17 ms·

Google Reader shutting down

1964 points by knurdle 14y ago

p3d4nt 14y ago
LOL! There's always Google Spreadsheets... =ImportFeed("http://news.google.com/?output=atom http://news.google.com/?output=atom)
klausa 14y ago
That's the first Google service shutdown that I'm affected by. Sad to see it go. What do you guys recommend for replacement? I know about NewsBlur [1], but I never liked it that much. I think I'm just looking for something that would emulate Reader's full-screen view as close as possible. [1] http://newsblur.com http://newsblur.com edit: Here's what I consider an absolute must-have in RSS app: - complete navigation with keyboard (j/k preferred) - full screen mode (really, I don't need a sidebar of a fixed header all the time) - feed view (not just list of items, show me excerpts!) And I know I may be the weird one, but I really, really dislike readers that try to show me items directly from feeds webpage. I find it jarring and distracting when I have five totally different layouts flash before my eyes within 10 seconds (I skim headlines and then skip most of items in my feed). And for the love of god, please, please, no goddamn 'WE LEARN WHAT YOU LIKE' or any kind of bullshit 'smart selection'. I selected my feeds myself, I can manage them just fine by myself, just get out of my way, please.
- genwin 14y ago
  For a news aggregator that adapts to your interests, try niflet.com. I'll add any decent feeds people want.
  - SeppoErviala 14y ago
    No localization, I'm not too interested in USA news.
    - genwin 14y ago
      It has a lot of non-USA sites. Just upvote the stuff you like.
- yaj 14y ago
  I have been using Twitter/Flipboard+Instapaper for a while now as a replacement for traditional RSS readers. I do use Tweetbot but most twitter clients do have "Read Later" applications integrated.
- dkeskar 14y ago
  Caveat: Still early[1], less featured than Google/RSS Reader. But also more. [1] http://memamsa.com/start/gr http://memamsa.com/start/gr
- kmfrk 14y ago
  I just Fever (http://www.feedafever.com/ http://www.feedafever.com/). You host it yourself, and it does the job perfectly.
  - initself 14y ago
    PHP and MySQL, yuck!
    - throwaway420 14y ago
      Is the software any less useful because it's not created in a trendy language? One of the advantages that PHP has is that virtually any cheap web-host in the world can run it. It's not a bad choice to sell a self-hosted product in PHP because of this advantage. I'm not a huge fan of PHP for many types of projects, but I don't see how it benefits anybody to reflexively hate on something just because of a technology choice.
      - wpietri 14y ago
        PHP was such a security nightmare for so long that I am very reluctant to enable it on any box I actually care about. (It could well be better. It's been a long time since I was sysadmining many boxes.) So for a project I have to do the hosting on, language choice still matters to me.
        hadem 14y ago
        And you're a huge fan of Ruby on Rails right...?
        kristopolous 14y ago
        And he's also part of the Long Now Foundation and did volunteer coding for MediaWiki (Don't know the guy, just googled around). No need to be mean to a nice guy. :-\
        gmac 14y ago
- spindritf 14y ago
  > What do you guys recommend for replacement? That's the hard part. Reader integrates nicely with Android's Listen (podcast app), and the reader app, and there's plenty of standalone clients that sync with Google. That's my most-used Google app. By far. Colossal disappointment.
  - TillE 14y ago
    Nice to know that there's still at least one other Google Listen user in the world. I'm a huge podcast consumer, I like listening to old podcasts which have fallen off the RSS feed, and I still haven't found anything better. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do now. As far as I'm aware, nobody besides Google has been archiving RSS history for the past few years. It's a massive pain to dig for old podcast episodes any other way, as full feeds are extremely rare.
    - baytrailcat 14y ago
      I used to be a big Listen user, but the app was so buggy. Then I found Stitcher and never went back.
    - netfeed 14y ago
      Listen was better, but i kinda like PocketCasts, the only problem with that one is that it eats up battery :/
    - bhaile 14y ago
      BeyondPod. Been using that to manage my podcasts for a few years. It can import from Google Reader or maintain its own podcast list. Easy to export out if needed.
  - rietta 14y ago
    I used to use Google Listen, but at some point started using BeyondPod and recently - within the last couple of weeks - went to the paid version of BeyondPod. It works great.
- pflats 14y ago
  http://netnewswireapp.com http://netnewswireapp.com is wonderful for the Mac users out there that aren't tied to an HTML solution. Pretty sure you can sync with your Google Reader account and then delete it from the app, and it'll remember your subscriptions. Just deleted mine and it works fine.
  - camillomiller 14y ago
    Netnewswire is great but now they should provide a new way to sync feeds and especially read/unread counts, flagged and unflagged items, and favorites instead of relying on GReader. If someone wants a pitch here: don't go for a reader, go for a simple WebDAV like system to keep feeds in sync cross-app with APIs so simple that every dev would include it in its feed reading app!
- srgseg 14y ago
  http://www.protopage.com http://www.protopage.com has full screen mode with keyboard navigation if you first do Colors/Settings then untick "open news items directly" (Unticking this will mean headlines will open in the internal full text RSS news feed reader instead of navigating to the headline's web page directly).
- busted 14y ago
  I found bazqux.com which has the keyboard shortucts i wanted as well
- sigil 14y ago
  Based on your must-have list, a good low-tech solution might be an RSS to email gateway. Then your mail client becomes your RSS client. Gmail has j/k key bindings, is relatively unadorned, and facilitates your skim / skip workflow. Excerpts might require some work, but perhaps you could coerce them into the subject line. Aaron Swartz wrote a nice RSS to email gateway btw: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ I have a crappier one that delivers directly into a Maildir, and I use it to read news in mutt: http://search.cpan.org/~acg/rssdrop-0.2/rssdrop http://search.cpan.org/~acg/rssdrop-0.2/rssdrop
  - johns 14y ago
    IFTTT will let you easily do RSS to email too: ifttt.com/feed
  - egh 14y ago
    I'm surprised more people don't do this. It's pretty easy to set up. Here's a little bit I wrote about using rss2email + emacs. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HOWTOReadFeedsInEmacsViaEmail http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HOWTOReadFeedsInEmacsViaEmail
  - quotemstr 14y ago
    "Low-tech"? Email is the best way to read RSS! Email has all the features of high-end RSS headers: * Remember your read messages, even across clients * Star and read for later * Cross-platform * Configurable archiving * Keyword filtering * Search past articles * Organize feeds into folders using configurable rules * Social! (Use the "forward" button.) What's not to like about email?
- erlichmen 14y ago
  > That's the first Google service shutdown that I'm affected by. You never use Google Code Search RIP?
knurdle 14y ago
I'm really sad to see it go, it's the one service I use more than anything else. Probably more than email.
vacipr 14y ago
What the fuck. Later edit: Like many other will most likely do in their replies I'm also going to suggest an alternative that I've tried in the past. http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/ Later edit 2: They even added a nice pop-up now. https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.imm.io/Zg6A.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.imm.io/Zg6A.png
- SpoonMeiser 14y ago
  theoldreader.com looks like a good alternative
  - vacipr 14y ago
    It actually is pretty decent.
  - unsane1 14y ago
    theoldreader seems to have died on my feed import to the best I can tell, anyone seen anything similar? It says it is still working in the background, but no update past the first 3 it imported...
    - vacipr 14y ago
      It's definitely slow right now.Just wait a few minutes.
      - unsane1 14y ago
        FINALLY. I let it work overnight and they finally showed. Now if only they would work on the OAUTH limits mentioned above.
        vacipr 14y ago
        I guess you had a lot of feeds.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
shared4you 14y ago
Anybody knows good alternatives?
AndrewDucker 14y ago
Okay. So I need a replacement website that also has an Android app. And preferably a desktop app (or syncs with FeedDemon). Any suggestions?
- mih 14y ago
  Second that. Feedemon has been my default client for years. Totally upset with Google's doing here.
- mikevm 14y ago
  FeedDemon is dead: http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.html http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.ht...
ericcoleman 14y ago
I've used it every day for years... Anyone run an instance of http://www.feedafever.com http://www.feedafever.com? How is it?
- hexis 14y ago
  I've been using this on and off for the past few months. Frankly, I prefer Google Reader to Fever, but I strongly prefer Fever to any of the other feed readers I've tried. I especially like that I can count on the server staying up and the service not shutting down.
- leejoramo 14y ago
  I really like Fever. It imports and exports OPML, so it was easy move from NetNewsWire to Fever and back to other feed apps and backups. The Fever's mobile view works very nicely. Easy to install and it automatically updates itself.
- nwh 14y ago
  I'd really love to be able to play with this before I drop $30 on it. It's not an unsubstantial amount of money to drop on a self-hosted webapp.
  - ericcoleman 14y ago
    I know Shaun has a great reputation, and I've played his games, but this is exactly how I feel. Wish I could play with it a little bit before I press that "Buy" button.
- owenwil 14y ago
  I use Fever full time. It's great, apart from the lack of native apps. That's the only thing that makes me resent it sometime. Their claims are true, too, it really does help cut back the noise and stops you reading the same story over and over. It's kind of nice to know that I own it, too, so nobody can just take it away.
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
shawnbaden 14y ago
+1 on first Google service shutdown that impacts me. I use Reader daily.
cdjk 14y ago
There's tt-rss [1] if you want to host it yourself. [1] http://tt-rss.org/ http://tt-rss.org/
- EvanAnderson 14y ago
  I'm glad I made the decision to host my own feed reader years ago. Mine's based on an old version of tt-rss, actually (I diverged from the codebase back in '05 when I felt like the author didn't really want any of my contributions). Edit: It looks like I'm also happy that I chose to host my own CalDAV server, too. Edit 2: @koenigdavidmj - Apparently I can't reply that deeply. DAViCal is the CalDAV server I'm using (http://www.davical.org/ http://www.davical.org/). My wife and I sync our iPhones to it and it's been a godsend for my personal organization. (Now if I could just find a decent replacement for Mozilla Sunbird...)
  - koenigdavidmj 14y ago
    What CalDAV server do you use?
  - mjs 14y ago
    Are they really shutting down the CalDAV interface to Google Calendar? (I'm not sure what the "API" bit means, or the "whitelisted".) As of now, CalDAV is Google's recommended way for syncing with iOS devices http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151674 http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
    - tensor 14y ago
      This is my concern too. I was under the impression that iCal also used CalDAV to sync. Why shut it down?
      - MrScruff 14y ago
        It's worse than that. On iOS Google have just shut down exchange support (for new users), which was how I was syncing calendars up until now. If they pull caldav support as well, there will be no syncing mechanism available to iOS users, unless I'm missing something.
andyl 14y ago
Curse this decision - I use Google Reader every day. What is the best alternative RSS reader ??
- viraptor 14y ago
  Just imported my feeds into http://theoldreader.com http://theoldreader.com and it seems to work ok. Just keep in mind that importing takes a while - I saw only the first entry for a minute or two, then others started joining in.
  - taproot 14y ago
    This is looking like the best straight up switch out for reader. Imports are currently limited, and adding a sub takes a while. I'm sure it will settle down in a couple of days. Message when clicking "import": Hey! Because of the huge load we started seeing from lots of concurrent feed import operations, we had to limit the number of imports active at any given time. It looks like right now there are no available slots left, so you might want to visit this page some time later. Meanwhile, feel free to subscribe to feeds manually. Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience.
  - taproot 14y ago
    Jesus. Just got into the import queue... > There are 41600 users in the import queue ahead of you. I bet they're happy right now.
lunchladydoris 14y ago
Only word one suffices: Fuck!
phasevar 14y ago
I depend on Google Reader for keeping up with Hacker News. I'm going to be in a world of hurt now. I use iReadG on the iPhone to browse headings and then star the Hacker News posts I want to read later when I get back to the computer. iReadG has been great because it will download all the rss feed data and allow me to browser it and star items without an Internet connection which is great for those times on the road when there is no signal. I have no idea what I'll be able to use to replicate this functionality now that Google Reader is going down. Very very sad.
conesus 14y ago
This has been a long time coming. Four years ago I began work on my own feed reader, NewsBlur, and it's now a full-fledged Google Reader competitor. It's also a paid app and has been paying for itself nearly since the beginning. http://www.newsblur.com http://www.newsblur.com I hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story sharing was launched last Summer and I expect NewsBlur to be around for quite a while. It's also fully open-source, in case you decide to build your own private community: http://github.com/samuelclay http://github.com/samuelclay. I also have a full-scale re-design in the works, but if you can't get to the main site you can try using the beta site: http://dev.newsblur.com http://dev.newsblur.com
- klausa 14y ago
  Does NewsBlur have something that resembles Reader's full-screen view? If not, is that anywhere on your roadmap?
- cadr 14y ago
  Is there a way to import your google reader list into it?
  - conesus 14y ago
    You bet! It's OAuth-based import, so when you create your account it's just a click away. Couldn't be easier. EDIT: And OPML is the other option when you signup. It's an easy import process, since it's really quite important to get that part right.
    - patrickdavey 14y ago
      So I didn't import the first time I created the account - how do I re-import?! :)
      - afita 14y ago
        Just click on the "+" button to add a new feed. In the dialog there is a button "Import from Google Reader or upload OPML". A small warning: the OPML import will delete you current sites and replace them with the ones from OPML, they will not be merged with the current ones you have.
_delirium 14y ago
Weird decision. Judging by my logs, and those of several other sites I know about, it still has quite significant usage, though I don't know what their threshold is. For example, my own blog has 12x as many Google Reader subscribers as NewsBlur subscribers. Perhaps even with significant usage, that usage wasn't monetizable, and the what-people-read data wasn't valuable enough to keep it operating? Good news for the competition, anyway: Google Reader being pretty good yet completely free and not (obviously) monetized occupied a lot of that space, which is now freed up. edit: In fact, I see NewsBlur is completely unresponsive now, presumably due to sudden interest.
- JohnTHaller 14y ago
  Newsblur had under 2,000 users in the last day. So the usage of Google Reader isn't as significant as you think.
callil 14y ago
Still he best way to read content on the web, really sad to see it go. Adding on to this: What he hell do I do with my starred items now, it's literally the best collection of content I have curated in my life and I reference it all the time. edit: petition to keep it open http://www.change.org/petitions/google-please-don-t-kill-google-reader http://www.change.org/petitions/google-please-don-t-kill-goo...
- josh-j 14y ago
  You can export your Google Reader data -- all your starred items are stored in a json file.
  - jjsz 14y ago
    It doesn't pass unread items though.
    - josh-j 14y ago
      Another option is to get pocket for chrome which adds an icon to google reader items and thereby allowing you to save your starred items to pocket.
- SeppoErviala 14y ago
  The petition will not help. Google already killed reader in their hearths when they made the g+ update. Instead of neglecting it for years to come they did the right thing and let it go for good.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  Wondering this too. I'd like to import my folders and starred items to another reader. Anyone a reader that can do this?
- Flenser 14y ago
  This petition has 10x the number of signatures https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-running https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-r...
ececconi 14y ago
Say it ain't so. I use this everyday at work on my text only internet browser. This is the first internet product shutdown I've ever been affected by. Maybe I don't need to spend so much time reading up on random news. Who knows, it might be good for me. But I will miss you.
- pseut 14y ago
  If you're text only already, check out newsbeuter.
Matsta 14y ago
Why are they shutting it down? I mean heaps of people must still use it. I bet a shit load of people use for Google Alerts as well, lots of businesses. Far if it costed too much, i bet people would be happy to fork out $10 a year for it? I've been using it daily for the past 4 years, to be honest nothing comes that close to it, and most likely the majority of people who use RSS readers use Google Reader. Also now most of the iOS/Android apps are fucked now since they all use Google Reader. Tldr; Google are dongies.
- duncan_bayne 14y ago
  > Why are they shutting it down? Because they would rather that you use Google+. The writing was on the wall when they started disabling features a year or two ago.
  - Matsta 14y ago
    They should shut down Google search as well while there at it, and redirect it to Google+.
    - dictum 14y ago
      Don't give them ideas.
  - talleyrand 14y ago
    But the thing is that Google+ is wholly different experience. It's not about quickly consuming large amounts of information.
  - pan69 14y ago
    How are you supposed to use RSS with G+? Wouldn't that be a mess?
    - Matsta 14y ago
      G+ is already a mess, so wouldn't make much of a difference.
ececconi 14y ago
I guess they couldn't monetize RSS. I would have taken an ad-supported version. Nobody would probably click the ads though.
- zanny 14y ago
  You can easily monetize RSS, you can get some of the best information about a person about the content they consistently subscribe to. All their targeted advertising would have been all the better targeted at people if they intelligently used their subscription information.
- otoburb 14y ago
  I would be willing to pay. I wish they'd tried to gauge user willingness to pay even as an experiment.
dbcooper 14y ago
Damn. Reader was very useful for keeping up with academic journals and flagging articles for further consideration.
Kylekramer 14y ago
Bummer. I imagine there will be a few decent alternatives, but if the biggest game in RSS reader town is shutting down, how long will websites continue to provide and expose RSS feeds to the public?
- nikatwork 14y ago
  Is it the biggest though? I get the impression many people use a desktop app for RSS feeds (I certainly do). Would be interesting to see a marketshare breakdown.
  - Encosia 14y ago
    Sample size of one, but Google Reader accounted for 6,168 of my 7,698 RSS subscribers yesterday (according to the probably-also-on-the-chopping-block FeedBurner).
- zanny 14y ago
  What other syndication mechanism works, is cross platform, portable, provides rich media, and is open?
  - Kylekramer 14y ago
    None that I know of. But the question remains is whether websites will want to provide a syndication mechanism similar to RSS. Google apparently thinks that it isn't worth maintaining and they are just the ones aggregating the feeds. RSS feeds won't die and will definitely be used in various niches such as podcasting. But if RSS feeds are losing popularity as Google claims, I am worried about their future. Combined with the fact they are probably harder to monetize, I would not be surprised if their days are numbered on most common websites. And that sucks, cause RSS readers always felt like using a cheat code on the internet and I don't find anything that replaces it to my satisfaction.
gyrccc 14y ago
use it daily. Would be nice if Google released details on this "decline in usage"
- infogulch 14y ago
  Agreed, and agreed.
vowelless 14y ago
This is going to be a huge pain for me. There was a decent infrastructure built on top of google reader (not only apps that let you log in and view your feeds on different devices). I constantly use ifttt to send starred articles to my evernote.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Since IFTTT can consume any RSS feed, you can just use any client that lets you export your starred articles as one, such as Tiny Tiny RSS. I have a similar use case, where I want to automatically download chosen podcasts. I just created a "download" label, got an RSS feed link from my client and put it on a podcasting app. Now I just need to label the episodes I want to listen to on Tiny and they'll be automatically downloaded to my phone.
guelo 14y ago
These web companies prove over and over again that it's not possible to trust them with your data. What would stop Google from killing your gmail or docs when they don't see it as valuable anymore? The worst part is how the big guys kill all competition with their free products leaving few alternatives for users.
- cma 14y ago
  You can get all your Gmail data over standard IMAP. If you don't take advantage that to make personal backups, you are a fool.
  - KingMob 14y ago
    True, but that's not too bad. The real pain comes when your email address is no longer valid. You have to hunt down everyone you've ever communicated with to give them a new one. A lot of older, and more casual, contacts will be unable to reach you.
    - DavidAdams 14y ago
      Any geek who relies on a domain name that belongs to someone else for their give-out-to-people, permanent email address needs to have his or her membership card revoked. Even if it's a domain that's owned by Google. Get a domain name.
      - ciupicri 14y ago
        Out of curiosity, what domain name should people choose, one based on their full name? If so, what happens when it has been already taken?
        tomjen3 14y ago
        You take something else? Tomjen isn't my name, but it is close enough.
        14y ago
jws 14y ago
I'll take the blame for this. I use Google Reader heavily, but I never go to the web pages. I have native apps on my desktop and mobile devices and just use Reader to keep my subscriptions synced. No ad views, no service.
- rbrcurtis 14y ago
  If it was an issue of ad views all they'd have to do is add an ad bar at the top ala gmail.
  - saurik 14y ago
    I think at that point, content creators being aggregated by Google--who are already have a fairly stressful relationship with Google--might accumulate too much ammunition to use against them (as then Google would be directly profiting from aggregating and redistributing content from third-parties in a modified presentation).
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago
  If that was a problem, they should've offered paid subscriptions. I refuse to see ads, but I'll happily pay for the privilege. I find the Google Reader web interface to be dreadful and ugly, so I never go there except to manage my RSS feeds. Third party devs have created newsreader apps so much better than Google did, it's not even funny.
  - pohl 14y ago
    If that was a problem, they should've offered paid subscriptions. Yeah, but they don't want us as customers, they want to sell us as Soylent Green out the back door. With this news, the only remaining things I'll use Google for are search, GMail, and some libraries like Guice & Guava.
    - tracker1 14y ago
      That's more than me.. without iGoogle and Reader, I don't see much use in them for search now.
wyclif 14y ago
I've been an active, daily user of Google Reader since the beginning. I knew this was coming, but it still doesn't feel right because unlike other Google properties that I don't use, it's part of my information flow. What I'd really like to see here on HN is a post comparing other RSS contenders like NewsBlur and The Old Reader.
- Maxious 14y ago
  These seems to be the most short sighted bit - they had the techarati 1% visiting a Google social media property multiple times a day and yet they neutered it (rather than integrating properly) to work more on Google+.
  - kingoftheintern 14y ago
    My impression is that the internet's elite click almost no ads, so Google as a profit-seeking entity doesn't necessarily care too much about what they do or think in aggregate, as long as they don't get upset enough to be heard by people who actually make up their revenue streams.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      That's what's stupid. Outlier users like this are the least likely to be attracted to standard consumption vectors like ads (IYSWIM), but the avenues of investigation they pursue instead are likely a very good guide to where the median consumer in a given market will move later. A fanatic motorcyclist (for example) is going to scour all sorts of obscure information sources that non-fanatics will not have the patience or time for. But that pattern of scouring will point towards the factors which do move the mass of consumers some time later. Heavy users of Reader were supplying Google with a lot of high-quality data, and if the product had been given the same attention as something like GMail that information would be worth proportionally more.
- simcop2387 14y ago
  I'd love that kind of comparison that also includes if there is any desktop (linux hopefully) app support too. I've been using google reader and liferea to keep my rss feeds synced between devices and to avoid re-reading things i already saw.
Morst 14y ago
I believe the "loyal userbase" would be large enough to sustain a startup. But sadly that is not enough for google anymore.
- campuscodi 14y ago
  Sergey Brin is a scurge for old Google fans.... this guy seems to focus on hardware related products more than what Google great.... its Web products
aheilbut 14y ago
Are there any alternative sources of archival RSS feeds like those that Google Reader (unofficially) provides?
- icebraining 14y ago
  What's an archival RSS feed?
  - aheilbut 14y ago
    You can get an RSS file (well, Atom) for any feed that includes all posts going back to whenever google reader started following it. Normally if you get the RSS from the originating site it'll only have the latest 20 or so posts, and there isn't a standardized way to get the history.
  - zanny 14y ago
    Greader will preserve its own history of a feed, including deleted items and feeds that go down, given someone on the Internet was accessing it, Google caches it. It means when a website is taken offline, if you are subscribed to, say, a content RSS feed through them, you can still browse the history and content. I just switched to Akregator, which will locally cache feeds (and you can configure it to do so permanantly) but it is a local copy. You can host your feeds via a feed host through it, so I imagine what I'm going to do is run Akregator off my server box, archive my feeds, and access it from my servers ip.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      Oh, well, I've name-dropped it a few times already, but TTRSS stories every item in its database. I've used it to run some numbers on them.
      - aheilbut 14y ago
        The beauty of this aspect of google reader though is that they have archived every feed that anyone has read in the past 5+ years, and there's actually an API to retrieve that data as RSS/Atom.
pauljonas 14y ago
NOOOOO! It is my most accessed browser URL. It is the primary method I peruse new stuff on the web. It is the only RSS app that can handle my volume of RSS subscriptions (all others choke and sputter once the feed total is greater than a couple hundred).
- zanny 14y ago
  Uh oh. Not good for someone with over a thousand RSS feeds from various updates-once-a-year products or sites.
  - eli 14y ago
    You can export most of your data (and certainly the list of feeds you follow) http://www.dataliberation.org/google/reader http://www.dataliberation.org/google/reader
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
josh-j 14y ago
Netvibes is another alternative (it has a widget and reader view).
- salmanapk 14y ago
  Thanks! Was trying to remember this one.
onan_barbarian 14y ago
Pretty irritated at the way Google takes moderately successful services that can't possibly cost them all that much to keep running and puts them down the memory hole, to foster the happy illusion that everything that everything that Google does turns to gold. I'm sure there's more engagement with Reader than Plus, with its millions of users who don't really use it (many of whom aren't even really aware that they are signed up for it).
- SeppoErviala 14y ago
  I for one welcome this change as an opportunity for growth. Google has not put any effort into reader for some time now. Maybe some innovative company will get the google reader user base and build something great. --- OTOH I do feel sad that reader is gone as it has been a part of my daily life for many years now. Some say that RSS is dead but I cannot find any alternative to feeds I've collected.
  - markdennehy 14y ago
    You know what you call a product you don't put much effort into for some time and which is still in daily use by happy users? Working. /mutter.
    - SeppoErviala 14y ago
      I would like more powerful filtering options and better recommendations. For example, Hacker News feed is impossible to follow as RSS on reader as it has too high volume (for me at least). I would be content with ~40 daily recommendations. Google reader had decent random recommendations before the G+ update. I believe that a good recommendation system can guess relevant items for given user, but that was not what google reader has been doing for some time now.
      - chrisbolt 14y ago
        I long ago switched to the Hacker News 100 feed: http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload/ http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overlo...
