4 ms·

It's a real shame that Google Reader has been neglected for years now.

• zanny 14y ago
  It is a shame RSS has been neglected for years as well. I blame Twitter basically doing the exact same thing, worse, and entirely in JS and with a platform lock to their service.
  • eli 14y ago
    You could just as well argue that if there had been robust uptake of Twitter's RSS feeds it would not have been so easy for them to kill the feature.
  • mistercheese 14y ago
    I would argue RSS was neglected by Twitter doing certain things better, things that the average user cares about
    • rdl 14y ago
      RSS + IM/IRC were a lot better than Twitter today, even for how most current Twitter users use the service.
      • mistercheese 14y ago
        For HackerNews readers, and also for me that's probably true. However, the popularity of Twitter would indicate to me otherwise.
        • zanny 14y ago
          Twitter became popular because Firefox / Chrome got rid of their in-navbar subscribe button and Google didn't advertise Reader. They had incentives to monetize doing things their own way, and every average joe who would go to twitter would have the easy path to just using what is in front of them or having to discover feeds in the page info, install an addon to return the subscribe button, and find an RSS application.
          • rdl 14y ago
            Yeah, I think one could have built IRC and RSS into good enough products to essentially reach out to everyone currently using Twitter who never used IRC/RSS. I still think there's an opportunity for something better-than-Twitter, IRC, RSS in the mobile space. Twitter is SMS mobile, but has what is honestly a shitty client experience on (everything, but especially) mobile. I wish someone would do something with the same initial goals as Diaspora (self-control, etc.), but focused on mobile, with ease of use on mobile as the goal. Snap Chat is kind of a step in that direction, but I'd rather have something where users got to explore the continuum of ephemeral stuff (like Snap Chat) to semi-permanent (like Twitter) to more permanent (like a blog, designed to be referenced in the future) to really permanent (publishing).
            • zanny 14y ago
              Why are you just targeting "mobile"? If you were making a new global chat system, it would almost certainly be cloud hosted and baked into a web app. The main reason that xmpp / jabber don't catch on is that you can't treat it with delayed delivery like you can twitter, and you can't broadcast messages.
          • icebraining 14y ago
            Twitter became popular because Firefox / Chrome got rid of their in-navbar subscribe button When Firefox 4, the first version without the button, was released, Twitter had already 200M users.
          • mistercheese 14y ago
            I don't understand how Firefox/Chrome getting rid of their in-navbar subscribe or Google not advertising Reader doesn't just put them at the same level of Twitter when it was just starting out. Twitter didn't necessarily need large marketing efforts to take off as far as I know. I feel like this is a case of the tech savy being somewhat removed from the majority of the web's consumer base. Honestly, I've had a surprisingly large amount of trouble explaining something like IRC/RSS to someone like my parents or my non-techy friends. I try to explain that IRC is just like any other chat room, but honestly it's incredibly scary and unattractive to most people.
• jinushaun 14y ago
  Neglected? Still a happy Google Reader user. What features are you dying for?
  • wyclif 14y ago
    Yes, neglected. More features isn't the point, nor is whether I personally like it (disclosure: I still use it every day). Google Reader is apparently not being developed; it's in "maintenance mode" and run by a skeleton crew.
    • leephillips 14y ago
      What kind of development does it need? It does what it's supposed to do, no?
      • Shooti 14y ago
        I'd be content if they added back the feed/folder autocomplete on the search box which was removed after the UI refresh.
        • leephillips 14y ago
          Interesting -- I never noticed it did this.
• kfury 14y ago
  I agree.
• ojiikun 14y ago
  Neglected? GOOG tore out all of the most awesome sharing/commenting features from reader around the time G+ was launched in order to force users into their facebook clone. They also highly messed with the UI around then, too. Of the folks I knew who were using GReader two years ago, at most 25% are still there. They destroyed Reader due to their crazed obsession with G+.