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Google Reader wasn't really only a RSS reader, it was a social network. You could follow your friends feeds, see what they liked, see their activity, discover n

Google Reader wasn't really only a RSS reader, it was a social network. You could follow your friends feeds, see what they liked, see their activity, discover new blogs as well as share what you were into. I found so many new blogs that way, it was the main entry into the web for me. It was my homepage and my friends were there too.

D13Fd 3y ago
Exactly. I get that, supposedly, it wasn’t shut down to make room for other social network features. But whatever the intent was, they shut down a very effective, useful and popular social network feature and didn’t replace it with any workable equivalent. They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason. It was pretty boneheaded.
- O1111OOO 3y ago
  > They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason. I always felt that RSS cost Google long-term ad revenue and that was the reason for the closure. It cost websites actual live visitors and these interactions became increasingly important as surveillance capitalism became more nuanced. That is: how much time you spent on a page, where you hovered your mouse, etc.. It was more important to upsell the benefits of Google Analytics - what it could do, what it could track. To get sites excited about SEO (ie, Google Ads and Google itself) than to cater to the wishes of the end-user (who ultimately does not want to become a product). When you're building an ad network, you want to get everyone involved. You need active, participating partners so that the network grows and builds on itself. This growth is what brings in larger, long-term ad money. RSS was the opposite of that.
  - jve 3y ago
    Umm, put ads on Reader? Umm, feed their targeting system with valuable info like what kind of articles person X is interested in with a great confidence?
  - D13Fd 3y ago
    I run a corporate blog. I would love it if Google still ran Reader and offered analytics on RSS use. If they were still running Reader, they would be the only company able to provide good analytics on RSS use. Plus they could essentially run ads on other people’s sites by running ads on Reader. This was just throwing away traffic. As it stands now, the analytics situation for RSS sucks. You can basically track your server logs and hope the RSS bots for Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader etc are kind enough to tell you how many subscribers you have. But that says nothing of what posts are actually pulling people in.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Does the article even makes it clear ? I would expect that Google would have known the consequences of letting a codebase rot, so one could still imagine how it was done deliberately in order to eventually be replaced by Google+/Wave...
  - D13Fd 3y ago
    That’s a good point.
- PeterStuer 2y ago
  "it wasn’t shut down to make room for other social network features" The deciding "feature" was that the social networks that were going to replace the RSS/Reader ecosystem would force all users to only publish on the operator's site, wereas with RSS you could get content from any site.
fragmede 3y ago
Which is made all the more hilarious by the fact that Google Plus went nowhere.
dangus 3y ago
This kind of shows why there aren’t any RSS readers like it anymore. Plain old social media replaced it. All of the features described here are things that sites like Reddit do. The really simple syndication part of RSS wasn’t really the “killer app.”
compsciphd 3y ago
which is how google really screwed up. They had a dedicated user base with google reader, they should have viewed it as simply a user interface on top of google+. i.e. one user interface on google+ would have been the facebook type clone, another could have been google reader. Instead they killed reader to try and force people into the facebook clone and failed. Google+, for the users who wanted a facebook like experience, would have been much more valuable with google reader users injecting content into it.
jraph 3y ago
Okay, this is the first time in years I understand why Google Reader closing was such a big deal, not having used it myself. It was not just a fancy web RSS client and it had social features.
pax 2y ago
so if, at some point in the future, say, 20 relevant influencers would choose a similarly featured RSS reader, more of us we'd try, and hopefully reach critical mass? built over ActivityPub / Matrix for extra novelty. I live with this fantasy.

D13Fd 3y ago

Exactly. I get that, supposedly, it wasn’t shut down to make room for other social network features. But whatever the intent was, they shut down a very effective, useful and popular social network feature and didn’t replace it with any workable equivalent. They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason. It was pretty boneheaded.

O1111OOO 3y ago
> They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason. I always felt that RSS cost Google long-term ad revenue and that was the reason for the closure. It cost websites actual live visitors and these interactions became increasingly important as surveillance capitalism became more nuanced. That is: how much time you spent on a page, where you hovered your mouse, etc.. It was more important to upsell the benefits of Google Analytics - what it could do, what it could track. To get sites excited about SEO (ie, Google Ads and Google itself) than to cater to the wishes of the end-user (who ultimately does not want to become a product). When you're building an ad network, you want to get everyone involved. You need active, participating partners so that the network grows and builds on itself. This growth is what brings in larger, long-term ad money. RSS was the opposite of that.
- jve 3y ago
  Umm, put ads on Reader? Umm, feed their targeting system with valuable info like what kind of articles person X is interested in with a great confidence?
- D13Fd 3y ago
  I run a corporate blog. I would love it if Google still ran Reader and offered analytics on RSS use. If they were still running Reader, they would be the only company able to provide good analytics on RSS use. Plus they could essentially run ads on other people’s sites by running ads on Reader. This was just throwing away traffic. As it stands now, the analytics situation for RSS sucks. You can basically track your server logs and hope the RSS bots for Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader etc are kind enough to tell you how many subscribers you have. But that says nothing of what posts are actually pulling people in.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Does the article even makes it clear ? I would expect that Google would have known the consequences of letting a codebase rot, so one could still imagine how it was done deliberately in order to eventually be replaced by Google+/Wave...
- D13Fd 3y ago
  That’s a good point.
PeterStuer 2y ago
"it wasn’t shut down to make room for other social network features" The deciding "feature" was that the social networks that were going to replace the RSS/Reader ecosystem would force all users to only publish on the operator's site, wereas with RSS you could get content from any site.

fragmede 3y ago

Which is made all the more hilarious by the fact that Google Plus went nowhere.

dangus 3y ago

This kind of shows why there aren’t any RSS readers like it anymore. Plain old social media replaced it. All of the features described here are things that sites like Reddit do. The really simple syndication part of RSS wasn’t really the “killer app.”

compsciphd 3y ago

which is how google really screwed up. They had a dedicated user base with google reader, they should have viewed it as simply a user interface on top of google+. i.e. one user interface on google+ would have been the facebook type clone, another could have been google reader. Instead they killed reader to try and force people into the facebook clone and failed. Google+, for the users who wanted a facebook like experience, would have been much more valuable with google reader users injecting content into it.

jraph 3y ago

Okay, this is the first time in years I understand why Google Reader closing was such a big deal, not having used it myself. It was not just a fancy web RSS client and it had social features.

pax 2y ago

so if, at some point in the future, say, 20 relevant influencers would choose a similarly featured RSS reader, more of us we'd try, and hopefully reach critical mass? built over ActivityPub / Matrix for extra novelty. I live with this fantasy.