3y ago30M, is that a lot? TFA says no.
- dangus 3y agoWith an annual revenue per account of…zero, right?
- gmerc 3y agoby that logic whatsapp has no value for most of its existence.
- Gigachad 3y agoIM apps seem like a good example of something that generates no profit and seems pretty worthless other than an addition to boost the value of some other product. I can’t see how Google Reader could have ever been profitable.
- specialist 3y agoA user's interest graph. Very valuable.
- specialist 3y agoHow much revenue does gmail contribute?
- dangus 3y agoA lot, through Google Workspaces.
- pjmlp 3y agoI still don't get it, it wasn't as if there weren't, aren't, plenty of RSS readers to chose from.
- moogly 3y agoAt the time when it happened, I tried over 15 of them, and they were all terrible and had one or more deal breakers. I finally found a replacement in TinyTinyRSS. Prickly developer, but well-made. I'm still using it self-hosted. I'm sure the alternatives are better now, but back then it looked dire.
- pjmlp 3y agoIn what sense? All of them allowed to provide a set of feeds, update, and display them, it is not likely one needs an office suite to display RSS feeds.
- redml 3y agoI loved reader. It was the tipping point for me that made me view every new google product with pessimism and scepticism. It's also amplified by the fact that several products I got invested in (google, youtube, google talk, etc) became significantly worse.
- achow 3y agoWhat killed reader (from original Verge story) - Company’s leadership began to wonder whether Reader was ever going to hit Google scale. Almost nothing ever hits Google scale, which is why Google kills almost everything. - Marissa Mayer didn’t like it. - Google+ sucked away all the engineers and resources. https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...
- dpcan 3y agoWhat about the simple fact that if I’m not going to the blog’s website directly, I’m not seeing or clicking on the Google adsense ads they were displaying? Or that you weren’t typing the name of the blog into Google to find it each time, and potentially clicking a sponsored link? The whole idea of reader hurt Google’s business model.
- jdechko 3y agoOr, it’s a highly customized list of websites and interests that is tied to an individual user, and therefore can be advertised against. Google could have put ads in Reader if they wanted to.
- blitzar 3y ago> - Marissa Mayer didn’t like it. Its safe to say with her track record as a visionary, Google Reader on its own could have been spun off, floated and the company would have been so wildly sucessful that we would call them FANGR stocks.
- dessimus 3y agoThat and every messaging app they release. You know it has about a 2 year shelf life, so don't bother picking it up.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoGNARF roll a little better off the tongue.
- MarkusWandel 3y agoAm I the only one who misses Google Reader precisely because you didn't have to deal with any UI? It came with a bookmarklet, I think it looked like ">>" that you put into your browser address bar. Click that and it just loaded the next article in your feed, natively, from its own site. No Google UI at all, no extra web page to load.
- htrp 3y agoThe tech goodwill burned from Google Reader will likely haunt google for the rest of existence, and probably prevents a good chunk of GCloud/Workspace adoption.
- TA_34545677 3y agoI'm always asking myself: - why hasnt someone just build a pure/full copycat? - originally looking just like Google Reader back then - marketing would be "a real Google Reader clone" (or similar BS) :) any idea?
- philonoist 3y agoWhy don't people forget Google Reader once and for all? There must be some unique feature which, to this day, is either too costly to access by the masses in others or not yet implemented by others. Had there bean feature parity with google reader, and say Bing or DDG picks that up, would we still be missing Google reader?