mdesq 14y ago
I spend more actual time in Reader than any other Google application including Gmail. This bites. I'm open to alternatives, but I haven't seen any I could really latch on to.
signed0 14y ago
While I am an avid Google Reader user, I think this is good news. Their product has stagnated over the past few years, yet few competitors emerged. Hopefully this creates a void that a better service or set of services can fill.
- Semaphor 14y ago
  Sadly most of the services fill a different niche. Feedly and so on are all magazines but not what I consider real RSS readers. I've read though this Thread, the Reddit threads and through some "Reader Alternatives" articles. The only things similar seem to be The Old Reader and Newsblur.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    Feedly has a very familiar view for Reader users: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/tips-for-google-reader-users-migrating-to-feedly/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/tips-for-google-reader-use... I've been using that view since the Reader announcement prompted me to give Feedly a second look. Works perfectly.
Samuel_Michon 14y ago
I'm very disappointed by this. I use Reader to manage all my RSS feeds. I check Reeder on my phone more than I use any other app. It just goes to show, if you're using Google software that has no advertising and isn't used to sell advertising, it could end any day, and it probably will some day. I'll be purchasing a Feedafever license, which also happens to work with Reeder. http://www.feedafever.com/ http://www.feedafever.com/
- mh- 14y ago
  I'm looking at FaF but not seeing how this works with Reeder?
  - jeffehobbs 14y ago
    It's true, Fever is an Account type for Reeder. http://shawnblanc.net/2012/06/review-reeder-3-for-iphone/ http://shawnblanc.net/2012/06/review-reeder-3-for-iphone/
    - lucian1900 14y ago
      Ah, but just for the iPhone client, which is the only one I don't use (as I have an Android phone).
  - chipotle_coyote 14y ago
    Reeder on the iPhone syncs with Fever, but neither the Mac nor iPad versions of Reeder do. Sunstroke (https://goneeast.com/sunstroke/ https://goneeast.com/sunstroke/) is a better Fever-specific client for the iPhone, I think... but it doesn't have either an iPad or a Mac version. On the Mac you can use Fever's web interface but on the iPad you're pretty much out of luck, as there are no native clients and trying to use the web interface there is crazy-making. (Actually, the web interface is a little crazy-making in any web browser. It's just a lot crazy-making on the iPad.)
    - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
      Wow. I mostly use Reeder on my phone, but it hadn't even crossed my mind that the iPad and OS X versions possibly wouldn't have Fever support. The author should really make that a priority, he has 2,5 months to make it happen.
reefab 14y ago
There is a whole app ecosystem built around Google Reader. This is going to be ugly. I actually it daily but only through apps like Reeder.
- miker64 14y ago
  Yeah, I'm far more worried about the fact that pretty much all the iOS rss readers use Google Reader as a backend. I'm going to be fubar for keeping different apps across devices all in sync...
abrowne 14y ago
I was kind of always expecting this ... I'm always afraid the same thing will happen to Voice.
- jbigelow76 14y ago
  I don't know, Voice can act as a competitor to Microsoft's Skype. With no visible competing product from Microsoft, Apple or Facebook and no perceived competition from something like Newsblur Google thinks they can kick their Reader users in the junk with impunity.
webwanderings 14y ago
First word came out of my mouth looking at this in Google Reader of course is, FUCK!
mindprince 14y ago
I would gladly pay for Google Reader. It is my most visited website. This is so sad.
flingbob 14y ago
I've been working on a replacement for a year now. It's open to the public. Get it while it's hot http://1kpl.us/ http://1kpl.us/
- tomedme 14y ago
  Thank you!
whitehat2k9 14y ago
I'm a huge fan of Netvibes - been using it for several years now. It has a single feed based view like most other RSS readers, but in my opinion the newspaper view is where it shines. I can quickly skim several dozen feeds with the scroll of a mouse - it's great if you're the kind of person who likes to take in a lot of info at once.
krcz 14y ago
Is there a RSS reader which incorporates some ML learning algorithms to determine which articles I'd probably like, basing on what others (ones having similar taste) click? That was only thing that would make me abandon Google Reader if it weren't closing anyway.
- platz 14y ago
  I think newsblur supports some kind of training after looking at it today; not sure how effective it is.
presty 14y ago
what the fuck google? seriously, I'm really pissed with this.
- presty 14y ago
  really, how is one's reading habits not useful data for google? you're sitting on a pile of gold. it's a billion times more valuable than the useless google plus desert!
- presty 14y ago
  ok Pocket, it's time for you guys to add rss reading support
beryllium 14y ago
I use NetNewsWire (an iOS app) every day, and it interfaces with Google Reader very nicely. Very sad that Google has made this decision - I will have to look into the alternatives. Hopefully they are even better! :) Edit/Update: I'm probably part of the problem. I never click ads - maybe they just had too many freeloaders like me? :) Weirdly, I also never block ads. I just don't click them.
taeric 14y ago
I hate saying this, as it sounds like I'm just bitter, but this really could be enough to finally leverage me off of google. Reader is by far my most used app of theirs. Plus is garbage in comparison.
- awhow 14y ago
  I am the say way. And I feel that my heavy use of Gmail and Google Reader meant that I was more likely to use other Google products when needed, ie Docs, Calendar. Without Reader, I don't feel like a Google user, just a Gmail user.
Llothy 14y ago
This is very sad. :-( That's like 3 hours of my day every day.
ruok0101 14y ago
Good motivation for cleaning out all those feeds I never read anymore...
kingoftheintern 14y ago
Literally my favorite thing on the internet. Revolutionized how I consume information. I found out about this via Google Reader! Google has fallen very far.
doe88 14y ago
Well done, it affects me a lot, it was one of two services I'm totally dependant from Google. The second one is Gmail, if I wasn't so lazy I would try to do something about it too, I'm not confortable with my mails stored at Google / in the US anymore.
stuqqq 14y ago
that is so sad.
rdl 14y ago
Ugh. I was living in fear of this happening for the past 3 years. I will never trust Google again. Apparently the only Google service I don't have a good alternative for is Google Books (for search; kindle, torrented bookwarez, and scribd works fine for the raw PDFs)
- BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
  > I will never trust Google again. What other free hosted service provider deserves your "trust" that it will never, ever go away, and which provides facilities for exporting all your data in a nice way (a feature which will likely be accessible long into the future)? I'm just as irritated as you are, but given that they've provided notice and good backup/takeout options, I don't see a betrayal of trust anywhere.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I didn't use Google Reader because it was free, I used it because it was 1) good and 2) the back-end to essentially every other RSS-based service I used. So they're not competing with "free", they're competing with everything. I learned this lesson when I made the mistake of Google Voice (which was free for some aspects).
    - wildmXranat 14y ago
      I concur with this sentiment. It is good enough to pay for in my point of view. Google simply made the choice of wanting to monetize on their current user group. It makes me wonder if they'll open source it so that others can self-host it.
Spittie 14y ago
This is a sad news, one of my favourite RSS reader is closing. Google Reader is likely the site I browse the most, and I always have one tab open on it. Also, my phone sync with RSS with it. I guess it's time to start searching for a new RSS reader. Too bad that I already did it a while ago, and every time I went back to Google Reader. The biggest problem for me with other feed reader is that they try to add too many features to the simple format that RSS is. No, I don't care about "hot news", and I don't care about "suggested stories", I just want to read the feed I've added to it. My brain is good enough to skim through that list by just reading the title. And most other reader lack integration with a mobile platform (Android/iOS/WP). Yes, sometimes they have a mobile client, but usually not nearly good enough as 3rd party clients. Hopefully they'll change their mind, but I doubt it. Time to force myself. Sigh.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Try Tiny Tiny RSS. It's pretty light, just a list of folders/feeds on a left pane and the items on the right. I've switched from GReader a few months ago and it's working pretty well. I don't know if there are any 3rd party clients, though. I know it has a mobile UI, but it's web, not native.
  - Spittie 14y ago
    Thanks, I looked into it some times ago. Liked it, but didn't bother to switch since Google Reader was working so nicely for me. I know it has a mobile app for android, but it always seemed sub-par to gReader or Press for me.
- axusgrad 14y ago
  I've been using "RSS Feed Reader" Google plugin, which was the first thing I came across. This thread is a nice place for seeing other options. If an API or service is really valuable, Google shutting their version down shouldn't be too bad. Other people can try to make some money offering a replacement.
- pauljonas 14y ago
  I have, over the years, experimented with all of the RSS reader alternatives and found them to be lacking. Especially in handling the volume of feeds I subscribe to (I subscribe to thousands of feeds, see it as a stream to dip into, not zealously sop up every item, and browse through).
ambirex 14y ago
Perhaps the "decline in usage" had something to do with the thoughtless redesign they implemented.
- TheCowboy 14y ago
  It might have been in the decline before that point, but I did stop using it because of the redesign hurting my eyes and being less of a pleasure to interact with. It's really a shame because it was a service a lot of people enjoyed. There was no need to force one look on every user. I can't imagine the likely demographic profile of Google Reader users was worthless to a company that sells targeted ads as well.
talleyrand 14y ago
Well, this is truly the apocalypse. To me, Google Reader IS the internet.....(It's how I got to this Hacker News post). Not pleased at all.
EugeneOZ 14y ago
Just want to repeat here my tweets: Maybe GoLang will be retired in August? AngularJS in September? GAE in October? "Backed by Google" is a joke now. I just can't trust Google anymore. Google Reader was important part of my day - source of information. Google apps are too UNSTABLE to use.
- TillE 14y ago
  Speaking of Twitter, I just checked my feed to find that a huge number of people I follow (from tech nerds to game developers to independent journalists) are upset that Google Reader is dying. This seems like a huge mistake. Why doesn't Google want to be the one place I can go for everything? They should be cultivating that kind of brand loyalty, not stomping all over it.
- Benferhat 14y ago
  > GAE in October? AppEngine's deprecation policy: 7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if we intend to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to this API or Service. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate that Service without these changes until the later of: (i) one year after the announcement or (ii) April 20, 2015, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment): # required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or # doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden. [0] https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms scroll down to 7.2
karpathy 14y ago
"over the years usage has declined" That's because there was almost ZERO innovation done on this product. Very few (mostly visual) improvements, and very few new features. The latest posts on Google Reader blog are from 2011 http://googlereader.blogspot.com/ http://googlereader.blogspot.com/
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  Was thinking the same thing - usage has declined in part because Google doesn't promote it. Google shapes the way many people discover, use and keep information (google search, maps, news, finance, gmail, etc). To let Reader languish then kill it because "usage has declined" is rather self-fulfilling. I bet if they didn't update their satellite images and road data, Maps usage would decline as well. They could have been working with the community to define new standards - tags, markup, etc - to allow richer interaction between rss readers and sites (thinking geoloc micro format work, and other semantic markup work in recent years). Making 'reader' a first-class citizen in its suite of services, then using interaction data as more relevance signaling seems like an evolutionary step that only a handful of players the size of google can make good use of, but apparently in their infinite wisdom, they'll just shutter it.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- sethish 14y ago
  It's worse than that. The google plus era redesign of all google sites ate up a massive fraction of the vertical space in Google Reader. And some social sharing features that made google reader an awesome place, were disabled in favor of sharing via google plus.
  - karpathy 14y ago
    Agreed with this, most notable example of this for me was when they took away recommendations within Google Reader. That was a great place to go to see what blog posts my friends like. Now it's all multiplexed into their G+ timelines and I happen to catch about a third of it in between their useless updates about being in a park with their kids or a new funny meme.
tvladeck 14y ago
Mixed emotions. I remember at the end of college and right after (I graduated in 2008), many of my close friends were on GReader and we would share and communicate directly through it about interesting things we were reading. It was an awesome way to interact, and nothing has replaced it for my group and me. Google's implicit (although I could be reading their intentions incorrectly) strategy of trying to route that interaction through GPlus did not work for us. Too much overhead and it never materialized. Now we just use email, which is fine. So on the whole it's a type of social interaction that has simply gone. It's a shame, because I think that Google could have done something with this. But they are just one company and the number of innovative things they're doing is really impressive. Maybe this will clear the way for a competitor that replaces the social interaction component and innovates on it. I'd be a user for sure.
- tvchurch 14y ago
  I'd note that Readertron (readertron.com) was built by a guy who was frustrated when Google nerfed the sharing among friends feature. MIght want to give it a shot.
  - sbarre 14y ago
    I am interested in Google Reader replacements, but that site has zero information for me before asking me for my email and to sign up.. Hmmmm
    - greenmountin 14y ago
      It actually looks pretty good, I was disappointed that there weren't any evangelists listing it in the other threads. I signed up in two seconds by using a mailinator address. It looks like an exact clone + sharing/contacts. On revisiting though, the XML import failed. Too bad.
  - RHSeeger 14y ago
    Sadly: > You need to sign in or sign up before continuing. Not even a description of what it is or why I want to give them my information. Sorry, but /close
fractalsea 14y ago
This is my most used Google service after the search and mail (it's probably on par with Youtube). Shame to see it go! I can't see how it was hurting them so much with users declining. Surely the more time staring at the Google website header the better?
zeitg3ist 14y ago
Sad, sad news. I get (I think) 300 items/day on my Google Reader and I always get to "inbox zero" - a bit of OCD maybe. It is my most visited URL ever and I've used it every day, several times a day, since 2006. Of course I would even pay a fair amount of money for it, given the time I've spent on it, but Google's not interested. I am currently trying The Old Reader and while the interface is nice (well... generic Bootstrap, which is pleasant, and better than newsblur) it's really slow with my amount of feeds. Sigh...
hiddentaco 14y ago
I literally said "Awwww, whaaaat?". http://tt-rss.org http://tt-rss.org as a replacement seems the winner for me so far.
vosechu_ 14y ago
I'm seriously digging Feedly right now. Took 12 seconds to get into it and everything just makes sense. I wish I had found this ages ago. No need to backup your feeds, it uses your google account for now.
- mehrzad 14y ago
  Feedly depends on Google Reader for now, IIRC. edit: They're fixing it! http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/
- mjs 14y ago
  Seems like the Chrome App can access: * Your data on all websites * Your tabs and browsing activity I'm not very comfortable with that. It also seems very unnecessary for an RSS reader.
  - mehrzad 14y ago
    https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permissions_are_too_broad_why https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permiss... This answered here.
    - fakeer 14y ago
      It doesn't give an answer that is acceptable. That's no way an explanation. That's an excuse.
- dbcooper 14y ago
  Feedly posted this to their blog today: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly Google Reader Posted on March 14, 2013 by @feedly Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting from some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandie back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered.
nbertram 14y ago
Thats funny... I found this post on google reader.
flatfilefan 14y ago
Search, maps, reader what other Google services do geeks use daily? Strange decision!
buremba 14y ago
I reacted in a same way when Google Notebook shutted down. WTF GOOGLE?!
jayeff 14y ago
I do hope this is a blessing in disguise! Google killed with their free Reader the biggest part of the market around RSS. Switching off Reader opens up this market which should be still large enough for a few indies to find their niche. Maybe even reinvigorating RSS while doing so.
marban 14y ago
Thank you, Google+
faithful_droog 14y ago
I (and it seems a lot of others) will be sad to see reader go. I presume this death announcement doesn't meet the criteria for a HN black banner though.
cgcdesign 14y ago
Sad to see it go. At least I have 3 months to make my own, should make for a good weekend(s) project.
pbreit 14y ago
Wow, very surprising. One of the few Google apps I access several times per day. Edit: I think there's a 50/50 chance this decision gets reversed. Edit: looks like http://feedly.com http://feedly.com is going to get my vote for now.
icebraining 14y ago
If you want a light and simple reader with a similar UI, try Tiny Tiny RSS. It's self-hosted, so it won't stop working when it's no longer "profitable", and it has all the basic features (folders, keyboard navigation, etc) without clutter. I've been really happy with it since I switched from GReader, a few months ago. http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki
antirez 14y ago
I wonder if it's just a Google Reader issue or RSS are fading out. I'm not a huge RSS user but I would be very concerned by RSS decline, it was one of the rare inter-operation standard that was very positive, easy, clean, and helped a lot programmers to put things together.
- frou_dh 14y ago
  It's bugged me when I've seen people say that Twitter replaces RSS. In my eyes, RSS is for feeds where you actually care about each item and the decision whether or not to read it. Twitter is catered towards dipping in and out, with items constantly slipping through the net.
wslh 14y ago
Google Reader is irreplaceable, it is not only about reading RSS. That is the easy part. It is about going back in time and accessing all past feeds in an organized way (it is difficult to rebuilt that from crawling and web scraping). If you add a blog now you can read articles that are not present in the current feed. Google Reader is the core of my information diet. Not twitter. Thousands of blogs starred, liked, and commented. An interesting feature that you couldn't replace is automatic translation: reading a russian blog asmit was written in english. Once I shared one of its articles and one friend asked me if I knew russian or if it was a joke my share! Because obviously the share was in the original language. Google is evil. While I can understand a business decision, there are ways to hand it over to other companies or organizations. I share some of my previous criticism: - Extraction of Main Text Content Using the Google Reader NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/extraction-of-main-text-content/ http://blog.databigbang.com/extraction-of-main-text-content/ -Google Search NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/ http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/ - The Data Portability Fact Sheet: http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/ http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/ - Reverse Engineering and the Cloud: http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-and-the-cloud/ http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-a...
- TillE 14y ago
  > It is about going back in time and accessing all past feeds in an organized way Yes, exactly. Google Reader is literally the only way to find past episodes of some podcasts - the files are still up, but after a site redesign nothing else links to them.
- nl 14y ago
  Wait.. so they have a service that in your words is so good it is irreplaceable.. and taking it away makes them evil? That's pretty strong!
  - wslh 14y ago
    Yes, their historical data can't be rebuilt. A little bit like what happened with USENET and Google buying DejaNews. Nobody has that data.
ja27 14y ago
I'm going to move all my feeds over to FriendFeed.
DannoHung 14y ago
Why don't they just fucking ask me to pay for it? God damnit.
mayneack 14y ago
Obligatory White House petition: http://wh.gov/oRoJ http://wh.gov/oRoJ
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ambirex 14y ago
Seeing the boom in alternatives, someone should start making a feedburner competitor.
- bennesvig 14y ago
  I think Feedblitz is one of the most popular at the moment. I'll either be switching to that or MailChimp.
surrealize 14y ago
I use Reader's "star" functionality to keep track of stuff that I want to refer back to later. And, AFAICT, you can't easily export your star history. You can export your subscriptions, but not the stars. The only approach that I've seen to exporting stars is to use the fact that Reader will create a feed of just your starred items. Then you can view that feed in some other reader and manually mark each one there (ugh). Edit: Oh, and the read/not read history is, AFAICT, also not exportable. And I do use this as well.
- skymt 14y ago
  Stars are, in fact, exportable. The "Google Takeout" zip archive for Reader includes a file called starred.json, containing a list of your starred items in a JSON format that, as far as I know, nothing else reads. If whatever reader you switch to can import marked items, you can probably work up a script to convert Google's format to whatever the new reader uses.
  - surrealize 14y ago
    Thanks! The last time I checked was when they turned my google-account-with-an-apps-domain-email-address into an actual google apps account, and I had to move my Reader data.
  - 1ManBandAccts 14y ago
    Feedly will sync over all your starred items and put them into Saved.
- zanny 14y ago
  Oh god. I have around 800 starred items dating back to 2008 in greader. Fuck me.
magoon 14y ago
Wait, Google is a business?
sideproject 14y ago
whoa. big move. can we somehow petition against this? and maybe even move this off as an alternative open source, driven by community? Whack some ads on Google Reader and you might make money out of it Google... but don't remove this.
- zanny 14y ago
  Well, I just exported my entire feed history to Akregator. It imported smoothly. I'm probably going to look into a qt 5.1 based port of it to Android if someone isn't already making it just so I can have my feeds on the go as well. That is my biggest concern, I really like the UX of the mobile reader app for browsing blog entries.
mattchew 14y ago
This is going to be a problem. Reader is fairly important to me. I'm dropping Google a note and offering to pay a subscription if they continue services. Probably won't make a dent, but worth a try.
shmerl 14y ago
Time to stick to Akregator.
- zanny 14y ago
  I've been reading up about Akregator, and it seems to be direly under-staffed in terms of developer oomph. There was blag post a few years ago about porting it to Akondai: http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=137 http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=137 but it is still using Metakit. Maybe this is the wake up call to get Akregator back up to snuff, though. I might look at the code to see if theres anything I can do, at least.
jezell 14y ago
http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/
przemoc 14y ago
I used to use Google Reader. Feed count rose and rose to the point I stopped using it. For many many months I'm checking only LWN and HN sites manually for CS/IT-related stuff - I don't feel like I lost anything. So cannot really complain about losing Google Reader now, but I think that this decease decision is strange. I may reevaluate feed idea when I see intelligent reader that will show me early the most interesting stories from my subscriptions and will do it with a style. Reading must be a pleasure, not pain. Typographically web is a horrible place, there is so much that can and should be improved. Feeds should be your better (i.e. correctly) looking versions of the texts you can find on the web. Google Reader Plus extension improved a bit comfort of using GR, thanks to multi-column view for instance, but it wasn't enough to keep me using GR.
lispython 14y ago
Reeder, my favorite iOS and Mac news app, that includes support for Fever (http://feedafever.com/ http://feedafever.com/), a news aggregation and evaluation service I’ve always wanted to try. If you are looking to leave Google Reader, this may be the combination you’re looking for.
idont 14y ago
This is such a sad news for lots of specialized website (including Google blogs!!!). For sure they will see some trafic impact. BTW, Google+ is too much time consuming per unit of information read, so I will never replace Reader by Plus.
DrinkWater 14y ago
i was especially interested in the history function of Google Reader. i could look up old items even if they were not starred, it was enough if they passed through Google Reader. And there is no option to save this data. Or is there?
pasbesoin 14y ago
Lessons for the week: It's not yours unless it's 1) On your machine [a], and 2) DRM free. -- [a] As long as your machine remains "yours", i.e. free of the same restrictions.
- zanny 14y ago
  I just exported my Greader profile into Akregator. Now to research if someone wrote an import of reader favorites JSON, or if I should just write the extension myself.
tvchurch 14y ago
I'd urge everyone to give Readertron (readertron.com) a try. It was built by programmer (and good friend of mine) who was frustrated when Google nerfed the ability to share among friends within Google Reader. It's a work in progress, but at least you can share articles among friends again. He's also very responsive to requests for features.
- Ziomislaw 14y ago
  uhg! tried it. after signing in I was presented with a "You are already subscribed to the following shared feeds." and two pages of random people I've never even heard about. I strongly advise against it.
smegel 14y ago
What happened to you Google :(
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
helloamar 14y ago
I use reeder for Mac and ipad that is connected to my google reader account. Need to find an alternative now.
- cstross 14y ago
  Not necessarily; @reederapp tweeted a few hours ago, "Don't worry, Reeder won't die with Google Reader." He's not very communicative but I suspect this means he's working on something :)
nickbaum 14y ago
Former Reader PM here, no longer at Google. Having fought many times to keep Reader alive, it's worth considering whether a large enough outcry would lead them to reconsider. White House Petition!
- zanny 14y ago
  Dear Mr President, you must use an executive order to stop Google from shutting down the reader service. Thanks, ~everyone.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Within the limits of confidentiality and business ethics, can you explain what the issues are in a situation like this? I agree with other readers above that Reader is probably a poor source of ad clicks and thus direct revenue, but it seems like it would offer invaluable forward intelligence for Google (just as searches for 'influenza' and 'flu' have proved to be excellent leading epidemiological indicators). ISTM that the value proposition for Google was in mining the behavior of Reader users to identify what would be interesting/ popular/ important a week or a month from now, and would help to optimize the value of keyword searches etc in adwords.
  - nickbaum 14y ago
    As a stand-alone product, Google Reader could easily have justified continued investment and headcount. The problem is that internally you're competing for resources against products with (a) tons of users (Gmail), (b) tons of revenue (AdWords), (c) high strategic priority (Android, Google+). To justify staffing a smaller product, you have to argue that it has the potential to be as big as the other products, and that the marginal impact of an engineer is higher on an under-staffed product.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      Sounds like the unwritten correlate of that is that you can't measure what you don't build, and without the measurements you don't get to build. I wonder what magic econometric fairy dust grants a project high strategic priority.
aaronbrethorst 14y ago
I've been a Google Reader user since the beginning, and have had an uneasy sense that this was coming for a while. I started building a replacement for it that fits my needs a couple months ago. It's not ready yet, but I thought I might as well toss up a launchrock page and collect email addresses from other folks who might be interested: http://signup.viafeeds.com http://signup.viafeeds.com Here are my guiding principles: 1. It's going to cost money. I refuse to 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.' I imagine that for more casual users, this'll be a nominal amount. I won't compromise on this because.... 2. I want to build something sustainable, and have it be enough of a profit center for me that I'm willing to focus on it and continually improve it for years to come. 3. I want to build something that I'll love more than Google Reader. I spend at least an hour a day in Google Reader, and want to make sure that whatever I build has the simplicity of Reader. I have a lot of interesting ideas I want to try out around inclusion of contextual information and the ability to easily save or share articles or clips of articles in multiple ways. From conversations I've had with friends in the journalism world, there's a real need for a product like this, especially one with a legitimate business model. Regarding where this fits in relative to NewsBlur: I think NewsBlur is doing a lot of interesting stuff, but it feels heavyweight to me, compared to Google Reader. I want a very minimalistic, "just the facts, ma'am" experience. What do you want to see in a news feed product? Where do you think Google Reader could've or should've been in 2013 if Google had properly maintained it? Anyway, to reiterate, if you're interested, head over here and enter your email address: http://signup.viafeeds.com http://signup.viafeeds.com (I just created the domain an hour ago, so hopefully it'll have propagated to your DNS server).
- pyre 14y ago
  | 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.' I think that you meant something else. Nobody "makes it up in volume." ;)
  - krallja 14y ago
    That's the joke.
    - 14y ago
jjsz 14y ago
See. The thing is. I haven't found ONE solution that imports starred items, unread items, and feeds properly besides Reeder. And it doesn't work on Android or on the web. :(.
anigbrowl 14y ago
While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. That will happen if you stop developing it and ignore requests for new features. Conesus has done a good job with Newsblur and I'll try going back to that, but I really wanted to have Gmail-style filtering of my RSS feeds in Google Reader, to to mention being able to maintain my sharing/tracking data within the Google ecosystem. This is a major failure on Google's part. Complaining about a declining user base when the product was left to stagnate amounts to blaming the users for the company's lack of vision. Why Google would want to abandon this extremely rich source of behavorial data and trend emergence is beyond me; it suggests a loss of direction, for which short-term reactivity is no substitute. Put another way, you can't lead the herd by following it faster. I am shocked. As I say, I've used Newsblur before and thought it OK - at the time I just somewhat preferred Reader's cosmetics. So the above is not just a reaction to the necessity to switch platforms.
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mike_ivanov 14y ago
Screw you, Google. Now I need to spend my own time to write a replacement as there is no viable alternative.
uladzislau 14y ago
List of Google Reader alternatives http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/?platform=online&license=free http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/?platform=on...
- olegp 14y ago
  Also: https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader
yread 14y ago
> CalDAV API will become available for whitelisted developers (only) Wasn't a big brouhaha about windows phone only supporting Exchange protocol and not the open standard that's used by everyone: CalDAV? Oh, and now Google is discontinuing it! Let's see how much longer Exchange will last...
- spinchange 14y ago
  More like let's see how much longer Google Apps will last in the enterprise. I am NOT a big MS fan, but Windows & Office is still a major factor for businesses and a big part of the Apps allure was that it was interoperable with existing Windows/Office deployments. As enterprises using Apps upgrade and find that they no longer sync with any of their brand new software, people are going to be very upset - particularly those with egg on their face who sold their company on Google Apps (like yours truly)
  - fludlight 14y ago
    Would you be interested in a Google Calendar API to CalDAV translator program or service?
    - bruceboughton 14y ago
      That seems like a backward step.
  - Encosia 14y ago
    No kidding. Compared to my clients that choose Exchange-friendly services like Office 365, the clients on Google Apps (paid or not) have been feeling a world of pain since the Office 2013 upgrade. I remember reading a post on some official Google blog late last year talking about how they were going to aggressively target and steal Microsoft's purchase in the enterprise. In reality, they're struggling horribly to even retain the customers they've coaxed over, in my experience. Whether they like it or not, ActiveSync is the most pervasive protocol for syncing mail, calendars, and contacts across a wide range of devices. It's a travesty that they're choosing a holy war against Microsoft instead of supporting what would serve their users best.
orionlogic 14y ago
I have thousands of websites inside Google Reader which serves me as a personal sub-internet. With archive and quick search within feeds was so much valuable for me. It was the only service of Google that i use second only to Gmail. I think they made a quick short headed cost analysis in this, that archive and search functionality needs server power. Actual userbase does not provide enough money juice to balance. Now, let the alternatives pour in.
- mxfh 14y ago
  Exactly that. My worst fear: Just couldn't find any service yet that provides this search capability in your very private hand-selected little back-catalog of the internet back to 2007 and earlier. Including sites that are no longer available in the wild. Nobody else will be able to provide that without access to the Google Reader Servers. Hope this current uproar gets enough traction to find a solution to save this searchable and indexed archive of the internet/blogosphere somewhere accessible for everyone.
jjsz 14y ago
Alternative list on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Google-Reader/What-are-the-current-multiplatform-2013-besides-the-ones-listed-below-alternatives-to-Google-Reader-where-I-can-transfer-my-starred-items-feeds-and-unread-items-In-response-to-A-second-spring-of-cleaning?__snids__=105010833&__nsrc__=5 http://www.quora.com/Google-Reader/What-are-the-current-mult...
beilabs 14y ago
So I love Google Reader, been using it from the very beginning. I love offline clients, quite often I'm stuck in a remote location where 3G has yet to penetrate so I like to have a couple of hundred items to read which will sync when I reach connectivity again. I need the RSS service to track what I've read across multiple devices and have the client support offline usage. Any recommendations?
- LoganCale 14y ago
  This is the primary reason I use Google Reader too. I don't use the web interface at all, I just use it to keep track of everything so I can sync with it when I reconnect later, long after a number of items have disappeared forever from the official RSS feeds of active sites.
nilved 14y ago
Reader was the only thing that made me almost want a Google account. A real shame to see it shut down -- I don't think any competitors are as good.
ivanmaeder 14y ago
Beware! This app is a gazillion times simpler than Google Reader. I'm putting this out there in case anybody finds it useful. I made it years ago but never got around to promoting it. The idea was an online bookmarking app that tells you when the bookmarked pages have changed, and for technical reasons it eventually turned into a simple news feed reader. It also supports drag and drop and for browsers with side bars (damn you Chrome!), it works... in the side bar. I've moved onto other things but if you're really into it, get in touch and I'll try to move your data from Google Reader. http://bookmarkchamp.com/ http://bookmarkchamp.com/
s1n4 14y ago
Dammit, I should be looking for an alternative rss reader
mindstab 14y ago
Author Warren Ellis on twitter: "Google shuts down Google Reader, probably the most effective tool I have." https://twitter.com/warrenellis/status/311992329181478912 https://twitter.com/warrenellis/status/311992329181478912
guiambros 14y ago
Google should open source it. Seriously. Donate the code base to the open source community, and let someone run with it. With some luck it'd attract enough developers to keep the project alive. Or maybe somebody would figure out a way to monetize the effort. Either option, it'd be much better than just let the service die. It's not unprecedented. Google did exactly this with Google Wave. Sadly, I don't think this will ever happen. This project is too small to justify the resources needed to clean up the code and solve any dependencies. And, differently than Chromium / Android / Google Wave, Google Reader is not a platform / protocol / OS. It's just yet-another pet project for a company that - sooner or later - has to justify its investment to Wall Street. This isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, product that Google creates just to later destroy it, when it discover it has no business or economic justification. Keep this in mind when developing for Mirror API, or anything else that is not core for the company.
- btipling 14y ago
  I doubt that open sourcing it is going to be any help to anyone since it probably integrates deeply with Google's proprietary backends.
  - Flenser 14y ago
    I wonder if Merchant Circle would be willing to sell the old Bloglines codebase seeing as they aren't using it.
deleted 14y ago
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owencm 14y ago
I've started a Slant comparison page for Google Reader replacements, hopefully we can crowd source a good, feature-by-feature comparison of the replacement apps to help decide. http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-alternative-to-google-reader/opinions/the-old-reader http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-alternative-to-googl...
ryfm 14y ago
sign the petition http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Ask_Google_to_keep_Google_Reader_online http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Ask_Google_to_keep_Google_R...
- voochuk 14y ago
  How about another petition to atleast open source the code so maybe the community can host it on google apps/ec3 or users can run a private instance
  - mieses 14y ago
    The problem is the historical data of all the feeds they've archived, not the interface. Google, a large number of almost-evil moves eventually adds up to evil.
mcgwiz 14y ago
Google is betting on Google+ being the future platform for general content publishing and consumption, so RSS in general, and Google Reader in particular, are effectively competitors of Google+. I wouldn't be surprised if Blogger was shutdown (or subsumed by Google+) 5 years from now.
Udo 14y ago
People have said repeatedly that RSS is dead, and that's apparently true, but I've been wondering for a few years now what has replaced it? It's not like social networks provide the same kind of service, really. So is getting updates from people and projects you care about really such a niche thing? Have I missed some other huge channel that supersedes RSS? Or are we about to actually lose something profound here? Kudos to Newsblur, which I never heard of before today. I'd like to sign up for a paying membership, but it seems like this is exactly what everyone else is doing, so servers are dead...
- sixQuarks 14y ago
  I feel exactly the same way: what the hell is replacing RSS feeds? I hate keeping up with "live" feeds like twitter.
- doidydoidy 14y ago
  Protip: when people like that say "RSS is dead", what they mean is "unfashionable".
  - Udo 14y ago
    I thought that was self-evident. Unfashionable is the first step in a trend that ends with "dead and abandoned". As an aside: I implore you not to say things like "protip" here. It comes off as immature and condescending if not outright hostile. I realize it's a quick and snappy way to get upvotes from like-minded users but it's really that kind of phrase which prompts people to complain about redditization or 4chanization when they refer to the declining post quality of HN.
- takluyver 14y ago
  As someone who used to use RSS feeds and doesn't any more, I've replaced it with a mixture of: checking websites for stuff that updates frequently like news, e-mail subscriptions for infrequent but important updates, and twitter (or similar) subscriptions for stuff that I can afford to miss. Why not RSS? Formatting was often not quite right - if I wanted to read something, I often ended up clicking through to the original site anyway. And I didn't like the e-mail style expectation that I would read everything, or at least mark it as read (which felt like admitting defeat). It just began to feel like a chore. When I log in to twitter, it doesn't tell me that I have 1439 unread tweets.
ohheyworld 14y ago
holy cow....can't believe this is going away. I love reader. real reason they are shutting it down...they want all that sharing/interaction in Google+...which i hate.
_Mark 14y ago
I am afraid of what I am going to do with all this spare time I will regain once this is gone. This was the home page of "My" internet.
- _Mark 14y ago
  From your 626 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 12,220 items Since September 5, 2010 you have read a total of 300,000+ items
raphman 14y ago
For those looking for a desktop app, the Opera browser has a nice integrated RSS reader and is cross-platform.
skilesare 14y ago
I'm stunned. I was depending on this service to document my life and what I know. I simply can't fathom that they are going to shut it off. If this happens I'm going to move everything I have on google off of it. I put too much trust in them for them to pull this crap. This is an evil move. It exudes evil. It damages my productivity and steals my time. Ughhhh.
mindcrime 14y ago
F^&@ D^&@ IT! ^%&( ()&@& @&!^$&!!!!! Of ALL the things they would shut-down, they have to kill Reader!?? Nooooooooooooo!! Aaargggghhhh.... Oh well, guess it's back to RSSOwl[1]. Maybe this will even motivate me to get involved in hacking on RSSOwl a bit and help those guys out. This will probably also serve as the impetus for me to start adding some Reader like features to Neddick[2]. That was always sort of in the back of my mind, so why not go ahead and jump on it? [1]: http://rssowl.org/ http://rssowl.org/ [2]: https://github.com/Fogbeam/Neddick https://github.com/Fogbeam/Neddick
- pknight 14y ago
  I switched to RSSowl quite a while ago and didn't find myself longing back to Google Reader once. It does everything I'd want, it's just not that pretty of an application.
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    My biggest gripe with RSSOwl was that it was that it had some performance issues, especially if you had a lot of feeds. And using Google Reader eliminated the need to synchronize my list of feeds between multiple RSSOwl instance (like, say, my personal laptop and my company laptop). But the first issue may be mitigated by hardware improvements since the last time I was using RSSOwl regularly, and I have some ideas around the second issue.
kirian 14y ago
Well that sucks. One of my most used/visited apps/sites. Maybe Yahoo should build a reader. Could be a good fit for them.
MichaelMoser70 14y ago
actually it is still available until June 1st. sad it will be gone. I think gmail will be next to go - I think the last gmail redesign made the product less usable on purpose; they must be paying a lot for storage cost on abandoned accounts, old emails etc; nowadays they get more transient user info from other sources ...
nbashaw 14y ago
http://bringgooglereaderback.com/ http://bringgooglereaderback.com/
vonuebelgarten 14y ago
I just saw half my twitter timeline panicking about this. Is there so much people using it? What happened to desktop feed readers? Newsbeuter is serving me well, as usual, for years.
- LoganCale 14y ago
  Google Reader is the back-end/syncing platform for many desktop and mobile feed readers, so everyone who uses those apps suffers from this as well. It's especially useful for feeds that update frequently, because if you go offline for a period of time you end up missing out on content, especially if their feed only has the 15 most recent items. Google Reader is constantly downloading and storing those items, even when you're offline, and syncs them with your client when you reconnect. (Plus if you read RSS on both desktop and mobile, it keeps your read items in sync.)
  - vonuebelgarten 14y ago
    Well, that's a feature of Google Reader I didn't know. Blame, since I never bothered to test it.
threepipeproblm 14y ago
I wonder if Google has accounted for the effect of people who have been burned by coming to rely on a product that was yanked becoming reluctant to use Google products in the future?
hnasarat 14y ago
Liferea is a great RSS app. It's Free software too. http://lzone.de/liferea/ http://lzone.de/liferea/
ika 14y ago
the world is near the end
MichaelMoser70 14y ago
They could have turned it into a payed service, with so many active users. What would be the arguments against such a move?
k3n 14y ago
I'll bet you anything the catalyst behind this is in some way related to G+, the introduction of which has led to a steady removal of features from Reader. This news is really rubbing me the wrong way; I've been a long-time Google customer, even a 'Google hipster' as my friends would say. I'm an early-adopter that often beta tests. I was the only one at work with GMail when it was released, and was always out of invites that first year. Same for GVoice (which I've had since GrandCentral), GWave, Apps for personal domains, and Chrome (where I've posted many bug reports that were accepted). I've been with Reader since the year it came out, though I never used any other RSS reader -- I'd tried several, but they all sucked; Reader was just a breath of fresh air, "cloud" based before that was even a buzzword, and I've introduced many a friend to its wonderful utility. My favorite feature was the _'note in reader'_ bookmarklet, which they killed in favor of crappy G+, but now they're going to outright kill the entire product? My only hope, if they don't grant a stay of execution, will be that they open-source the code such as they did with Wave. At least then I'll have some hope of retaining my most-used web app of all time. From your 117 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 398 items, clicked 189 items, starred 7 items, and emailed 0 items. Since October 26, 2010 you have read a total of 20,685 items. (I think 10/2010 is when I was finally able to transition my normal GMail account to a GAFYD account, thus why the metrics stop there) Needless to say, I use this app 10x more than any other, including email (edit: ok I might be exaggerating). Also, it looks like the Google Operating System (unofficial blog) recognized the distress signals back in December with "Google Reader, 'Constantly on the Chopping Block'"[1]. Where's my pitchfork... 1. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-reader-constantly-on-chopping.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-reader-const...
- tracker1 14y ago
  Without iGoogle, and Google Reader.. honestly, I don't have much use for Google over say DuckDuckGo. I signed into the Android/Google echosystem.. mainly for iGoogle, and Reader.. with both going away, I'm pretty close to out.
  - peapicker 14y ago
    Until you brought it up, I didn't realize that those are really the only two products of theirs I use outside of search as well... sigh
mspseudolus 14y ago
We think RSS is far from dead. We've built a free reader that lets you put your feeds into a magazine style, highly visual page: Kuratur.com This isn't a traditional email-inbox-style feed reader. It's like Flipboard for your feeds, on the web. In beta - feedback warmly welcomed. Also, very interested in talking to RSS fanatics.
bsg75 14y ago
Thankfully this will mean that the trend of news reader apps that consume Google feeds instead of the actual sources will end. Some of the current ones will die off, but maybe a few of the better will convert.
jason_slack 14y ago
For OS X users that use Apple Mail it supports RSS Feeds. Not sure about Outlook 2012 for Mac though...
- mikestew 14y ago
  Sadly, that went away in Mountain Lion.
  - jason_slack 14y ago
    oh, geez. I am on 10.8 but I dont use Apple Mail and I was going to go back to it solely for OS X.
benubois 14y ago
Here's another good Google Reader alternative. https://feedbin.me https://feedbin.me. It's a new reader with a similar experience to NetNewsWire. It costs $2/month but there is a free 3 day trial. I created Feedbin because I was looking for an alternative to Google Reader that's simpler than what's already out there. No social junk, no ads, no content discovery. Just an RSS reader.
georgeoliver 14y ago
This definitely is the first time I've been disappointed by a web service shutting down. I've been looking through alternatives. I'd like it to look like this, http://wp.me/aseR-cr http://wp.me/aseR-cr , be web-based, have keyboard navigation, and not much else. Is there a web-based newsbeuter?
damian2000 14y ago
I'll be honest, I never even tried Google Reader. An RSS reader is such a simple app, I didn't think that it would anything special.
mkr-hn 14y ago
I saw NewsBlur when it first popped up on HN but never gave it thought since I thought Reader served my needs well enough. Amazing how that inertia melts away when the floor vanishes. Now I just have to wait for its servers to stop melting.
adad95 14y ago
To me Reader is the 2nd most used google Service. A Great Lost to me.
nreece 14y ago
Here are some hand-picked, noteworthy alternatives: http://blog.feedity.com/2013/03/14/google-reader-alternatives/ http://blog.feedity.com/2013/03/14/google-reader-alternative...
taproot 14y ago
Google: Reader usage is going down, lets axe it. Every alternative reader website / service: Fuck me thats a lot of traffic.
endgame 14y ago
I never used google reader, but I wrote my own tool to merge the feeds I care about into one megafeed: https://code.google.com/p/msrss/ https://code.google.com/p/msrss/ That way, I don't have to depend on any web services.
knodi 14y ago
WTF is this bullshit... I love Google Reader.
programminggeek 14y ago
This is another reminder that if Google does a service for free, there is likely a business to be had in making a paid version, simply for the inevitable moment that they kill the free service. Think paid Google+, paid GMail, paid search engine maybe? You get the idea.
winkerVSbecks 14y ago
The loss of Reader doesn't matter much to me a most others. It's the fact that Reader synced all my RSS feeds to whichever application that was/is the flavour of the month. It's that ability to have a repository of your feeds available in an instance. That's the product people need. Google should try to build that functionality into Gmail or something. Also, fuck any RSS feed reading service that charges monthly. I'll pay for an app, but I'm not paying a monthly subscription fee to read freely available content.
Amarandei 14y ago
Instead of wasting your time creating petitions to keep Google Reader open, I suggest you make a petition to make Google Reader open source. Google is going to close Reader either way so at least we'd haven a self hosted good alternative. Every alternative I've seen so far in this hole topic(yes, all of them, I've tested all of them) is either poorly designed, bad UX, weird browser problems or trying too hard to be more then a RSS reader. Guess I'll just have to spend 2 days and build my own. Oh, well :)
trevorhartman 14y ago
If you haven't already used it, check out http://getprismatic.com/ http://getprismatic.com/. It replaced Google Reader for me. (It also replaced HN for the most part).
goronbjorn 14y ago
With the rise of things like Twitter and Facebook as primary news/link sources, I doubt that most people 18 and under even know what RSS is.
sdiwakar 14y ago
Hi HN, my co-founder and I have been working on a Google Reader clone in the last few weeks, we're not quite ready to launch, but would love to get feedback as soon as we've opened up our beta: http://beta.newsmaven.co http://beta.newsmaven.co We promise to have all the basics of Google Reader covered, including importing your feed data (or as much as possible through the API). Of course, if you're looking for something to move to immediately, NewsBlur is an awesome product :)
mcovey 14y ago
If anyone wants the direct export link instead of using takeout, this still works: https://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export?hl=en https://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export?hl=en
mladenkovacevic 14y ago
This affects me in a huge way. I spend at least a couple of hours in Reader every day. I'd even be ok if they found a way to integrate Reader into Google+ in a more than just a superficial way and somehow and made it super social. They seem to be hellbent on making Google+ work.. so here's a perfect way to make me spend more time there! Make Google Authorship work with Greader then allow me to follow specific authors and get only their RSS feeds (instead of blanket following whole websites). Use G+ as a commenting system behind my RSS subscriptions, giving Disqus a run for its money. Ugh so many possibilities... :(
MrBlue 14y ago
Yet another example why I never built a service or app relying on any Google product, service or API.
mooreds 14y ago
Will blogger stop supporting RSS?
talleyrand 14y ago
Basically every Reader-alternative site is getting its servers slammed tonight. This makes me wonder about Reader's "declining usage."
- mikevm 14y ago
  You don't see all the data...
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leephillips 14y ago
A very nice thing about Google Reader is that is real time, because it receives pubsubhubbub pushes. Are any of the alternatives mentioned here capable of that?
- 18pfsmt 14y ago
  Looking through the git repo, it appears NewsBlur does.
smnl 14y ago
Seemed like this would eventually happen since Google stopped updating Reader (and its APIs) a few years ago I've also been working on a similar news reader app called BlogRoll: http://blogrollapp.com http://blogrollapp.com It can import your Google Reader feeds and has a tiled layout (which may not be everybody's cup of tea), but it works well for photo-focused sites like food and fashion blogs, and it handles other news sites and blogs quite well too. Here's a screenshot of it: http://bit.ly/Yc1P9C http://bit.ly/Yc1P9C
kevinSuttle 14y ago
I have never gotten the appeal of Google Reader. I've been using Netvibes for several years and have yet to find anything better. You'll be glad you did. netvibes.com
crucialfelix 14y ago
bastards. they never seem to realize how much they damage our trust with these actions. it effects all of their future products. I don't trust them anymore. anyway feedly has a replacement coming soon: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ > We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless. > If you are a Google Reader, give feedly a try before July 1st, and you will be able to migrate seamlesly
- alex_doom 14y ago
  Their site is getting crushed right now. I can't even login.
  - baszero 14y ago
    http://www.feedly.com/ http://www.feedly.com/ perfectly works right now. With four clicks you find all your feed groups again you had in Google Reader and the User Interface is even nicer... I think the most important feature for any alternative is the import of the Google Reader's feeds and structure including all tags!
- nakedrobot2 14y ago
  "a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine" So it will also die when Google shuts down App Engine? :)
- levesque 14y ago
  I've made the switch to feedly as well, and so far I must say it has been a pleasant experience. Everything was set-up and imported in a few clicks, and the general usage experience is also pretty smooth. I got rid of the useless default interface, replaced it by compact lists. I can say I'm happy with the state of things for now.
- inafield 14y ago
jessaustin 14y ago
I won't bitch about this decision, because after all I got more than my money's worth. I do wonder if the change doesn't weaken the whole Google "Suite" though. Google (until quite recently anyway) seems to be focusing a great deal on G+. The vast majority of my G+ posts come from Reader; I doubt I'll be posting to G+ in future. I know G+ can live without me, but as far as I can tell the only value in G+ comes from its integration with the rest of the "Suite". If Facebook or Amazon had been in this situation, instead of killing Reader, they would have focused it more and more on feeding, promoting, and otherwise bolstering their other services, probably to the detriment of actually reading RSS. Probably to the point where some, but not all users would have become disgusted and quit using Reader anyway. Google doesn't do that sort of thing, which I guess is to its credit.
thelah 14y ago
Joining in on the disapproval of Google's move here, as I use it constantly all day everyday! Here's to hoping this public cry might change Google's decision to axe it...
beambot 14y ago
Does anyone know of an extraction tool to pull down all your starred items (in addition to feeds) into some semi-structured format -- even just a big, single HTML file? I've got YEARS of starred items "saved" in Reader. I use it everyday to stay abreast of news (1000+ items / day). Between Google Reader and iGoogle... Google has deprecated most of the tools I use on a regular basis. This makes me seriously question using Gmail and Apps for Business. EDIT: Just RTFM'd. Looks like Google TakeOut will let me export most of the stuff I care about. Still, this sucks. I'll probably just keep using it and hope (like iGoogle) the deprecation date gets pushed back. Otherwise... productivity boon due to lack of RSS feeds. Also.... Feedburner users should see the writing on the wall!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
Danieru 14y ago
One not mentioned yet is http://selfoss.aditu.de/ http://selfoss.aditu.de/ It is an open source self hosted rss reader with a responsive skin. I'll be migrating tonight nad since it is open source I can contribute when I run into issues!
trts 14y ago
I can use another RSS Reader (and probably won't like it nearly as much as Google Reader), but I worry that the Google Reader audience is so big, and that so many will likely not bother finding another worthy RSS aggregator, that some blogs who get most of their traffic from GR users will throw in the towel when their readership declines.
killy 14y ago
http://lenta.yandex.com http://lenta.yandex.com
jtgeibel 14y ago
I thought of this exact situation just last night when subscribing to a feed. Firefox sent me to a google page which offered me an option to add it to either iGoogle or Reader. I recalled that iGoogle is being shut-down and thought it was strange that it was still offered as a prominent option. I guess now it makes sense. I seems strange to me though that Reader will be shut down before iGoogle, which is slated for November 1, 2013.
dpeck 14y ago
This is just a delayed press release, reader was killed 2 years ago with the release of google+ that removed the amazing social/sharing features that made it special.
edwardunknown 14y ago
I'm a big dummy but almost every major decision Google has made since Larry Page became CEO has me baffled. The whole idea of squandering the nice vibes they had by forcing everybody into that stupid Facebook knockoff, killing off cool projects left and right, those dumb glasses that nobody is going to buy... I don't get it. Is Reader costing them that much money? Put some ads on it then. Is this a Captain Ahab thing where Facebook is the whale? Then someone should let them know that no one really likes their Facebook ripoff because no one likes the actual Facebook. Facebook is a fucking car crash. I wish Google would just make cool stuff and continue not being evil and knock it off with the master plan bullshit.
- gwern 14y ago
  Supposedly Page has been heavily inspired by Steve Jobs's advice to him to 'focus'. Just consider this part of Jobs's most poisonous legacy: his epigones.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 14y ago
The writing was on the wall for reader once they stripped the commenting/sharing functionality. This was a great tool for the teams I managed to stay on top of things. The redesign destroyed the product.
deerpig 14y ago
Let me see how I can delicately sum up my feelings about this: "Google, you Bastard!" I think they announced this while the news cycle is wall-to-wall New Pope Mania to cover up this appalling summery execution :)
vijayboyapati 14y ago
It's unfair for Google to claim usage has been decreasing since it broke the social aspect of Greader (which was the part I loved the most) which I think is a major factor in declining usage. I definitely saw less content that my friends on Greader used to share. My usage of the product dropped after that, but it was still useful enough I wanted to keep using it. This is probably one of the most shameful episodes in google product history. I bet they're rationalizing away all the feedback from upset users too. They should at least let someone spin off the product into a startup. Most startups would die to have the user base of Google reader. Just because Google doesn't care about it, doesn't mean there is no market to be served.
laserDinosaur 14y ago
I use Google Reader for one very simple reason - I'm already signed into Google. It's on my phone, it's on all my computers . I don't want to have to use yet another bloody website just to manage something as simple as an RSS feed. I like Reader because it as simple, it worked and it was everywhere I needed it. The fact that it's retiring just because people are not using it is a misconception - I've managed to get a fairly large number of people using Google Reader, none of which had ANY idea it existed before. As a few others have said in the thread, the "declined usage" is no fault of the product itself but through absolutely no promotion of it from Google.
plinkplonk 14y ago
The real winner here might be Prismatic. They already do awesome machine learning based discovery. If they'd add an RSS reader (not just RSS feeds into their discovery machine) they'll get every one of millions of users moving off Google Reader. Due Disclosure: Though I have no official connection to Prismatic, founder Bradford Cross is a friend and I am biased to Prismatic. It is awesome. Try it at http://getprismatic.com/ http://getprismatic.com/
- k_bx 14y ago
  While I like prismatic a lot, it builds on idea of a filtering bubble that you put yourself into. So it's better for finding something that you'll be interested in and you already know that (since it's in your interests, and your friends quote on that), but it's absolutely orthogonal to rss reader.
- laacz 14y ago
  I've never been a fan of giving away choice of what to read to automated systems. Of course some percent of suggested stuff is ok, but actually it all boils down to three components for me. Mostly I read what I want to read (interests). Then I'm interested to follow popular stuff (keeping up). Then I'm all right to take a peak at what a program suggests I could like (discovery).
csom 14y ago
I wonder what would happen if everybody who wants Google to continue Reader would start clicking on the Ads in Reader on a daily basis. Oh wait, which ads...
jayadevan 14y ago
Alternatives: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/alternatives-to-google-reader-297/ http://www.nextbigwhat.com/alternatives-to-google-reader-297...
slake 14y ago
Wow. That's a lot of angst. I feel it too. Years of saving useful links on reader which was really easy to search.
slake 14y ago
Wow. That's a lot of angst. I feel it too. Years of saving useful links on reader which was really easy to search.
slake 14y ago
Wow. That's a lot of angst. I feel it too. Years of saving useful links on reader which was really easy to search.
tmzt 14y ago
The really interesting product/service would be a datastore and RSS consumer like GR API is. I think a lot of competitors spend time working on the UI and miss the power that is behind it. (I would include Google in this list, even if they didn't have the front end UI the Atom API would still be a useful thing.) I wonder if building something on elasticsearch would work.
rafski 14y ago
RSS bypasses ads on websites. Google makes money on those ads. It was strange that they supported RSS for so long.
fakeer 14y ago
There were apps and services. They starting shutting down. Never actually mattered. Not to me at least. Until a few were killed, like Google Reader, and I started understanding the frustration and sometimes disappointment shown by some of the users and fans. I feel the same now. This is one of the few services other than Gmail that I use(used) from Google's shop. Will have to settle for a good alternative now. I guess I would rather to go a paid solution. It's for the same reason that I am thinking of this move that I went to Pinboard from Delicious for - advertisements were not my worry, it was the chance being shut down. Was Google Reader bringing any revenue to Google? I mean I never saw any ads in there, so I doubt it but some of you might be knowing better. Not sure they have killed for just being out there not bringing any money home or they will be focussing on Google Currents now? But stuff like this http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.html http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.ht... is more sad than the news itself :(
asdf333 14y ago
its too bad. i can see why they cancelled it but it was an essential part of how i process information
mschuster91 14y ago
I am calling for the biggest shitstorm in the existence of the Internet. Anonymous, where are you? :D
rob22 14y ago
Its very bad day for rss lover....
raywu 14y ago
Would you pay for Google Reader per month? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xr6ZINsFK69VCPW2ryuTfHGrt1RyE-1D51FEAdt0VJs/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xr6ZINsFK69VCPW2ryuTfHGrt1R...
- fakeer 14y ago
  Yes. But without ads and with my privacy intact, totally.
bconway 14y ago
I heartily recommend http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/ - lean and mean.
nazgulnarsil 14y ago
Which reader can parse the xml file google reader generates without extra work?
7hundredand77 14y ago
I have been working on one for the last couple of weeks, and will hopefully create it as a fully functional RSS reader: http://nuesbyte.com/ http://nuesbyte.com/ for more information, visit me on reddit username: 7hundredand77
Yhippa 14y ago
Wow this one hurts. They took down another Google service I loved, Google Notebook (http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html). I have no idea why I loved it. It was just so easy to make lots of quick text documents without the fluff and it was fast. I used it despite the existence of Evernote and other online documentation services. I still haven't found a suitable replacement though OneNote comes real close. I don't know what I'm going to do about this. I guess the reality is that social won and RSS is dead. Or at least social is much more monetizable. I've tried so many other different RSS aggregators but kept coming back to Google Reader. It worked well, had minimal fluff, and was fast. R.I.P. Google Reader
bbayer 14y ago
They could offer paid version. I guess lots of people will want to throw a few bucks for that kind of product. For me Google Reader is one of the few software that I use every day.
mieses 14y ago
This is a disaster for Google. Elites are mobile. The empire collapses after they leave.
ayushgta 14y ago
NewsBlur may have a solution for end users but there seems to be no recourse for the huge impact this has to the dev community. With Google Reader as an API devs had a way to get historical data on practically any RSS feed going back many years. That ability will be lost/gone forever. Even if Google sunsets the reader app, I wish they'd keep this data source open. Its hugely valuable and I don't think there is any alternative to it. I think that having cached all this data on their server over the years of their own free will, they've put themselves to be in a position where they have a somewhat fiduciary responsibility of keeping this data alive and open.
- pauljonas 14y ago
  ^^This. Any new application starts in a state of tabula rasa -- all history, prior to some point in 2013 (or late 2012) will not be accessible, considering that a typical site/blog feed contains only 10 to a few dozen most recent items. Presently, in Google Reader, I can click on a feed and flip through items all the way back to 2005 (for those sites with that long of a history). I know that Google Reader search has been flaky as the product has languished, but it still the most powerful way to search a select group you sites you care about (incidentally, the Google Labs custom search engine product is on life support too, if not set to sunset soon) and search for a topical phrase of interest and get a set of results with that matching text.
justips 14y ago
I'm going to try https://ifttt.com https://ifttt.com. It has a few recipes for RSS: RSS -> Instapaper, Readability, email and so on.
i4i 14y ago
I love Reader and hate that it's going away. A pox on Plus I say.
dbcooper 14y ago
Come on Microsoft, this is a good opportunity for you - Bing Reader. Make it happen.
- sp332 14y ago
  The Windows Live Mail app has a feed reader. I wonder how hard it would really be to add the functionality to the web-app version of outlook.com.
- leoc 14y ago
  Or Yahoo!? DDG? Anyone?
mikro2nd 14y ago
Next will be Blogger...
spatten 14y ago
I'm assuming that this will also shut down the Google Reader API, but I haven't seen anything definite. Anyone have confirmation either way?
usablebytes 14y ago
Although, it is sad for the current Reader users, good thing about Google is, it admits its failures quickly and get over it.
mikestew 14y ago
It looks like a bit of work to set up, but I might just adjust how I digest things and give this a shot: http://tabs.mediahackers.org http://tabs.mediahackers.org. "Rivers" probably aren't going to have the archiving and what not that Google Reader or others will have (maybe, haven't looked that deeply) but most stuff I just read, or not, and move on.
mhausenblas 14y ago
Not cool, GOOG. Suppose I'll give NewsBlur a try then.
camillomiller 14y ago
Do you this will have a big impact on sites like daring fireball that have a huge rss subscription base?
srinibond 14y ago
One update for all RSS feed fans. If you are in India, US or Casnada, you could SMS enable your feeds by using the RSS feature of http://txtweb.com http://txtweb.com. check it out!
olefoo 14y ago
May I say, Aaeaarrghhhhhhhhh! This was ( I speak in the past tense, even though death does not happen until July 1st ) one of the few reliable guideposts about the internet. Google reader,of the RSS readers, you were the best, reliable, unencumbered by partisanship, unflavored by ideology. You were the best. Too bad, I must say goodbye, too bad I must go to newsbeuter or some other webreader, too bad you must die. Truly I hate google, I hate what Google has become, I love the web, I love what the web was supposed to be. I love RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS and I will mourn you when you are gone.
n2j3 14y ago
let me be the first to say http://nooooooooooooooo.com/ http://nooooooooooooooo.com/
camus 14y ago
Google might drop anything now, groups , appengine, whatever , You just cant trust their Saas anymore.
mattbarrie 14y ago
I'm here with Alan Noble who runs engineering at Google Australia and ran the Google Reader project until 18 months ago. They looked at open sourcing it but it was too much effort to do so because it's tied to closely to Google infrastructure. Basically it's been culled due to long term declining use.
villesundberg 14y ago
I think we all saw this coming when G+ took over some of Reader's functionality. I've been working on a news solution of my own, Scoopinion, since 2011. It's a discovery engine that ranks articles based on how closely they've been read. Users install a browser extension that lets them track their own reading (within a set of whitelisted sites). It's a little bit of quantified self for news. The data is used for recommendations and to help journalists in their work. It's not a drop-in replacement for Reader since you don't get the full firehose of headlines from your feeds, only the most engaging stories. https://www.scoopinion.com https://www.scoopinion.com
aquadrop 14y ago
Don't Be Evil... Heh.
pilooch 14y ago
Just thought I would mention that you can use XPLR unsupervised machine learning API https://xplr.com/developers/ https://xplr.com/developers/ to build your own feed reader in the manner of https://xplr.com/products/illuminate/browser/ https://xplr.com/products/illuminate/browser/ Though this probably applies more to RSS reader developers than end users. In a way, you can build your own little Prismatic-like app, tailored to your needs, or just play with AI and news :)
senegoid 14y ago
what is concerning is that this decision could influence sites making their feeds available. Twitter and G+ are not viable alternatives. Google alerts to RSS were wonderful. I'm sure they will shutter alerts soon too.
senegoid 14y ago
what is concerning is that this decision could influence sites making their feeds available. Twitter and G+ are not viable alternatives. Google alerts to RSS were wonderful. I'm sure they will shutter alerts soon too.
meerita 14y ago
Correct me but the rest of the apps and website application who are RSS readers too use mostly, Google Reader. So this affects also them in a way.
deconq 14y ago
I support this move. For me, RSS is a necessary evil. I always opt for email subscription when I have the choice, because I find it infinitely more convenient to have my subscriptions and emails in the one place, rather than in two separate products. However, for sites that do not offer email subscription but only offer RSS coughHNcough - I reluctantly use Google Reader to subscribe. Meaning an extra account to check each day. Hopefully this won't merely result in everyone switching to just another RSS aggregator - instead, I hope it will prompt websites to start using more convenient subscription methods, whether that be email or something else. RSS is dead. Long live... ???
jpswade 14y ago
I used to have a news (rss feed) reader on my blackberry, which was great. Now I switched to Android, I've been using Google Reader so I can sync it online too. So now this sucks, what's the alternative?
ohwp 14y ago
I created a poll to keep track of the best alternative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373538
siromoney 14y ago
I'm building an alternative (https://feedreader.co https://feedreader.co) and would like volunteers to test it. The focus is on reading (https://feedreader.co/arpith/labels/read https://feedreader.co/arpith/labels/read should give you an idea) so it's much simpler than newsblur, etc, but the front end is built using a feed sync API (https://feedreader.co/api https://feedreader.co/api) which I think will be useful.
bromagosa 14y ago
I use it daily. A lot. Since they're shutting it down, couldn't they release the code as opensource so we can build our own greader servers? Or is that insane from the technical point of view?
draegtun 14y ago
I use Google Reader a lot so this is a shame|sad|annoying :( Still this video "Hitler finds out Gooder Reader is shutting down" at least put a broad smile back on my face :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=A25VgNZDQ08 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=A25VgNZD... (via Dave Winer tweet - https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/312049161677713408 https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/312049161677713408)
friendofasquid 14y ago
We convert a few big-ish blogs to audio using a professional reader if you're into audiobooks or podcasts. Skip Google Reader listen instead. http://castify.co/ http://castify.co/
crusso 14y ago
Crap, after years of avoiding RSS, yesterday I found a blog that I wanted to follow. I signed up for Google Reader... Sorry, folks - I may have caused the shut-down.
egeozcan 14y ago
well, their "cleaning"s now deserve their own blog; just google this: site:"googleblog.blogspot.com" intitle:cleaning
nakedrobot2 14y ago
Alright Google, I'll make a deal with you: Keep Reader alive and I'll CONSIDER using G+ Until then, I'm not going to touch you.
olgeni 14y ago
As soon as RSS disappeared from Mountain Lion, Google copied the idea: time to sue again.
kondro 14y ago
If they want to make money from it, charge for it. I would gladly pay $40/month to access Google Reader.
oracuk 14y ago
This is affecting me similarly to the announcement of Yahoo killing Delicious. Both Delicious and Google reader became for me definitions of their services. As a result of this all alternatives do not feel right (Even if they're technically more full featured). I have swapped Delicious with Diigo (After shopping around many alternatives). I really hope the process of replacing Google reader isn't as long or as painful as that was. The ending of Delicious and Google Reader is the end of an era of my use of the Internet. I wonder if it's a function of my age that I now see that as a sad and worrying development rather than an opportunity to be grasped.
senegoid 14y ago
what is concerning is that this decision could influence sites making their feeds available. Twitter and G+ are not viable alternatives. Google alerts to RSS were wonderful. I'm sure they will shutter alerts soon too.
baszero 14y ago
FEEDLY has done a great job: - with 4 clicks you find ALL feeds with - ALL feed groups / folders - ALL tags are imported - you even have the complete HISTORY of all feeds again - it is SYNCHED REALTIME with your Google Reader account: if you "like" a post in feedly, you instantly also have a "star" in Google Reader. Any alternative discussed here should have this import and SYNC feature, otherwise it is useless. http://www.feedly.com/ http://www.feedly.com/
anon1385 14y ago
One more for the list of killed Google services: Code Search, Google Search API (twice), Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets), Google Pack, Image Labeller and Google Dictionary. Friends don't let friends rely on free web services.
- k3n 14y ago
  Wow, at first I was thinking that this was their first shutdown that really affected me, but looking at your list there's many other services that I really enjoyed and utilized very frequently. * Code Search -- how did I forget this awesome tool? What an invaluable, educational, and fun tool that was. * Google Video -- somewhat redundant with YouTube, but I always felt Video had a place in that it seemed to be much more liberal than YT and also allowed larger uploads. * Google Desktop -- ok, this one did hurt. My primary use for it was to search my Outlook mail at work (f'g Outlook search is the worst I've ever seen in any product). Now I'm back to never being able to find an email... * Google Notebook -- a very awesome online clipbook / personal wiki. I still miss it. * GOOG-411 -- I still miss this service too. Going online is just too slow and tedious, not to mention impossible and/or illegal when you're driving (whereas hitting a speeddial for GOOG-411 was quick and easy). And no, the "voice search" on my phone is not the same, not even close. * Google Health -- this was a very neat service that I think was ahead of its time, and I didn't use it much (as I didn't have many health issues at the time), but as I age, I'm wishing more & more I had a centralized location to store my medical history on my terms. * Google Dictionary -- another tool I used on a daily basis. At least there's an official extension[1] that I can use in its place that is functionally equivalent (for my uses); just turn off the pop-ups and invoke it manually from the button. Pretty scary how many of my tools and services that I came to rely on were shuttered; however, I think the powering down of Reader will impact me the most. 1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-by-goog/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...
mrgreenfur 14y ago
They shut down the products API, in case anyone was using it. It was a quick way to get pricing info into apps..
oivvio 14y ago
I've looking into building a Google Reader alternative for quite some time now. Because let's face it, Google Reader has been neglected since forever. This news prompts me to finally do it. Tell me what you think: http://getfishwrap.com/ http://getfishwrap.com/
olifante 14y ago
Shutting down Google Reader makes a mockery of their famous mission statement: "Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
forgotAgain 14y ago
Sounds like an opportunity for Yahoo to raise its profile.
prathibhanu 14y ago
Checkout http://multiplx.com http://multiplx.com as an alternate to Google Reader.
mkr-hn 14y ago
HN deaded this when I tried to submit it: http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network I don't know why. It's a great eulogy for Reader, written in 2012.
- wglb 14y ago
  I think buzzfeed gets automatically marked dead.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    That's unfortunate. It has a lot of quality content mixed with the revenue-generating pop stuff.
forgotAgain 14y ago
I wonder if bit by bit ending secondary products like this doesn't separate Google from its customers. Part of my reason for not using search services like Bing is that I'm tied to Google by their secondary products such as Reader. The end of Reader will loosen Google's hold on me. As will the end of iGoogle.
avaku 14y ago
At readrz.com, we will be releasing a related tool in a few weeks. It is not a pure RSS reader, but it's useful for aggregating information. See more details and subscribe for updates at http://eepurl.com/d48hj http://eepurl.com/d48hj
mimor 14y ago
For the people running their own OwnCloud setup: https://github.com/owncloud/apps/tree/master/news https://github.com/owncloud/apps/tree/master/news
neves 14y ago
At least now I'll have to search for another reader. I've always were worried that Google knows too much about me. They can access my email, see what I search and download, and every news/blog that I follow.
zmanian 14y ago
I was hoping for a different fate for Google Reader. - The feed digesting functionality could have been merged into Google+ -Google Reader could have become a news reader skin on the of G+ As long as Google Reader remained a stand alone service and yet deeply tied into the search index, it has been doomed.
calgaryeng 14y ago
Are there any open source alternatives (I'm thinking Ruby/Rails/Sinatra) where I could throw up my own RSS read/sync server onto Heroku or something?
- draegtun 14y ago
  Have a look to see if there are any Planet type solutions for Ruby - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) I'm going to spend some time looking at the two main Perl solutions, Perlanet & Plagger (used respectively by http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org & http://perlsphere.net http://perlsphere.net). * Perlanet - https://metacpan.org/module/perlanet https://metacpan.org/module/perlanet * Plagger - https://metacpan.org/module/Plagger https://metacpan.org/module/Plagger Failing that I may produce a custom solution with a feed aggregator library (for eg. https://metacpan.org/module/XML::Feed::Aggregator https://metacpan.org/module/XML::Feed::Aggregator).
pit 14y ago
Hooray! One time I read the Fleshbot RSS feed, and I've never been able to un-read it -- it just stays in my "Read items" queue.
samspot 14y ago
Between the massive interest in this topic and the fact that many google reader competitors were crushed by load last night, I'm having a hard time believing use has 'declined' as much as Google is implying.
ireadzalot 14y ago
One of the first 2 sites I go to when I launch my browser in the morning everyday (gmail and reader). I will sorely miss it.
fakeer 14y ago
If one think devs must learn from this development, that would be - go for an open standard now. The way Rackspace is doing with OpenStack for cloud. Similarly sth for feed sync/tag etc - where a services changes with an URL and few more things like an UUID etc. Devs in this field might be having a better picture of this. I just want sth like email. Like currently I host my mails with Google Apps with my domain but I can take it to my VPS any minute and my email will still be up and will keep syncing to my desktop/mobile clients without a problem. Or maybe I would shift to some free provider like ABC, XYZ etc.
VictorZ 14y ago
http://ifgooglekillsreader.tumblr.com/ http://ifgooglekillsreader.tumblr.com/
devesh 14y ago
It’s sad to see google killing one of the most useful service. Though, there’s a petition going on to keep the Google Reader running https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-running https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-r... and more than 40k+ people have signed it. If Google still decides to kill the service, I am going to use Feedly ;).
Fuzzwah 14y ago
Since I'm one of those "weekend hackers who likes to use PHP like a newb"...... I use a self hosted and rather hacked up rnews install: http://rnews.sourceforge.net/ http://rnews.sourceforge.net/ It uses magpierss to grab feeds: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/ http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/ I also make heavy use of yahoo pipes to munge together a few rss feeds and do other regex'y type things to a feeds: http://pipes.yahoo.com http://pipes.yahoo.com (pls yahoo, never kill pipes!) The reason I like rnews is the boxed layout (where each feed is seperated), rather than every other rss reader which jams everything into a single feed. With the boxed way I have the feeds I read daily up top and then progressively have boxes for sites which I only skim headlines for every week down lower. I have a side question which I've been meaning to float on HN for some time: is there anything cool I could do with the fact that my self hosted rss aggregator receives roughly 2,000 hits a day from search bots? I mean I get scraped constantly all day, from ALL engines.
mkr-hn 14y ago
When choosing your new reader, look for the one that's already monetized. Feedly has ads and plans for premium. NewsBlur has a paid option. Any hosted option without financial incentive lives at the whim of the developer.
binderbizingdos 14y ago
- apt-get install rss2email - add some feeds - be done with it
- autotravis 14y ago
  I tried this a while back and totally forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder! To run it, use the r2e command and you can follow the guide here:http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/getting-started-with-rss2email/#unix http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/getting-started-with-r... I think I will try this and set up some filters to move the feed emails out of my inbox for later viewing.
SaveReader 14y ago
Save Google Reader : http://www.savereader.info http://www.savereader.info
polochon 14y ago
I am using KrISS Feed, https://github.com/tontof/kriss_feed https://github.com/tontof/kriss_feed If you speak French, a little help here: http://tontof.net/?2013/03/14/18/12/56-presque-nouveau-lecteur-rss-kriss-feed-est-vraiment-tout-terrain http://tontof.net/?2013/03/14/18/12/56-presque-nouveau-lecte... and a demo there: http://tontof.net/feed http://tontof.net/feed
vijayboyapati 14y ago
Can someone explain to me why no one is doing a direct, pixel for pixel clone of Google Reader? I mean, the thing is popular enough that any startup would die for its traffic. Not to mention its users absolutely love it. As Paul Bucheit said, it's better to have a small number of users who love your product than a large number that like it. And well, Greader has a large number of users who love it (bordering on fanatical about it). So why not do a blatant clone as a f* you to Google for nuking a product that its users are absolutely devoted to.
- srean 14y ago
  While not quite pixel to pixel oldreader seems to be quite close, they want to be close to the older UI which makes it even better in my eyes. They are sort of keeling over with the new load, but have scheduled an import, will see how it goes. Unfortunaately as of now they only import the subscriptions not he stars. Not sure how they plan to support the service.
prathibhanu 14y ago
Guys, try this goo.gl/r861h Visually rich RSS reader
dogada 14y ago
A year ago near last Google Reader redesign I made my own online RSS-reader http://www.cliws.com/ http://www.cliws.com/ and now don't care. We should less depend on the large corporations. The idea about I think last time is that we need some kind of distributed Twitter (like we have perfectly worked distributed email now). If you can't replace one tool with another you are in trouble definitely.
Nux 14y ago
This is a good opportunity for all you smart developers around here to come up with an open source self-hosted thing to replace gugl reader.
sbirchall 14y ago
I've got to mention the FF add-on "InfoRSS" which I haven't used in a while, but I just exported my feeds to it rather painlessly and it offers some nice features if you're willing to put a bit of time into customizing what you want from it. Deals with podcasts as well.
tonyblundell 14y ago
Lots of people rushing to build RSS clients, but why not build something better? If you can build something that will take any URL, figure out which bits are changing regularly (the news items, etc), and push the changes to a Reader style interface, you might be on to a winner. It's 2013, a reader should be possible without RSS.
r4ps 14y ago
I bought SimpleRSS.com a little while ago with the intention of building an alternative and open-source RSS reader. If anyone's interested in acquiring the domain, message me! ;)
jobigoud 14y ago
Could someone underline the advantages of Google Reader and the features that will be missed ? What had it that other free products don't ? (I use a desktop reader for news (FeedDemon) and an Android app for podcasts, I don't really know what I'm missing by not using something like reader.)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
taimoorq 14y ago
This one works well on mobile devices and lets you add feeds from around the web and tag them for retrieval later. It also keeps you focused on one feed at a time instead of letting you put 100 feeds on one page which makes it hard to read any one. http://newsfeedreader.com http://newsfeedreader.com
cmatteson 14y ago
Though we focus more on industry/professional news, Delve (delvenews.com) just launched Google Reader integration. Now you can sync your data and we'll pull in sources, generate topics and turn your folders into 'channels' for fast news filtering. It's free to use Delve as an individual and we're launching our mobile apps soon!

1964 points by knurdle 14y ago

LOL! There's always Google Spreadsheets... =ImportFeed("http://news.google.com/?output=atom http://news.google.com/?output=atom)

klausa 14y ago

That's the first Google service shutdown that I'm affected by. Sad to see it go. What do you guys recommend for replacement? I know about NewsBlur [1], but I never liked it that much. I think I'm just looking for something that would emulate Reader's full-screen view as close as possible. [1] http://newsblur.com http://newsblur.com edit: Here's what I consider an absolute must-have in RSS app: - complete navigation with keyboard (j/k preferred) - full screen mode (really, I don't need a sidebar of a fixed header all the time) - feed view (not just list of items, show me excerpts!) And I know I may be the weird one, but I really, really dislike readers that try to show me items directly from feeds webpage. I find it jarring and distracting when I have five totally different layouts flash before my eyes within 10 seconds (I skim headlines and then skip most of items in my feed). And for the love of god, please, please, no goddamn 'WE LEARN WHAT YOU LIKE' or any kind of bullshit 'smart selection'. I selected my feeds myself, I can manage them just fine by myself, just get out of my way, please.

genwin 14y ago
For a news aggregator that adapts to your interests, try niflet.com. I'll add any decent feeds people want.
- SeppoErviala 14y ago
  No localization, I'm not too interested in USA news.
  - genwin 14y ago
    It has a lot of non-USA sites. Just upvote the stuff you like.
yaj 14y ago
I have been using Twitter/Flipboard+Instapaper for a while now as a replacement for traditional RSS readers. I do use Tweetbot but most twitter clients do have "Read Later" applications integrated.
dkeskar 14y ago
Caveat: Still early[1], less featured than Google/RSS Reader. But also more. [1] http://memamsa.com/start/gr http://memamsa.com/start/gr
kmfrk 14y ago
I just Fever (http://www.feedafever.com/ http://www.feedafever.com/). You host it yourself, and it does the job perfectly.
- initself 14y ago
  PHP and MySQL, yuck!
  - throwaway420 14y ago
    Is the software any less useful because it's not created in a trendy language? One of the advantages that PHP has is that virtually any cheap web-host in the world can run it. It's not a bad choice to sell a self-hosted product in PHP because of this advantage. I'm not a huge fan of PHP for many types of projects, but I don't see how it benefits anybody to reflexively hate on something just because of a technology choice.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      PHP was such a security nightmare for so long that I am very reluctant to enable it on any box I actually care about. (It could well be better. It's been a long time since I was sysadmining many boxes.) So for a project I have to do the hosting on, language choice still matters to me.
      - hadem 14y ago
        And you're a huge fan of Ruby on Rails right...?
        kristopolous 14y ago
        And he's also part of the Long Now Foundation and did volunteer coding for MediaWiki (Don't know the guy, just googled around). No need to be mean to a nice guy. :-\
        gmac 14y ago
spindritf 14y ago
> What do you guys recommend for replacement? That's the hard part. Reader integrates nicely with Android's Listen (podcast app), and the reader app, and there's plenty of standalone clients that sync with Google. That's my most-used Google app. By far. Colossal disappointment.
- TillE 14y ago
  Nice to know that there's still at least one other Google Listen user in the world. I'm a huge podcast consumer, I like listening to old podcasts which have fallen off the RSS feed, and I still haven't found anything better. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do now. As far as I'm aware, nobody besides Google has been archiving RSS history for the past few years. It's a massive pain to dig for old podcast episodes any other way, as full feeds are extremely rare.
  - baytrailcat 14y ago
    I used to be a big Listen user, but the app was so buggy. Then I found Stitcher and never went back.
  - netfeed 14y ago
    Listen was better, but i kinda like PocketCasts, the only problem with that one is that it eats up battery :/
  - bhaile 14y ago
    BeyondPod. Been using that to manage my podcasts for a few years. It can import from Google Reader or maintain its own podcast list. Easy to export out if needed.
- rietta 14y ago
  I used to use Google Listen, but at some point started using BeyondPod and recently - within the last couple of weeks - went to the paid version of BeyondPod. It works great.
pflats 14y ago
http://netnewswireapp.com http://netnewswireapp.com is wonderful for the Mac users out there that aren't tied to an HTML solution. Pretty sure you can sync with your Google Reader account and then delete it from the app, and it'll remember your subscriptions. Just deleted mine and it works fine.
- camillomiller 14y ago
  Netnewswire is great but now they should provide a new way to sync feeds and especially read/unread counts, flagged and unflagged items, and favorites instead of relying on GReader. If someone wants a pitch here: don't go for a reader, go for a simple WebDAV like system to keep feeds in sync cross-app with APIs so simple that every dev would include it in its feed reading app!
srgseg 14y ago
http://www.protopage.com http://www.protopage.com has full screen mode with keyboard navigation if you first do Colors/Settings then untick "open news items directly" (Unticking this will mean headlines will open in the internal full text RSS news feed reader instead of navigating to the headline's web page directly).
busted 14y ago
I found bazqux.com which has the keyboard shortucts i wanted as well
sigil 14y ago
Based on your must-have list, a good low-tech solution might be an RSS to email gateway. Then your mail client becomes your RSS client. Gmail has j/k key bindings, is relatively unadorned, and facilitates your skim / skip workflow. Excerpts might require some work, but perhaps you could coerce them into the subject line. Aaron Swartz wrote a nice RSS to email gateway btw: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ I have a crappier one that delivers directly into a Maildir, and I use it to read news in mutt: http://search.cpan.org/~acg/rssdrop-0.2/rssdrop http://search.cpan.org/~acg/rssdrop-0.2/rssdrop
- johns 14y ago
  IFTTT will let you easily do RSS to email too: ifttt.com/feed
- egh 14y ago
  I'm surprised more people don't do this. It's pretty easy to set up. Here's a little bit I wrote about using rss2email + emacs. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HOWTOReadFeedsInEmacsViaEmail http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HOWTOReadFeedsInEmacsViaEmail
- quotemstr 14y ago
  "Low-tech"? Email is the best way to read RSS! Email has all the features of high-end RSS headers: * Remember your read messages, even across clients * Star and read for later * Cross-platform * Configurable archiving * Keyword filtering * Search past articles * Organize feeds into folders using configurable rules * Social! (Use the "forward" button.) What's not to like about email?
erlichmen 14y ago
> That's the first Google service shutdown that I'm affected by. You never use Google Code Search RIP?

knurdle 14y ago

I'm really sad to see it go, it's the one service I use more than anything else. Probably more than email.

vacipr 14y ago

What the fuck. Later edit: Like many other will most likely do in their replies I'm also going to suggest an alternative that I've tried in the past. http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/ Later edit 2: They even added a nice pop-up now. https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.imm.io/Zg6A.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.imm.io/Zg6A.png

SpoonMeiser 14y ago
theoldreader.com looks like a good alternative
- vacipr 14y ago
  It actually is pretty decent.
- unsane1 14y ago
  theoldreader seems to have died on my feed import to the best I can tell, anyone seen anything similar? It says it is still working in the background, but no update past the first 3 it imported...
  - vacipr 14y ago
    It's definitely slow right now.Just wait a few minutes.
    - unsane1 14y ago
      FINALLY. I let it work overnight and they finally showed. Now if only they would work on the OAUTH limits mentioned above.
      - vacipr 14y ago
        I guess you had a lot of feeds.
drivebyacct2 14y ago

shared4you 14y ago

Anybody knows good alternatives?

AndrewDucker 14y ago

Okay. So I need a replacement website that also has an Android app. And preferably a desktop app (or syncs with FeedDemon). Any suggestions?

mih 14y ago
Second that. Feedemon has been my default client for years. Totally upset with Google's doing here.
mikevm 14y ago
FeedDemon is dead: http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.html http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.ht...

ericcoleman 14y ago

I've used it every day for years... Anyone run an instance of http://www.feedafever.com http://www.feedafever.com? How is it?

hexis 14y ago
I've been using this on and off for the past few months. Frankly, I prefer Google Reader to Fever, but I strongly prefer Fever to any of the other feed readers I've tried. I especially like that I can count on the server staying up and the service not shutting down.
leejoramo 14y ago
I really like Fever. It imports and exports OPML, so it was easy move from NetNewsWire to Fever and back to other feed apps and backups. The Fever's mobile view works very nicely. Easy to install and it automatically updates itself.
nwh 14y ago
I'd really love to be able to play with this before I drop $30 on it. It's not an unsubstantial amount of money to drop on a self-hosted webapp.
- ericcoleman 14y ago
  I know Shaun has a great reputation, and I've played his games, but this is exactly how I feel. Wish I could play with it a little bit before I press that "Buy" button.
owenwil 14y ago
I use Fever full time. It's great, apart from the lack of native apps. That's the only thing that makes me resent it sometime. Their claims are true, too, it really does help cut back the noise and stops you reading the same story over and over. It's kind of nice to know that I own it, too, so nobody can just take it away.
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago

shawnbaden 14y ago

+1 on first Google service shutdown that impacts me. I use Reader daily.

cdjk 14y ago

There's tt-rss [1] if you want to host it yourself. [1] http://tt-rss.org/ http://tt-rss.org/

EvanAnderson 14y ago
I'm glad I made the decision to host my own feed reader years ago. Mine's based on an old version of tt-rss, actually (I diverged from the codebase back in '05 when I felt like the author didn't really want any of my contributions). Edit: It looks like I'm also happy that I chose to host my own CalDAV server, too. Edit 2: @koenigdavidmj - Apparently I can't reply that deeply. DAViCal is the CalDAV server I'm using (http://www.davical.org/ http://www.davical.org/). My wife and I sync our iPhones to it and it's been a godsend for my personal organization. (Now if I could just find a decent replacement for Mozilla Sunbird...)
- koenigdavidmj 14y ago
  What CalDAV server do you use?
- mjs 14y ago
  Are they really shutting down the CalDAV interface to Google Calendar? (I'm not sure what the "API" bit means, or the "whitelisted".) As of now, CalDAV is Google's recommended way for syncing with iOS devices http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151674 http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
  - tensor 14y ago
    This is my concern too. I was under the impression that iCal also used CalDAV to sync. Why shut it down?
    - MrScruff 14y ago
      It's worse than that. On iOS Google have just shut down exchange support (for new users), which was how I was syncing calendars up until now. If they pull caldav support as well, there will be no syncing mechanism available to iOS users, unless I'm missing something.

andyl 14y ago

Curse this decision - I use Google Reader every day. What is the best alternative RSS reader ??

viraptor 14y ago
Just imported my feeds into http://theoldreader.com http://theoldreader.com and it seems to work ok. Just keep in mind that importing takes a while - I saw only the first entry for a minute or two, then others started joining in.
- taproot 14y ago
  This is looking like the best straight up switch out for reader. Imports are currently limited, and adding a sub takes a while. I'm sure it will settle down in a couple of days. Message when clicking "import": Hey! Because of the huge load we started seeing from lots of concurrent feed import operations, we had to limit the number of imports active at any given time. It looks like right now there are no available slots left, so you might want to visit this page some time later. Meanwhile, feel free to subscribe to feeds manually. Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience.
- taproot 14y ago
  Jesus. Just got into the import queue... > There are 41600 users in the import queue ahead of you. I bet they're happy right now.

lunchladydoris 14y ago

Only word one suffices: Fuck!

phasevar 14y ago

I depend on Google Reader for keeping up with Hacker News. I'm going to be in a world of hurt now. I use iReadG on the iPhone to browse headings and then star the Hacker News posts I want to read later when I get back to the computer. iReadG has been great because it will download all the rss feed data and allow me to browser it and star items without an Internet connection which is great for those times on the road when there is no signal. I have no idea what I'll be able to use to replicate this functionality now that Google Reader is going down. Very very sad.

conesus 14y ago

This has been a long time coming. Four years ago I began work on my own feed reader, NewsBlur, and it's now a full-fledged Google Reader competitor. It's also a paid app and has been paying for itself nearly since the beginning. http://www.newsblur.com http://www.newsblur.com I hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story sharing was launched last Summer and I expect NewsBlur to be around for quite a while. It's also fully open-source, in case you decide to build your own private community: http://github.com/samuelclay http://github.com/samuelclay. I also have a full-scale re-design in the works, but if you can't get to the main site you can try using the beta site: http://dev.newsblur.com http://dev.newsblur.com

klausa 14y ago
Does NewsBlur have something that resembles Reader's full-screen view? If not, is that anywhere on your roadmap?
cadr 14y ago
Is there a way to import your google reader list into it?
- conesus 14y ago
  You bet! It's OAuth-based import, so when you create your account it's just a click away. Couldn't be easier. EDIT: And OPML is the other option when you signup. It's an easy import process, since it's really quite important to get that part right.
  - patrickdavey 14y ago
    So I didn't import the first time I created the account - how do I re-import?! :)
    - afita 14y ago
      Just click on the "+" button to add a new feed. In the dialog there is a button "Import from Google Reader or upload OPML". A small warning: the OPML import will delete you current sites and replace them with the ones from OPML, they will not be merged with the current ones you have.

_delirium 14y ago

Weird decision. Judging by my logs, and those of several other sites I know about, it still has quite significant usage, though I don't know what their threshold is. For example, my own blog has 12x as many Google Reader subscribers as NewsBlur subscribers. Perhaps even with significant usage, that usage wasn't monetizable, and the what-people-read data wasn't valuable enough to keep it operating? Good news for the competition, anyway: Google Reader being pretty good yet completely free and not (obviously) monetized occupied a lot of that space, which is now freed up. edit: In fact, I see NewsBlur is completely unresponsive now, presumably due to sudden interest.

JohnTHaller 14y ago
Newsblur had under 2,000 users in the last day. So the usage of Google Reader isn't as significant as you think.

callil 14y ago

Still he best way to read content on the web, really sad to see it go. Adding on to this: What he hell do I do with my starred items now, it's literally the best collection of content I have curated in my life and I reference it all the time. edit: petition to keep it open http://www.change.org/petitions/google-please-don-t-kill-google-reader http://www.change.org/petitions/google-please-don-t-kill-goo...

josh-j 14y ago
You can export your Google Reader data -- all your starred items are stored in a json file.
- jjsz 14y ago
  It doesn't pass unread items though.
  - josh-j 14y ago
    Another option is to get pocket for chrome which adds an icon to google reader items and thereby allowing you to save your starred items to pocket.
SeppoErviala 14y ago
The petition will not help. Google already killed reader in their hearths when they made the g+ update. Instead of neglecting it for years to come they did the right thing and let it go for good.
SkyMarshal 14y ago
Wondering this too. I'd like to import my folders and starred items to another reader. Anyone a reader that can do this?
Flenser 14y ago
This petition has 10x the number of signatures https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-running https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-r...

ececconi 14y ago

Say it ain't so. I use this everyday at work on my text only internet browser. This is the first internet product shutdown I've ever been affected by. Maybe I don't need to spend so much time reading up on random news. Who knows, it might be good for me. But I will miss you.

pseut 14y ago
If you're text only already, check out newsbeuter.

Matsta 14y ago

Why are they shutting it down? I mean heaps of people must still use it. I bet a shit load of people use for Google Alerts as well, lots of businesses. Far if it costed too much, i bet people would be happy to fork out $10 a year for it? I've been using it daily for the past 4 years, to be honest nothing comes that close to it, and most likely the majority of people who use RSS readers use Google Reader. Also now most of the iOS/Android apps are fucked now since they all use Google Reader. Tldr; Google are dongies.

duncan_bayne 14y ago
> Why are they shutting it down? Because they would rather that you use Google+. The writing was on the wall when they started disabling features a year or two ago.
- Matsta 14y ago
  They should shut down Google search as well while there at it, and redirect it to Google+.
  - dictum 14y ago
    Don't give them ideas.
- talleyrand 14y ago
  But the thing is that Google+ is wholly different experience. It's not about quickly consuming large amounts of information.
- pan69 14y ago
  How are you supposed to use RSS with G+? Wouldn't that be a mess?
  - Matsta 14y ago
    G+ is already a mess, so wouldn't make much of a difference.

ececconi 14y ago

I guess they couldn't monetize RSS. I would have taken an ad-supported version. Nobody would probably click the ads though.

zanny 14y ago
You can easily monetize RSS, you can get some of the best information about a person about the content they consistently subscribe to. All their targeted advertising would have been all the better targeted at people if they intelligently used their subscription information.
otoburb 14y ago
I would be willing to pay. I wish they'd tried to gauge user willingness to pay even as an experiment.

dbcooper 14y ago

Damn. Reader was very useful for keeping up with academic journals and flagging articles for further consideration.

Kylekramer 14y ago

Bummer. I imagine there will be a few decent alternatives, but if the biggest game in RSS reader town is shutting down, how long will websites continue to provide and expose RSS feeds to the public?

nikatwork 14y ago
Is it the biggest though? I get the impression many people use a desktop app for RSS feeds (I certainly do). Would be interesting to see a marketshare breakdown.
- Encosia 14y ago
  Sample size of one, but Google Reader accounted for 6,168 of my 7,698 RSS subscribers yesterday (according to the probably-also-on-the-chopping-block FeedBurner).
zanny 14y ago
What other syndication mechanism works, is cross platform, portable, provides rich media, and is open?
- Kylekramer 14y ago
  None that I know of. But the question remains is whether websites will want to provide a syndication mechanism similar to RSS. Google apparently thinks that it isn't worth maintaining and they are just the ones aggregating the feeds. RSS feeds won't die and will definitely be used in various niches such as podcasting. But if RSS feeds are losing popularity as Google claims, I am worried about their future. Combined with the fact they are probably harder to monetize, I would not be surprised if their days are numbered on most common websites. And that sucks, cause RSS readers always felt like using a cheat code on the internet and I don't find anything that replaces it to my satisfaction.

gyrccc 14y ago

use it daily. Would be nice if Google released details on this "decline in usage"

infogulch 14y ago
Agreed, and agreed.

vowelless 14y ago

This is going to be a huge pain for me. There was a decent infrastructure built on top of google reader (not only apps that let you log in and view your feeds on different devices). I constantly use ifttt to send starred articles to my evernote.

icebraining 14y ago
Since IFTTT can consume any RSS feed, you can just use any client that lets you export your starred articles as one, such as Tiny Tiny RSS. I have a similar use case, where I want to automatically download chosen podcasts. I just created a "download" label, got an RSS feed link from my client and put it on a podcasting app. Now I just need to label the episodes I want to listen to on Tiny and they'll be automatically downloaded to my phone.

guelo 14y ago

These web companies prove over and over again that it's not possible to trust them with your data. What would stop Google from killing your gmail or docs when they don't see it as valuable anymore? The worst part is how the big guys kill all competition with their free products leaving few alternatives for users.

cma 14y ago
You can get all your Gmail data over standard IMAP. If you don't take advantage that to make personal backups, you are a fool.
- KingMob 14y ago
  True, but that's not too bad. The real pain comes when your email address is no longer valid. You have to hunt down everyone you've ever communicated with to give them a new one. A lot of older, and more casual, contacts will be unable to reach you.
  - DavidAdams 14y ago
    Any geek who relies on a domain name that belongs to someone else for their give-out-to-people, permanent email address needs to have his or her membership card revoked. Even if it's a domain that's owned by Google. Get a domain name.
    - ciupicri 14y ago
      Out of curiosity, what domain name should people choose, one based on their full name? If so, what happens when it has been already taken?
      - tomjen3 14y ago
        You take something else? Tomjen isn't my name, but it is close enough.
      - 14y ago

jws 14y ago

I'll take the blame for this. I use Google Reader heavily, but I never go to the web pages. I have native apps on my desktop and mobile devices and just use Reader to keep my subscriptions synced. No ad views, no service.

rbrcurtis 14y ago
If it was an issue of ad views all they'd have to do is add an ad bar at the top ala gmail.
- saurik 14y ago
  I think at that point, content creators being aggregated by Google--who are already have a fairly stressful relationship with Google--might accumulate too much ammunition to use against them (as then Google would be directly profiting from aggregating and redistributing content from third-parties in a modified presentation).
Samuel_Michon 14y ago
If that was a problem, they should've offered paid subscriptions. I refuse to see ads, but I'll happily pay for the privilege. I find the Google Reader web interface to be dreadful and ugly, so I never go there except to manage my RSS feeds. Third party devs have created newsreader apps so much better than Google did, it's not even funny.
- pohl 14y ago
  If that was a problem, they should've offered paid subscriptions. Yeah, but they don't want us as customers, they want to sell us as Soylent Green out the back door. With this news, the only remaining things I'll use Google for are search, GMail, and some libraries like Guice & Guava.
  - tracker1 14y ago
    That's more than me.. without iGoogle and Reader, I don't see much use in them for search now.

wyclif 14y ago

I've been an active, daily user of Google Reader since the beginning. I knew this was coming, but it still doesn't feel right because unlike other Google properties that I don't use, it's part of my information flow. What I'd really like to see here on HN is a post comparing other RSS contenders like NewsBlur and The Old Reader.

Maxious 14y ago
These seems to be the most short sighted bit - they had the techarati 1% visiting a Google social media property multiple times a day and yet they neutered it (rather than integrating properly) to work more on Google+.
- kingoftheintern 14y ago
  My impression is that the internet's elite click almost no ads, so Google as a profit-seeking entity doesn't necessarily care too much about what they do or think in aggregate, as long as they don't get upset enough to be heard by people who actually make up their revenue streams.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    That's what's stupid. Outlier users like this are the least likely to be attracted to standard consumption vectors like ads (IYSWIM), but the avenues of investigation they pursue instead are likely a very good guide to where the median consumer in a given market will move later. A fanatic motorcyclist (for example) is going to scour all sorts of obscure information sources that non-fanatics will not have the patience or time for. But that pattern of scouring will point towards the factors which do move the mass of consumers some time later. Heavy users of Reader were supplying Google with a lot of high-quality data, and if the product had been given the same attention as something like GMail that information would be worth proportionally more.
simcop2387 14y ago
I'd love that kind of comparison that also includes if there is any desktop (linux hopefully) app support too. I've been using google reader and liferea to keep my rss feeds synced between devices and to avoid re-reading things i already saw.

Morst 14y ago

I believe the "loyal userbase" would be large enough to sustain a startup. But sadly that is not enough for google anymore.

campuscodi 14y ago
Sergey Brin is a scurge for old Google fans.... this guy seems to focus on hardware related products more than what Google great.... its Web products

aheilbut 14y ago

Are there any alternative sources of archival RSS feeds like those that Google Reader (unofficially) provides?

icebraining 14y ago
What's an archival RSS feed?
- aheilbut 14y ago
  You can get an RSS file (well, Atom) for any feed that includes all posts going back to whenever google reader started following it. Normally if you get the RSS from the originating site it'll only have the latest 20 or so posts, and there isn't a standardized way to get the history.
- zanny 14y ago
  Greader will preserve its own history of a feed, including deleted items and feeds that go down, given someone on the Internet was accessing it, Google caches it. It means when a website is taken offline, if you are subscribed to, say, a content RSS feed through them, you can still browse the history and content. I just switched to Akregator, which will locally cache feeds (and you can configure it to do so permanantly) but it is a local copy. You can host your feeds via a feed host through it, so I imagine what I'm going to do is run Akregator off my server box, archive my feeds, and access it from my servers ip.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Oh, well, I've name-dropped it a few times already, but TTRSS stories every item in its database. I've used it to run some numbers on them.
    - aheilbut 14y ago
      The beauty of this aspect of google reader though is that they have archived every feed that anyone has read in the past 5+ years, and there's actually an API to retrieve that data as RSS/Atom.

pauljonas 14y ago

NOOOOO! It is my most accessed browser URL. It is the primary method I peruse new stuff on the web. It is the only RSS app that can handle my volume of RSS subscriptions (all others choke and sputter once the feed total is greater than a couple hundred).

zanny 14y ago
Uh oh. Not good for someone with over a thousand RSS feeds from various updates-once-a-year products or sites.
- eli 14y ago
  You can export most of your data (and certainly the list of feeds you follow) http://www.dataliberation.org/google/reader http://www.dataliberation.org/google/reader

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

josh-j 14y ago

Netvibes is another alternative (it has a widget and reader view).

salmanapk 14y ago
Thanks! Was trying to remember this one.

onan_barbarian 14y ago

Pretty irritated at the way Google takes moderately successful services that can't possibly cost them all that much to keep running and puts them down the memory hole, to foster the happy illusion that everything that everything that Google does turns to gold. I'm sure there's more engagement with Reader than Plus, with its millions of users who don't really use it (many of whom aren't even really aware that they are signed up for it).

SeppoErviala 14y ago
I for one welcome this change as an opportunity for growth. Google has not put any effort into reader for some time now. Maybe some innovative company will get the google reader user base and build something great. --- OTOH I do feel sad that reader is gone as it has been a part of my daily life for many years now. Some say that RSS is dead but I cannot find any alternative to feeds I've collected.
- markdennehy 14y ago
  You know what you call a product you don't put much effort into for some time and which is still in daily use by happy users? Working. /mutter.
  - SeppoErviala 14y ago
    I would like more powerful filtering options and better recommendations. For example, Hacker News feed is impossible to follow as RSS on reader as it has too high volume (for me at least). I would be content with ~40 daily recommendations. Google reader had decent random recommendations before the G+ update. I believe that a good recommendation system can guess relevant items for given user, but that was not what google reader has been doing for some time now.
    - chrisbolt 14y ago
      I long ago switched to the Hacker News 100 feed: http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload/ http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overlo...

mdesq 14y ago

I spend more actual time in Reader than any other Google application including Gmail. This bites. I'm open to alternatives, but I haven't seen any I could really latch on to.

signed0 14y ago

While I am an avid Google Reader user, I think this is good news. Their product has stagnated over the past few years, yet few competitors emerged. Hopefully this creates a void that a better service or set of services can fill.

Semaphor 14y ago
Sadly most of the services fill a different niche. Feedly and so on are all magazines but not what I consider real RSS readers. I've read though this Thread, the Reddit threads and through some "Reader Alternatives" articles. The only things similar seem to be The Old Reader and Newsblur.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  Feedly has a very familiar view for Reader users: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/tips-for-google-reader-users-migrating-to-feedly/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/tips-for-google-reader-use... I've been using that view since the Reader announcement prompted me to give Feedly a second look. Works perfectly.

Samuel_Michon 14y ago

I'm very disappointed by this. I use Reader to manage all my RSS feeds. I check Reeder on my phone more than I use any other app. It just goes to show, if you're using Google software that has no advertising and isn't used to sell advertising, it could end any day, and it probably will some day. I'll be purchasing a Feedafever license, which also happens to work with Reeder. http://www.feedafever.com/ http://www.feedafever.com/

mh- 14y ago
I'm looking at FaF but not seeing how this works with Reeder?
- jeffehobbs 14y ago
  It's true, Fever is an Account type for Reeder. http://shawnblanc.net/2012/06/review-reeder-3-for-iphone/ http://shawnblanc.net/2012/06/review-reeder-3-for-iphone/
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    Ah, but just for the iPhone client, which is the only one I don't use (as I have an Android phone).
- chipotle_coyote 14y ago
  Reeder on the iPhone syncs with Fever, but neither the Mac nor iPad versions of Reeder do. Sunstroke (https://goneeast.com/sunstroke/ https://goneeast.com/sunstroke/) is a better Fever-specific client for the iPhone, I think... but it doesn't have either an iPad or a Mac version. On the Mac you can use Fever's web interface but on the iPad you're pretty much out of luck, as there are no native clients and trying to use the web interface there is crazy-making. (Actually, the web interface is a little crazy-making in any web browser. It's just a lot crazy-making on the iPad.)
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    Wow. I mostly use Reeder on my phone, but it hadn't even crossed my mind that the iPad and OS X versions possibly wouldn't have Fever support. The author should really make that a priority, he has 2,5 months to make it happen.

reefab 14y ago

There is a whole app ecosystem built around Google Reader. This is going to be ugly. I actually it daily but only through apps like Reeder.

miker64 14y ago
Yeah, I'm far more worried about the fact that pretty much all the iOS rss readers use Google Reader as a backend. I'm going to be fubar for keeping different apps across devices all in sync...

abrowne 14y ago

I was kind of always expecting this ... I'm always afraid the same thing will happen to Voice.

jbigelow76 14y ago
I don't know, Voice can act as a competitor to Microsoft's Skype. With no visible competing product from Microsoft, Apple or Facebook and no perceived competition from something like Newsblur Google thinks they can kick their Reader users in the junk with impunity.

webwanderings 14y ago

First word came out of my mouth looking at this in Google Reader of course is, FUCK!

mindprince 14y ago

I would gladly pay for Google Reader. It is my most visited website. This is so sad.

flingbob 14y ago

I've been working on a replacement for a year now. It's open to the public. Get it while it's hot http://1kpl.us/ http://1kpl.us/

tomedme 14y ago
Thank you!

whitehat2k9 14y ago

I'm a huge fan of Netvibes - been using it for several years now. It has a single feed based view like most other RSS readers, but in my opinion the newspaper view is where it shines. I can quickly skim several dozen feeds with the scroll of a mouse - it's great if you're the kind of person who likes to take in a lot of info at once.

krcz 14y ago

Is there a RSS reader which incorporates some ML learning algorithms to determine which articles I'd probably like, basing on what others (ones having similar taste) click? That was only thing that would make me abandon Google Reader if it weren't closing anyway.

platz 14y ago
I think newsblur supports some kind of training after looking at it today; not sure how effective it is.

presty 14y ago

what the fuck google? seriously, I'm really pissed with this.

presty 14y ago
really, how is one's reading habits not useful data for google? you're sitting on a pile of gold. it's a billion times more valuable than the useless google plus desert!
presty 14y ago
ok Pocket, it's time for you guys to add rss reading support

beryllium 14y ago

I use NetNewsWire (an iOS app) every day, and it interfaces with Google Reader very nicely. Very sad that Google has made this decision - I will have to look into the alternatives. Hopefully they are even better! :) Edit/Update: I'm probably part of the problem. I never click ads - maybe they just had too many freeloaders like me? :) Weirdly, I also never block ads. I just don't click them.

taeric 14y ago

I hate saying this, as it sounds like I'm just bitter, but this really could be enough to finally leverage me off of google. Reader is by far my most used app of theirs. Plus is garbage in comparison.

awhow 14y ago
I am the say way. And I feel that my heavy use of Gmail and Google Reader meant that I was more likely to use other Google products when needed, ie Docs, Calendar. Without Reader, I don't feel like a Google user, just a Gmail user.

Llothy 14y ago

This is very sad. :-( That's like 3 hours of my day every day.

ruok0101 14y ago

Good motivation for cleaning out all those feeds I never read anymore...

kingoftheintern 14y ago

Literally my favorite thing on the internet. Revolutionized how I consume information. I found out about this via Google Reader! Google has fallen very far.

doe88 14y ago

Well done, it affects me a lot, it was one of two services I'm totally dependant from Google. The second one is Gmail, if I wasn't so lazy I would try to do something about it too, I'm not confortable with my mails stored at Google / in the US anymore.

stuqqq 14y ago

that is so sad.

rdl 14y ago

Ugh. I was living in fear of this happening for the past 3 years. I will never trust Google again. Apparently the only Google service I don't have a good alternative for is Google Books (for search; kindle, torrented bookwarez, and scribd works fine for the raw PDFs)

BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
> I will never trust Google again. What other free hosted service provider deserves your "trust" that it will never, ever go away, and which provides facilities for exporting all your data in a nice way (a feature which will likely be accessible long into the future)? I'm just as irritated as you are, but given that they've provided notice and good backup/takeout options, I don't see a betrayal of trust anywhere.
- rdl 14y ago
  I didn't use Google Reader because it was free, I used it because it was 1) good and 2) the back-end to essentially every other RSS-based service I used. So they're not competing with "free", they're competing with everything. I learned this lesson when I made the mistake of Google Voice (which was free for some aspects).
  - wildmXranat 14y ago
    I concur with this sentiment. It is good enough to pay for in my point of view. Google simply made the choice of wanting to monetize on their current user group. It makes me wonder if they'll open source it so that others can self-host it.

Spittie 14y ago

This is a sad news, one of my favourite RSS reader is closing. Google Reader is likely the site I browse the most, and I always have one tab open on it. Also, my phone sync with RSS with it. I guess it's time to start searching for a new RSS reader. Too bad that I already did it a while ago, and every time I went back to Google Reader. The biggest problem for me with other feed reader is that they try to add too many features to the simple format that RSS is. No, I don't care about "hot news", and I don't care about "suggested stories", I just want to read the feed I've added to it. My brain is good enough to skim through that list by just reading the title. And most other reader lack integration with a mobile platform (Android/iOS/WP). Yes, sometimes they have a mobile client, but usually not nearly good enough as 3rd party clients. Hopefully they'll change their mind, but I doubt it. Time to force myself. Sigh.

icebraining 14y ago
Try Tiny Tiny RSS. It's pretty light, just a list of folders/feeds on a left pane and the items on the right. I've switched from GReader a few months ago and it's working pretty well. I don't know if there are any 3rd party clients, though. I know it has a mobile UI, but it's web, not native.
- Spittie 14y ago
  Thanks, I looked into it some times ago. Liked it, but didn't bother to switch since Google Reader was working so nicely for me. I know it has a mobile app for android, but it always seemed sub-par to gReader or Press for me.
axusgrad 14y ago
I've been using "RSS Feed Reader" Google plugin, which was the first thing I came across. This thread is a nice place for seeing other options. If an API or service is really valuable, Google shutting their version down shouldn't be too bad. Other people can try to make some money offering a replacement.
pauljonas 14y ago
I have, over the years, experimented with all of the RSS reader alternatives and found them to be lacking. Especially in handling the volume of feeds I subscribe to (I subscribe to thousands of feeds, see it as a stream to dip into, not zealously sop up every item, and browse through).

ambirex 14y ago

Perhaps the "decline in usage" had something to do with the thoughtless redesign they implemented.

TheCowboy 14y ago
It might have been in the decline before that point, but I did stop using it because of the redesign hurting my eyes and being less of a pleasure to interact with. It's really a shame because it was a service a lot of people enjoyed. There was no need to force one look on every user. I can't imagine the likely demographic profile of Google Reader users was worthless to a company that sells targeted ads as well.

talleyrand 14y ago

Well, this is truly the apocalypse. To me, Google Reader IS the internet.....(It's how I got to this Hacker News post). Not pleased at all.

EugeneOZ 14y ago

Just want to repeat here my tweets: Maybe GoLang will be retired in August? AngularJS in September? GAE in October? "Backed by Google" is a joke now. I just can't trust Google anymore. Google Reader was important part of my day - source of information. Google apps are too UNSTABLE to use.

TillE 14y ago
Speaking of Twitter, I just checked my feed to find that a huge number of people I follow (from tech nerds to game developers to independent journalists) are upset that Google Reader is dying. This seems like a huge mistake. Why doesn't Google want to be the one place I can go for everything? They should be cultivating that kind of brand loyalty, not stomping all over it.
Benferhat 14y ago
> GAE in October? AppEngine's deprecation policy: 7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if we intend to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to this API or Service. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate that Service without these changes until the later of: (i) one year after the announcement or (ii) April 20, 2015, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment): # required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or # doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden. [0] https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms scroll down to 7.2

karpathy 14y ago

"over the years usage has declined" That's because there was almost ZERO innovation done on this product. Very few (mostly visual) improvements, and very few new features. The latest posts on Google Reader blog are from 2011 http://googlereader.blogspot.com/ http://googlereader.blogspot.com/

mgkimsal 14y ago
Was thinking the same thing - usage has declined in part because Google doesn't promote it. Google shapes the way many people discover, use and keep information (google search, maps, news, finance, gmail, etc). To let Reader languish then kill it because "usage has declined" is rather self-fulfilling. I bet if they didn't update their satellite images and road data, Maps usage would decline as well. They could have been working with the community to define new standards - tags, markup, etc - to allow richer interaction between rss readers and sites (thinking geoloc micro format work, and other semantic markup work in recent years). Making 'reader' a first-class citizen in its suite of services, then using interaction data as more relevance signaling seems like an evolutionary step that only a handful of players the size of google can make good use of, but apparently in their infinite wisdom, they'll just shutter it.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
sethish 14y ago
It's worse than that. The google plus era redesign of all google sites ate up a massive fraction of the vertical space in Google Reader. And some social sharing features that made google reader an awesome place, were disabled in favor of sharing via google plus.
- karpathy 14y ago
  Agreed with this, most notable example of this for me was when they took away recommendations within Google Reader. That was a great place to go to see what blog posts my friends like. Now it's all multiplexed into their G+ timelines and I happen to catch about a third of it in between their useless updates about being in a park with their kids or a new funny meme.

tvladeck 14y ago

Mixed emotions. I remember at the end of college and right after (I graduated in 2008), many of my close friends were on GReader and we would share and communicate directly through it about interesting things we were reading. It was an awesome way to interact, and nothing has replaced it for my group and me. Google's implicit (although I could be reading their intentions incorrectly) strategy of trying to route that interaction through GPlus did not work for us. Too much overhead and it never materialized. Now we just use email, which is fine. So on the whole it's a type of social interaction that has simply gone. It's a shame, because I think that Google could have done something with this. But they are just one company and the number of innovative things they're doing is really impressive. Maybe this will clear the way for a competitor that replaces the social interaction component and innovates on it. I'd be a user for sure.

tvchurch 14y ago
I'd note that Readertron (readertron.com) was built by a guy who was frustrated when Google nerfed the sharing among friends feature. MIght want to give it a shot.
- sbarre 14y ago
  I am interested in Google Reader replacements, but that site has zero information for me before asking me for my email and to sign up.. Hmmmm
  - greenmountin 14y ago
    It actually looks pretty good, I was disappointed that there weren't any evangelists listing it in the other threads. I signed up in two seconds by using a mailinator address. It looks like an exact clone + sharing/contacts. On revisiting though, the XML import failed. Too bad.
- RHSeeger 14y ago
  Sadly: > You need to sign in or sign up before continuing. Not even a description of what it is or why I want to give them my information. Sorry, but /close

fractalsea 14y ago

This is my most used Google service after the search and mail (it's probably on par with Youtube). Shame to see it go! I can't see how it was hurting them so much with users declining. Surely the more time staring at the Google website header the better?

zeitg3ist 14y ago

Sad, sad news. I get (I think) 300 items/day on my Google Reader and I always get to "inbox zero" - a bit of OCD maybe. It is my most visited URL ever and I've used it every day, several times a day, since 2006. Of course I would even pay a fair amount of money for it, given the time I've spent on it, but Google's not interested. I am currently trying The Old Reader and while the interface is nice (well... generic Bootstrap, which is pleasant, and better than newsblur) it's really slow with my amount of feeds. Sigh...

hiddentaco 14y ago

I literally said "Awwww, whaaaat?". http://tt-rss.org http://tt-rss.org as a replacement seems the winner for me so far.

vosechu_ 14y ago

I'm seriously digging Feedly right now. Took 12 seconds to get into it and everything just makes sense. I wish I had found this ages ago. No need to backup your feeds, it uses your google account for now.

mehrzad 14y ago
Feedly depends on Google Reader for now, IIRC. edit: They're fixing it! http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/
mjs 14y ago
Seems like the Chrome App can access: * Your data on all websites * Your tabs and browsing activity I'm not very comfortable with that. It also seems very unnecessary for an RSS reader.
- mehrzad 14y ago
  https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permissions_are_too_broad_why https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permiss... This answered here.
  - fakeer 14y ago
    It doesn't give an answer that is acceptable. That's no way an explanation. That's an excuse.
dbcooper 14y ago
Feedly posted this to their blog today: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly Google Reader Posted on March 14, 2013 by @feedly Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting from some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandie back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered.

nbertram 14y ago

Thats funny... I found this post on google reader.

flatfilefan 14y ago

Search, maps, reader what other Google services do geeks use daily? Strange decision!

buremba 14y ago

I reacted in a same way when Google Notebook shutted down. WTF GOOGLE?!

jayeff 14y ago

I do hope this is a blessing in disguise! Google killed with their free Reader the biggest part of the market around RSS. Switching off Reader opens up this market which should be still large enough for a few indies to find their niche. Maybe even reinvigorating RSS while doing so.

marban 14y ago

Thank you, Google+

faithful_droog 14y ago

I (and it seems a lot of others) will be sad to see reader go. I presume this death announcement doesn't meet the criteria for a HN black banner though.

cgcdesign 14y ago

Sad to see it go. At least I have 3 months to make my own, should make for a good weekend(s) project.

pbreit 14y ago

Wow, very surprising. One of the few Google apps I access several times per day. Edit: I think there's a 50/50 chance this decision gets reversed. Edit: looks like http://feedly.com http://feedly.com is going to get my vote for now.

icebraining 14y ago

If you want a light and simple reader with a similar UI, try Tiny Tiny RSS. It's self-hosted, so it won't stop working when it's no longer "profitable", and it has all the basic features (folders, keyboard navigation, etc) without clutter. I've been really happy with it since I switched from GReader, a few months ago. http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki

antirez 14y ago

I wonder if it's just a Google Reader issue or RSS are fading out. I'm not a huge RSS user but I would be very concerned by RSS decline, it was one of the rare inter-operation standard that was very positive, easy, clean, and helped a lot programmers to put things together.

frou_dh 14y ago
It's bugged me when I've seen people say that Twitter replaces RSS. In my eyes, RSS is for feeds where you actually care about each item and the decision whether or not to read it. Twitter is catered towards dipping in and out, with items constantly slipping through the net.

wslh 14y ago

Google Reader is irreplaceable, it is not only about reading RSS. That is the easy part. It is about going back in time and accessing all past feeds in an organized way (it is difficult to rebuilt that from crawling and web scraping). If you add a blog now you can read articles that are not present in the current feed. Google Reader is the core of my information diet. Not twitter. Thousands of blogs starred, liked, and commented. An interesting feature that you couldn't replace is automatic translation: reading a russian blog asmit was written in english. Once I shared one of its articles and one friend asked me if I knew russian or if it was a joke my share! Because obviously the share was in the original language. Google is evil. While I can understand a business decision, there are ways to hand it over to other companies or organizations. I share some of my previous criticism: - Extraction of Main Text Content Using the Google Reader NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/extraction-of-main-text-content/ http://blog.databigbang.com/extraction-of-main-text-content/ -Google Search NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/ http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/ - The Data Portability Fact Sheet: http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/ http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/ - Reverse Engineering and the Cloud: http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-and-the-cloud/ http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-a...

TillE 14y ago
> It is about going back in time and accessing all past feeds in an organized way Yes, exactly. Google Reader is literally the only way to find past episodes of some podcasts - the files are still up, but after a site redesign nothing else links to them.
nl 14y ago
Wait.. so they have a service that in your words is so good it is irreplaceable.. and taking it away makes them evil? That's pretty strong!
- wslh 14y ago
  Yes, their historical data can't be rebuilt. A little bit like what happened with USENET and Google buying DejaNews. Nobody has that data.

ja27 14y ago

I'm going to move all my feeds over to FriendFeed.

DannoHung 14y ago

Why don't they just fucking ask me to pay for it? God damnit.

mayneack 14y ago

Obligatory White House petition: http://wh.gov/oRoJ http://wh.gov/oRoJ

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ambirex 14y ago

Seeing the boom in alternatives, someone should start making a feedburner competitor.

bennesvig 14y ago
I think Feedblitz is one of the most popular at the moment. I'll either be switching to that or MailChimp.

surrealize 14y ago

I use Reader's "star" functionality to keep track of stuff that I want to refer back to later. And, AFAICT, you can't easily export your star history. You can export your subscriptions, but not the stars. The only approach that I've seen to exporting stars is to use the fact that Reader will create a feed of just your starred items. Then you can view that feed in some other reader and manually mark each one there (ugh). Edit: Oh, and the read/not read history is, AFAICT, also not exportable. And I do use this as well.

skymt 14y ago
Stars are, in fact, exportable. The "Google Takeout" zip archive for Reader includes a file called starred.json, containing a list of your starred items in a JSON format that, as far as I know, nothing else reads. If whatever reader you switch to can import marked items, you can probably work up a script to convert Google's format to whatever the new reader uses.
- surrealize 14y ago
  Thanks! The last time I checked was when they turned my google-account-with-an-apps-domain-email-address into an actual google apps account, and I had to move my Reader data.
- 1ManBandAccts 14y ago
  Feedly will sync over all your starred items and put them into Saved.
zanny 14y ago
Oh god. I have around 800 starred items dating back to 2008 in greader. Fuck me.

magoon 14y ago

Wait, Google is a business?

sideproject 14y ago

whoa. big move. can we somehow petition against this? and maybe even move this off as an alternative open source, driven by community? Whack some ads on Google Reader and you might make money out of it Google... but don't remove this.

zanny 14y ago
Well, I just exported my entire feed history to Akregator. It imported smoothly. I'm probably going to look into a qt 5.1 based port of it to Android if someone isn't already making it just so I can have my feeds on the go as well. That is my biggest concern, I really like the UX of the mobile reader app for browsing blog entries.

mattchew 14y ago

This is going to be a problem. Reader is fairly important to me. I'm dropping Google a note and offering to pay a subscription if they continue services. Probably won't make a dent, but worth a try.

shmerl 14y ago

Time to stick to Akregator.

zanny 14y ago
I've been reading up about Akregator, and it seems to be direly under-staffed in terms of developer oomph. There was blag post a few years ago about porting it to Akondai: http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=137 http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=137 but it is still using Metakit. Maybe this is the wake up call to get Akregator back up to snuff, though. I might look at the code to see if theres anything I can do, at least.

jezell 14y ago

http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/

przemoc 14y ago

I used to use Google Reader. Feed count rose and rose to the point I stopped using it. For many many months I'm checking only LWN and HN sites manually for CS/IT-related stuff - I don't feel like I lost anything. So cannot really complain about losing Google Reader now, but I think that this decease decision is strange. I may reevaluate feed idea when I see intelligent reader that will show me early the most interesting stories from my subscriptions and will do it with a style. Reading must be a pleasure, not pain. Typographically web is a horrible place, there is so much that can and should be improved. Feeds should be your better (i.e. correctly) looking versions of the texts you can find on the web. Google Reader Plus extension improved a bit comfort of using GR, thanks to multi-column view for instance, but it wasn't enough to keep me using GR.

lispython 14y ago

Reeder, my favorite iOS and Mac news app, that includes support for Fever (http://feedafever.com/ http://feedafever.com/), a news aggregation and evaluation service I’ve always wanted to try. If you are looking to leave Google Reader, this may be the combination you’re looking for.

idont 14y ago

This is such a sad news for lots of specialized website (including Google blogs!!!). For sure they will see some trafic impact. BTW, Google+ is too much time consuming per unit of information read, so I will never replace Reader by Plus.

DrinkWater 14y ago

i was especially interested in the history function of Google Reader. i could look up old items even if they were not starred, it was enough if they passed through Google Reader. And there is no option to save this data. Or is there?

pasbesoin 14y ago

Lessons for the week: It's not yours unless it's 1) On your machine [a], and 2) DRM free. -- [a] As long as your machine remains "yours", i.e. free of the same restrictions.

zanny 14y ago
I just exported my Greader profile into Akregator. Now to research if someone wrote an import of reader favorites JSON, or if I should just write the extension myself.

tvchurch 14y ago

I'd urge everyone to give Readertron (readertron.com) a try. It was built by programmer (and good friend of mine) who was frustrated when Google nerfed the ability to share among friends within Google Reader. It's a work in progress, but at least you can share articles among friends again. He's also very responsive to requests for features.

Ziomislaw 14y ago
uhg! tried it. after signing in I was presented with a "You are already subscribed to the following shared feeds." and two pages of random people I've never even heard about. I strongly advise against it.

smegel 14y ago

What happened to you Google :(

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

helloamar 14y ago

I use reeder for Mac and ipad that is connected to my google reader account. Need to find an alternative now.

cstross 14y ago
Not necessarily; @reederapp tweeted a few hours ago, "Don't worry, Reeder won't die with Google Reader." He's not very communicative but I suspect this means he's working on something :)

nickbaum 14y ago

Former Reader PM here, no longer at Google. Having fought many times to keep Reader alive, it's worth considering whether a large enough outcry would lead them to reconsider. White House Petition!

zanny 14y ago
Dear Mr President, you must use an executive order to stop Google from shutting down the reader service. Thanks, ~everyone.
anigbrowl 14y ago
Within the limits of confidentiality and business ethics, can you explain what the issues are in a situation like this? I agree with other readers above that Reader is probably a poor source of ad clicks and thus direct revenue, but it seems like it would offer invaluable forward intelligence for Google (just as searches for 'influenza' and 'flu' have proved to be excellent leading epidemiological indicators). ISTM that the value proposition for Google was in mining the behavior of Reader users to identify what would be interesting/ popular/ important a week or a month from now, and would help to optimize the value of keyword searches etc in adwords.
- nickbaum 14y ago
  As a stand-alone product, Google Reader could easily have justified continued investment and headcount. The problem is that internally you're competing for resources against products with (a) tons of users (Gmail), (b) tons of revenue (AdWords), (c) high strategic priority (Android, Google+). To justify staffing a smaller product, you have to argue that it has the potential to be as big as the other products, and that the marginal impact of an engineer is higher on an under-staffed product.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Sounds like the unwritten correlate of that is that you can't measure what you don't build, and without the measurements you don't get to build. I wonder what magic econometric fairy dust grants a project high strategic priority.

aaronbrethorst 14y ago

I've been a Google Reader user since the beginning, and have had an uneasy sense that this was coming for a while. I started building a replacement for it that fits my needs a couple months ago. It's not ready yet, but I thought I might as well toss up a launchrock page and collect email addresses from other folks who might be interested: http://signup.viafeeds.com http://signup.viafeeds.com Here are my guiding principles: 1. It's going to cost money. I refuse to 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.' I imagine that for more casual users, this'll be a nominal amount. I won't compromise on this because.... 2. I want to build something sustainable, and have it be enough of a profit center for me that I'm willing to focus on it and continually improve it for years to come. 3. I want to build something that I'll love more than Google Reader. I spend at least an hour a day in Google Reader, and want to make sure that whatever I build has the simplicity of Reader. I have a lot of interesting ideas I want to try out around inclusion of contextual information and the ability to easily save or share articles or clips of articles in multiple ways. From conversations I've had with friends in the journalism world, there's a real need for a product like this, especially one with a legitimate business model. Regarding where this fits in relative to NewsBlur: I think NewsBlur is doing a lot of interesting stuff, but it feels heavyweight to me, compared to Google Reader. I want a very minimalistic, "just the facts, ma'am" experience. What do you want to see in a news feed product? Where do you think Google Reader could've or should've been in 2013 if Google had properly maintained it? Anyway, to reiterate, if you're interested, head over here and enter your email address: http://signup.viafeeds.com http://signup.viafeeds.com (I just created the domain an hour ago, so hopefully it'll have propagated to your DNS server).

pyre 14y ago
| 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.' I think that you meant something else. Nobody "makes it up in volume." ;)
- krallja 14y ago
  That's the joke.
  - 14y ago

jjsz 14y ago

See. The thing is. I haven't found ONE solution that imports starred items, unread items, and feeds properly besides Reeder. And it doesn't work on Android or on the web. :(.

anigbrowl 14y ago

While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. That will happen if you stop developing it and ignore requests for new features. Conesus has done a good job with Newsblur and I'll try going back to that, but I really wanted to have Gmail-style filtering of my RSS feeds in Google Reader, to to mention being able to maintain my sharing/tracking data within the Google ecosystem. This is a major failure on Google's part. Complaining about a declining user base when the product was left to stagnate amounts to blaming the users for the company's lack of vision. Why Google would want to abandon this extremely rich source of behavorial data and trend emergence is beyond me; it suggests a loss of direction, for which short-term reactivity is no substitute. Put another way, you can't lead the herd by following it faster. I am shocked. As I say, I've used Newsblur before and thought it OK - at the time I just somewhat preferred Reader's cosmetics. So the above is not just a reaction to the necessity to switch platforms.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mike_ivanov 14y ago

Screw you, Google. Now I need to spend my own time to write a replacement as there is no viable alternative.

uladzislau 14y ago

List of Google Reader alternatives http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/?platform=online&license=free http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/?platform=on...

olegp 14y ago
Also: https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader

yread 14y ago

> CalDAV API will become available for whitelisted developers (only) Wasn't a big brouhaha about windows phone only supporting Exchange protocol and not the open standard that's used by everyone: CalDAV? Oh, and now Google is discontinuing it! Let's see how much longer Exchange will last...

spinchange 14y ago
More like let's see how much longer Google Apps will last in the enterprise. I am NOT a big MS fan, but Windows & Office is still a major factor for businesses and a big part of the Apps allure was that it was interoperable with existing Windows/Office deployments. As enterprises using Apps upgrade and find that they no longer sync with any of their brand new software, people are going to be very upset - particularly those with egg on their face who sold their company on Google Apps (like yours truly)
- fludlight 14y ago
  Would you be interested in a Google Calendar API to CalDAV translator program or service?
  - bruceboughton 14y ago
    That seems like a backward step.
- Encosia 14y ago
  No kidding. Compared to my clients that choose Exchange-friendly services like Office 365, the clients on Google Apps (paid or not) have been feeling a world of pain since the Office 2013 upgrade. I remember reading a post on some official Google blog late last year talking about how they were going to aggressively target and steal Microsoft's purchase in the enterprise. In reality, they're struggling horribly to even retain the customers they've coaxed over, in my experience. Whether they like it or not, ActiveSync is the most pervasive protocol for syncing mail, calendars, and contacts across a wide range of devices. It's a travesty that they're choosing a holy war against Microsoft instead of supporting what would serve their users best.

orionlogic 14y ago

I have thousands of websites inside Google Reader which serves me as a personal sub-internet. With archive and quick search within feeds was so much valuable for me. It was the only service of Google that i use second only to Gmail. I think they made a quick short headed cost analysis in this, that archive and search functionality needs server power. Actual userbase does not provide enough money juice to balance. Now, let the alternatives pour in.

mxfh 14y ago
Exactly that. My worst fear: Just couldn't find any service yet that provides this search capability in your very private hand-selected little back-catalog of the internet back to 2007 and earlier. Including sites that are no longer available in the wild. Nobody else will be able to provide that without access to the Google Reader Servers. Hope this current uproar gets enough traction to find a solution to save this searchable and indexed archive of the internet/blogosphere somewhere accessible for everyone.

jjsz 14y ago

Alternative list on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Google-Reader/What-are-the-current-multiplatform-2013-besides-the-ones-listed-below-alternatives-to-Google-Reader-where-I-can-transfer-my-starred-items-feeds-and-unread-items-In-response-to-A-second-spring-of-cleaning?__snids__=105010833&__nsrc__=5 http://www.quora.com/Google-Reader/What-are-the-current-mult...

beilabs 14y ago

So I love Google Reader, been using it from the very beginning. I love offline clients, quite often I'm stuck in a remote location where 3G has yet to penetrate so I like to have a couple of hundred items to read which will sync when I reach connectivity again. I need the RSS service to track what I've read across multiple devices and have the client support offline usage. Any recommendations?

LoganCale 14y ago
This is the primary reason I use Google Reader too. I don't use the web interface at all, I just use it to keep track of everything so I can sync with it when I reconnect later, long after a number of items have disappeared forever from the official RSS feeds of active sites.

nilved 14y ago

Reader was the only thing that made me almost want a Google account. A real shame to see it shut down -- I don't think any competitors are as good.

ivanmaeder 14y ago

Beware! This app is a gazillion times simpler than Google Reader. I'm putting this out there in case anybody finds it useful. I made it years ago but never got around to promoting it. The idea was an online bookmarking app that tells you when the bookmarked pages have changed, and for technical reasons it eventually turned into a simple news feed reader. It also supports drag and drop and for browsers with side bars (damn you Chrome!), it works... in the side bar. I've moved onto other things but if you're really into it, get in touch and I'll try to move your data from Google Reader. http://bookmarkchamp.com/ http://bookmarkchamp.com/

s1n4 14y ago

Dammit, I should be looking for an alternative rss reader

mindstab 14y ago

Author Warren Ellis on twitter: "Google shuts down Google Reader, probably the most effective tool I have." https://twitter.com/warrenellis/status/311992329181478912 https://twitter.com/warrenellis/status/311992329181478912

guiambros 14y ago

Google should open source it. Seriously. Donate the code base to the open source community, and let someone run with it. With some luck it'd attract enough developers to keep the project alive. Or maybe somebody would figure out a way to monetize the effort. Either option, it'd be much better than just let the service die. It's not unprecedented. Google did exactly this with Google Wave. Sadly, I don't think this will ever happen. This project is too small to justify the resources needed to clean up the code and solve any dependencies. And, differently than Chromium / Android / Google Wave, Google Reader is not a platform / protocol / OS. It's just yet-another pet project for a company that - sooner or later - has to justify its investment to Wall Street. This isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, product that Google creates just to later destroy it, when it discover it has no business or economic justification. Keep this in mind when developing for Mirror API, or anything else that is not core for the company.

btipling 14y ago
I doubt that open sourcing it is going to be any help to anyone since it probably integrates deeply with Google's proprietary backends.
- Flenser 14y ago
  I wonder if Merchant Circle would be willing to sell the old Bloglines codebase seeing as they aren't using it.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

owencm 14y ago

I've started a Slant comparison page for Google Reader replacements, hopefully we can crowd source a good, feature-by-feature comparison of the replacement apps to help decide. http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-alternative-to-google-reader/opinions/the-old-reader http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-alternative-to-googl...

ryfm 14y ago

sign the petition http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Ask_Google_to_keep_Google_Reader_online http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Ask_Google_to_keep_Google_R...

voochuk 14y ago
How about another petition to atleast open source the code so maybe the community can host it on google apps/ec3 or users can run a private instance
- mieses 14y ago
  The problem is the historical data of all the feeds they've archived, not the interface. Google, a large number of almost-evil moves eventually adds up to evil.

mcgwiz 14y ago

Google is betting on Google+ being the future platform for general content publishing and consumption, so RSS in general, and Google Reader in particular, are effectively competitors of Google+. I wouldn't be surprised if Blogger was shutdown (or subsumed by Google+) 5 years from now.

Udo 14y ago

People have said repeatedly that RSS is dead, and that's apparently true, but I've been wondering for a few years now what has replaced it? It's not like social networks provide the same kind of service, really. So is getting updates from people and projects you care about really such a niche thing? Have I missed some other huge channel that supersedes RSS? Or are we about to actually lose something profound here? Kudos to Newsblur, which I never heard of before today. I'd like to sign up for a paying membership, but it seems like this is exactly what everyone else is doing, so servers are dead...

sixQuarks 14y ago
I feel exactly the same way: what the hell is replacing RSS feeds? I hate keeping up with "live" feeds like twitter.
doidydoidy 14y ago
Protip: when people like that say "RSS is dead", what they mean is "unfashionable".
- Udo 14y ago
  I thought that was self-evident. Unfashionable is the first step in a trend that ends with "dead and abandoned". As an aside: I implore you not to say things like "protip" here. It comes off as immature and condescending if not outright hostile. I realize it's a quick and snappy way to get upvotes from like-minded users but it's really that kind of phrase which prompts people to complain about redditization or 4chanization when they refer to the declining post quality of HN.
takluyver 14y ago
As someone who used to use RSS feeds and doesn't any more, I've replaced it with a mixture of: checking websites for stuff that updates frequently like news, e-mail subscriptions for infrequent but important updates, and twitter (or similar) subscriptions for stuff that I can afford to miss. Why not RSS? Formatting was often not quite right - if I wanted to read something, I often ended up clicking through to the original site anyway. And I didn't like the e-mail style expectation that I would read everything, or at least mark it as read (which felt like admitting defeat). It just began to feel like a chore. When I log in to twitter, it doesn't tell me that I have 1439 unread tweets.

ohheyworld 14y ago

holy cow....can't believe this is going away. I love reader. real reason they are shutting it down...they want all that sharing/interaction in Google+...which i hate.

_Mark 14y ago

I am afraid of what I am going to do with all this spare time I will regain once this is gone. This was the home page of "My" internet.

_Mark 14y ago
From your 626 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 12,220 items Since September 5, 2010 you have read a total of 300,000+ items

raphman 14y ago

For those looking for a desktop app, the Opera browser has a nice integrated RSS reader and is cross-platform.

skilesare 14y ago

I'm stunned. I was depending on this service to document my life and what I know. I simply can't fathom that they are going to shut it off. If this happens I'm going to move everything I have on google off of it. I put too much trust in them for them to pull this crap. This is an evil move. It exudes evil. It damages my productivity and steals my time. Ughhhh.

mindcrime 14y ago

F^&@ D^&@ IT! ^%&( ()&@& @&!^$&!!!!! Of ALL the things they would shut-down, they have to kill Reader!?? Nooooooooooooo!! Aaargggghhhh.... Oh well, guess it's back to RSSOwl[1]. Maybe this will even motivate me to get involved in hacking on RSSOwl a bit and help those guys out. This will probably also serve as the impetus for me to start adding some Reader like features to Neddick[2]. That was always sort of in the back of my mind, so why not go ahead and jump on it? [1]: http://rssowl.org/ http://rssowl.org/ [2]: https://github.com/Fogbeam/Neddick https://github.com/Fogbeam/Neddick

pknight 14y ago
I switched to RSSowl quite a while ago and didn't find myself longing back to Google Reader once. It does everything I'd want, it's just not that pretty of an application.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  My biggest gripe with RSSOwl was that it was that it had some performance issues, especially if you had a lot of feeds. And using Google Reader eliminated the need to synchronize my list of feeds between multiple RSSOwl instance (like, say, my personal laptop and my company laptop). But the first issue may be mitigated by hardware improvements since the last time I was using RSSOwl regularly, and I have some ideas around the second issue.

kirian 14y ago

Well that sucks. One of my most used/visited apps/sites. Maybe Yahoo should build a reader. Could be a good fit for them.

MichaelMoser70 14y ago

actually it is still available until June 1st. sad it will be gone. I think gmail will be next to go - I think the last gmail redesign made the product less usable on purpose; they must be paying a lot for storage cost on abandoned accounts, old emails etc; nowadays they get more transient user info from other sources ...

nbashaw 14y ago

http://bringgooglereaderback.com/ http://bringgooglereaderback.com/

vonuebelgarten 14y ago

I just saw half my twitter timeline panicking about this. Is there so much people using it? What happened to desktop feed readers? Newsbeuter is serving me well, as usual, for years.

LoganCale 14y ago
Google Reader is the back-end/syncing platform for many desktop and mobile feed readers, so everyone who uses those apps suffers from this as well. It's especially useful for feeds that update frequently, because if you go offline for a period of time you end up missing out on content, especially if their feed only has the 15 most recent items. Google Reader is constantly downloading and storing those items, even when you're offline, and syncs them with your client when you reconnect. (Plus if you read RSS on both desktop and mobile, it keeps your read items in sync.)
- vonuebelgarten 14y ago
  Well, that's a feature of Google Reader I didn't know. Blame, since I never bothered to test it.

threepipeproblm 14y ago

I wonder if Google has accounted for the effect of people who have been burned by coming to rely on a product that was yanked becoming reluctant to use Google products in the future?

hnasarat 14y ago

Liferea is a great RSS app. It's Free software too. http://lzone.de/liferea/ http://lzone.de/liferea/

ika 14y ago

the world is near the end

MichaelMoser70 14y ago

They could have turned it into a payed service, with so many active users. What would be the arguments against such a move?

k3n 14y ago

I'll bet you anything the catalyst behind this is in some way related to G+, the introduction of which has led to a steady removal of features from Reader. This news is really rubbing me the wrong way; I've been a long-time Google customer, even a 'Google hipster' as my friends would say. I'm an early-adopter that often beta tests. I was the only one at work with GMail when it was released, and was always out of invites that first year. Same for GVoice (which I've had since GrandCentral), GWave, Apps for personal domains, and Chrome (where I've posted many bug reports that were accepted). I've been with Reader since the year it came out, though I never used any other RSS reader -- I'd tried several, but they all sucked; Reader was just a breath of fresh air, "cloud" based before that was even a buzzword, and I've introduced many a friend to its wonderful utility. My favorite feature was the _'note in reader'_ bookmarklet, which they killed in favor of crappy G+, but now they're going to outright kill the entire product? My only hope, if they don't grant a stay of execution, will be that they open-source the code such as they did with Wave. At least then I'll have some hope of retaining my most-used web app of all time. From your 117 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 398 items, clicked 189 items, starred 7 items, and emailed 0 items. Since October 26, 2010 you have read a total of 20,685 items. (I think 10/2010 is when I was finally able to transition my normal GMail account to a GAFYD account, thus why the metrics stop there) Needless to say, I use this app 10x more than any other, including email (edit: ok I might be exaggerating). Also, it looks like the Google Operating System (unofficial blog) recognized the distress signals back in December with "Google Reader, 'Constantly on the Chopping Block'"[1]. Where's my pitchfork... 1. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-reader-constantly-on-chopping.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-reader-const...

tracker1 14y ago
Without iGoogle, and Google Reader.. honestly, I don't have much use for Google over say DuckDuckGo. I signed into the Android/Google echosystem.. mainly for iGoogle, and Reader.. with both going away, I'm pretty close to out.
- peapicker 14y ago
  Until you brought it up, I didn't realize that those are really the only two products of theirs I use outside of search as well... sigh

mspseudolus 14y ago

We think RSS is far from dead. We've built a free reader that lets you put your feeds into a magazine style, highly visual page: Kuratur.com This isn't a traditional email-inbox-style feed reader. It's like Flipboard for your feeds, on the web. In beta - feedback warmly welcomed. Also, very interested in talking to RSS fanatics.

bsg75 14y ago

Thankfully this will mean that the trend of news reader apps that consume Google feeds instead of the actual sources will end. Some of the current ones will die off, but maybe a few of the better will convert.

jason_slack 14y ago

For OS X users that use Apple Mail it supports RSS Feeds. Not sure about Outlook 2012 for Mac though...

mikestew 14y ago
Sadly, that went away in Mountain Lion.
- jason_slack 14y ago
  oh, geez. I am on 10.8 but I dont use Apple Mail and I was going to go back to it solely for OS X.

benubois 14y ago

Here's another good Google Reader alternative. https://feedbin.me https://feedbin.me. It's a new reader with a similar experience to NetNewsWire. It costs $2/month but there is a free 3 day trial. I created Feedbin because I was looking for an alternative to Google Reader that's simpler than what's already out there. No social junk, no ads, no content discovery. Just an RSS reader.

georgeoliver 14y ago

This definitely is the first time I've been disappointed by a web service shutting down. I've been looking through alternatives. I'd like it to look like this, http://wp.me/aseR-cr http://wp.me/aseR-cr , be web-based, have keyboard navigation, and not much else. Is there a web-based newsbeuter?

damian2000 14y ago

I'll be honest, I never even tried Google Reader. An RSS reader is such a simple app, I didn't think that it would anything special.

mkr-hn 14y ago

I saw NewsBlur when it first popped up on HN but never gave it thought since I thought Reader served my needs well enough. Amazing how that inertia melts away when the floor vanishes. Now I just have to wait for its servers to stop melting.

adad95 14y ago

To me Reader is the 2nd most used google Service. A Great Lost to me.

nreece 14y ago

Here are some hand-picked, noteworthy alternatives: http://blog.feedity.com/2013/03/14/google-reader-alternatives/ http://blog.feedity.com/2013/03/14/google-reader-alternative...

taproot 14y ago

Google: Reader usage is going down, lets axe it. Every alternative reader website / service: Fuck me thats a lot of traffic.

endgame 14y ago

I never used google reader, but I wrote my own tool to merge the feeds I care about into one megafeed: https://code.google.com/p/msrss/ https://code.google.com/p/msrss/ That way, I don't have to depend on any web services.

knodi 14y ago

WTF is this bullshit... I love Google Reader.

programminggeek 14y ago

This is another reminder that if Google does a service for free, there is likely a business to be had in making a paid version, simply for the inevitable moment that they kill the free service. Think paid Google+, paid GMail, paid search engine maybe? You get the idea.

winkerVSbecks 14y ago

The loss of Reader doesn't matter much to me a most others. It's the fact that Reader synced all my RSS feeds to whichever application that was/is the flavour of the month. It's that ability to have a repository of your feeds available in an instance. That's the product people need. Google should try to build that functionality into Gmail or something. Also, fuck any RSS feed reading service that charges monthly. I'll pay for an app, but I'm not paying a monthly subscription fee to read freely available content.

Amarandei 14y ago

Instead of wasting your time creating petitions to keep Google Reader open, I suggest you make a petition to make Google Reader open source. Google is going to close Reader either way so at least we'd haven a self hosted good alternative. Every alternative I've seen so far in this hole topic(yes, all of them, I've tested all of them) is either poorly designed, bad UX, weird browser problems or trying too hard to be more then a RSS reader. Guess I'll just have to spend 2 days and build my own. Oh, well :)

trevorhartman 14y ago

If you haven't already used it, check out http://getprismatic.com/ http://getprismatic.com/. It replaced Google Reader for me. (It also replaced HN for the most part).

goronbjorn 14y ago

With the rise of things like Twitter and Facebook as primary news/link sources, I doubt that most people 18 and under even know what RSS is.

sdiwakar 14y ago

Hi HN, my co-founder and I have been working on a Google Reader clone in the last few weeks, we're not quite ready to launch, but would love to get feedback as soon as we've opened up our beta: http://beta.newsmaven.co http://beta.newsmaven.co We promise to have all the basics of Google Reader covered, including importing your feed data (or as much as possible through the API). Of course, if you're looking for something to move to immediately, NewsBlur is an awesome product :)

mcovey 14y ago

If anyone wants the direct export link instead of using takeout, this still works: https://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export?hl=en https://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export?hl=en

mladenkovacevic 14y ago

This affects me in a huge way. I spend at least a couple of hours in Reader every day. I'd even be ok if they found a way to integrate Reader into Google+ in a more than just a superficial way and somehow and made it super social. They seem to be hellbent on making Google+ work.. so here's a perfect way to make me spend more time there! Make Google Authorship work with Greader then allow me to follow specific authors and get only their RSS feeds (instead of blanket following whole websites). Use G+ as a commenting system behind my RSS subscriptions, giving Disqus a run for its money. Ugh so many possibilities... :(

MrBlue 14y ago

Yet another example why I never built a service or app relying on any Google product, service or API.

mooreds 14y ago

Will blogger stop supporting RSS?

talleyrand 14y ago

Basically every Reader-alternative site is getting its servers slammed tonight. This makes me wonder about Reader's "declining usage."

mikevm 14y ago
You don't see all the data...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

leephillips 14y ago

A very nice thing about Google Reader is that is real time, because it receives pubsubhubbub pushes. Are any of the alternatives mentioned here capable of that?

18pfsmt 14y ago
Looking through the git repo, it appears NewsBlur does.

smnl 14y ago

Seemed like this would eventually happen since Google stopped updating Reader (and its APIs) a few years ago I've also been working on a similar news reader app called BlogRoll: http://blogrollapp.com http://blogrollapp.com It can import your Google Reader feeds and has a tiled layout (which may not be everybody's cup of tea), but it works well for photo-focused sites like food and fashion blogs, and it handles other news sites and blogs quite well too. Here's a screenshot of it: http://bit.ly/Yc1P9C http://bit.ly/Yc1P9C

kevinSuttle 14y ago

I have never gotten the appeal of Google Reader. I've been using Netvibes for several years and have yet to find anything better. You'll be glad you did. netvibes.com

crucialfelix 14y ago

bastards. they never seem to realize how much they damage our trust with these actions. it effects all of their future products. I don't trust them anymore. anyway feedly has a replacement coming soon: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/ > We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless. > If you are a Google Reader, give feedly a try before July 1st, and you will be able to migrate seamlesly

alex_doom 14y ago
Their site is getting crushed right now. I can't even login.
- baszero 14y ago
  http://www.feedly.com/ http://www.feedly.com/ perfectly works right now. With four clicks you find all your feed groups again you had in Google Reader and the User Interface is even nicer... I think the most important feature for any alternative is the import of the Google Reader's feeds and structure including all tags!
nakedrobot2 14y ago
"a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine" So it will also die when Google shuts down App Engine? :)
levesque 14y ago
I've made the switch to feedly as well, and so far I must say it has been a pleasant experience. Everything was set-up and imported in a few clicks, and the general usage experience is also pretty smooth. I got rid of the useless default interface, replaced it by compact lists. I can say I'm happy with the state of things for now.
inafield 14y ago

jessaustin 14y ago

I won't bitch about this decision, because after all I got more than my money's worth. I do wonder if the change doesn't weaken the whole Google "Suite" though. Google (until quite recently anyway) seems to be focusing a great deal on G+. The vast majority of my G+ posts come from Reader; I doubt I'll be posting to G+ in future. I know G+ can live without me, but as far as I can tell the only value in G+ comes from its integration with the rest of the "Suite". If Facebook or Amazon had been in this situation, instead of killing Reader, they would have focused it more and more on feeding, promoting, and otherwise bolstering their other services, probably to the detriment of actually reading RSS. Probably to the point where some, but not all users would have become disgusted and quit using Reader anyway. Google doesn't do that sort of thing, which I guess is to its credit.

thelah 14y ago

Joining in on the disapproval of Google's move here, as I use it constantly all day everyday! Here's to hoping this public cry might change Google's decision to axe it...

beambot 14y ago

Does anyone know of an extraction tool to pull down all your starred items (in addition to feeds) into some semi-structured format -- even just a big, single HTML file? I've got YEARS of starred items "saved" in Reader. I use it everyday to stay abreast of news (1000+ items / day). Between Google Reader and iGoogle... Google has deprecated most of the tools I use on a regular basis. This makes me seriously question using Gmail and Apps for Business. EDIT: Just RTFM'd. Looks like Google TakeOut will let me export most of the stuff I care about. Still, this sucks. I'll probably just keep using it and hope (like iGoogle) the deprecation date gets pushed back. Otherwise... productivity boon due to lack of RSS feeds. Also.... Feedburner users should see the writing on the wall!

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

Danieru 14y ago

One not mentioned yet is http://selfoss.aditu.de/ http://selfoss.aditu.de/ It is an open source self hosted rss reader with a responsive skin. I'll be migrating tonight nad since it is open source I can contribute when I run into issues!

trts 14y ago

I can use another RSS Reader (and probably won't like it nearly as much as Google Reader), but I worry that the Google Reader audience is so big, and that so many will likely not bother finding another worthy RSS aggregator, that some blogs who get most of their traffic from GR users will throw in the towel when their readership declines.

killy 14y ago

http://lenta.yandex.com http://lenta.yandex.com

jtgeibel 14y ago

I thought of this exact situation just last night when subscribing to a feed. Firefox sent me to a google page which offered me an option to add it to either iGoogle or Reader. I recalled that iGoogle is being shut-down and thought it was strange that it was still offered as a prominent option. I guess now it makes sense. I seems strange to me though that Reader will be shut down before iGoogle, which is slated for November 1, 2013.

dpeck 14y ago

This is just a delayed press release, reader was killed 2 years ago with the release of google+ that removed the amazing social/sharing features that made it special.

edwardunknown 14y ago

I'm a big dummy but almost every major decision Google has made since Larry Page became CEO has me baffled. The whole idea of squandering the nice vibes they had by forcing everybody into that stupid Facebook knockoff, killing off cool projects left and right, those dumb glasses that nobody is going to buy... I don't get it. Is Reader costing them that much money? Put some ads on it then. Is this a Captain Ahab thing where Facebook is the whale? Then someone should let them know that no one really likes their Facebook ripoff because no one likes the actual Facebook. Facebook is a fucking car crash. I wish Google would just make cool stuff and continue not being evil and knock it off with the master plan bullshit.

gwern 14y ago
Supposedly Page has been heavily inspired by Steve Jobs's advice to him to 'focus'. Just consider this part of Jobs's most poisonous legacy: his epigones.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Spooky23 14y ago

The writing was on the wall for reader once they stripped the commenting/sharing functionality. This was a great tool for the teams I managed to stay on top of things. The redesign destroyed the product.

deerpig 14y ago

Let me see how I can delicately sum up my feelings about this: "Google, you Bastard!" I think they announced this while the news cycle is wall-to-wall New Pope Mania to cover up this appalling summery execution :)

vijayboyapati 14y ago

It's unfair for Google to claim usage has been decreasing since it broke the social aspect of Greader (which was the part I loved the most) which I think is a major factor in declining usage. I definitely saw less content that my friends on Greader used to share. My usage of the product dropped after that, but it was still useful enough I wanted to keep using it. This is probably one of the most shameful episodes in google product history. I bet they're rationalizing away all the feedback from upset users too. They should at least let someone spin off the product into a startup. Most startups would die to have the user base of Google reader. Just because Google doesn't care about it, doesn't mean there is no market to be served.

laserDinosaur 14y ago

I use Google Reader for one very simple reason - I'm already signed into Google. It's on my phone, it's on all my computers . I don't want to have to use yet another bloody website just to manage something as simple as an RSS feed. I like Reader because it as simple, it worked and it was everywhere I needed it. The fact that it's retiring just because people are not using it is a misconception - I've managed to get a fairly large number of people using Google Reader, none of which had ANY idea it existed before. As a few others have said in the thread, the "declined usage" is no fault of the product itself but through absolutely no promotion of it from Google.

plinkplonk 14y ago

The real winner here might be Prismatic. They already do awesome machine learning based discovery. If they'd add an RSS reader (not just RSS feeds into their discovery machine) they'll get every one of millions of users moving off Google Reader. Due Disclosure: Though I have no official connection to Prismatic, founder Bradford Cross is a friend and I am biased to Prismatic. It is awesome. Try it at http://getprismatic.com/ http://getprismatic.com/

k_bx 14y ago
While I like prismatic a lot, it builds on idea of a filtering bubble that you put yourself into. So it's better for finding something that you'll be interested in and you already know that (since it's in your interests, and your friends quote on that), but it's absolutely orthogonal to rss reader.
laacz 14y ago
I've never been a fan of giving away choice of what to read to automated systems. Of course some percent of suggested stuff is ok, but actually it all boils down to three components for me. Mostly I read what I want to read (interests). Then I'm interested to follow popular stuff (keeping up). Then I'm all right to take a peak at what a program suggests I could like (discovery).

csom 14y ago

I wonder what would happen if everybody who wants Google to continue Reader would start clicking on the Ads in Reader on a daily basis. Oh wait, which ads...

jayadevan 14y ago

Alternatives: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/alternatives-to-google-reader-297/ http://www.nextbigwhat.com/alternatives-to-google-reader-297...

slake 14y ago

Wow. That's a lot of angst. I feel it too. Years of saving useful links on reader which was really easy to search.

slake 14y ago

Wow. That's a lot of angst. I feel it too. Years of saving useful links on reader which was really easy to search.

slake 14y ago

Wow. That's a lot of angst. I feel it too. Years of saving useful links on reader which was really easy to search.

tmzt 14y ago

The really interesting product/service would be a datastore and RSS consumer like GR API is. I think a lot of competitors spend time working on the UI and miss the power that is behind it. (I would include Google in this list, even if they didn't have the front end UI the Atom API would still be a useful thing.) I wonder if building something on elasticsearch would work.

rafski 14y ago

RSS bypasses ads on websites. Google makes money on those ads. It was strange that they supported RSS for so long.

fakeer 14y ago

There were apps and services. They starting shutting down. Never actually mattered. Not to me at least. Until a few were killed, like Google Reader, and I started understanding the frustration and sometimes disappointment shown by some of the users and fans. I feel the same now. This is one of the few services other than Gmail that I use(used) from Google's shop. Will have to settle for a good alternative now. I guess I would rather to go a paid solution. It's for the same reason that I am thinking of this move that I went to Pinboard from Delicious for - advertisements were not my worry, it was the chance being shut down. Was Google Reader bringing any revenue to Google? I mean I never saw any ads in there, so I doubt it but some of you might be knowing better. Not sure they have killed for just being out there not bringing any money home or they will be focussing on Google Currents now? But stuff like this http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.html http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.ht... is more sad than the news itself :(

asdf333 14y ago

its too bad. i can see why they cancelled it but it was an essential part of how i process information

mschuster91 14y ago

I am calling for the biggest shitstorm in the existence of the Internet. Anonymous, where are you? :D

rob22 14y ago

Its very bad day for rss lover....

raywu 14y ago

Would you pay for Google Reader per month? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xr6ZINsFK69VCPW2ryuTfHGrt1RyE-1D51FEAdt0VJs/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xr6ZINsFK69VCPW2ryuTfHGrt1R...

fakeer 14y ago
Yes. But without ads and with my privacy intact, totally.

bconway 14y ago

I heartily recommend http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/ - lean and mean.

nazgulnarsil 14y ago

Which reader can parse the xml file google reader generates without extra work?

7hundredand77 14y ago

I have been working on one for the last couple of weeks, and will hopefully create it as a fully functional RSS reader: http://nuesbyte.com/ http://nuesbyte.com/ for more information, visit me on reddit username: 7hundredand77

Yhippa 14y ago

Wow this one hurts. They took down another Google service I loved, Google Notebook (http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html). I have no idea why I loved it. It was just so easy to make lots of quick text documents without the fluff and it was fast. I used it despite the existence of Evernote and other online documentation services. I still haven't found a suitable replacement though OneNote comes real close. I don't know what I'm going to do about this. I guess the reality is that social won and RSS is dead. Or at least social is much more monetizable. I've tried so many other different RSS aggregators but kept coming back to Google Reader. It worked well, had minimal fluff, and was fast. R.I.P. Google Reader

bbayer 14y ago

They could offer paid version. I guess lots of people will want to throw a few bucks for that kind of product. For me Google Reader is one of the few software that I use every day.

mieses 14y ago

This is a disaster for Google. Elites are mobile. The empire collapses after they leave.

ayushgta 14y ago

NewsBlur may have a solution for end users but there seems to be no recourse for the huge impact this has to the dev community. With Google Reader as an API devs had a way to get historical data on practically any RSS feed going back many years. That ability will be lost/gone forever. Even if Google sunsets the reader app, I wish they'd keep this data source open. Its hugely valuable and I don't think there is any alternative to it. I think that having cached all this data on their server over the years of their own free will, they've put themselves to be in a position where they have a somewhat fiduciary responsibility of keeping this data alive and open.

pauljonas 14y ago
^^This. Any new application starts in a state of tabula rasa -- all history, prior to some point in 2013 (or late 2012) will not be accessible, considering that a typical site/blog feed contains only 10 to a few dozen most recent items. Presently, in Google Reader, I can click on a feed and flip through items all the way back to 2005 (for those sites with that long of a history). I know that Google Reader search has been flaky as the product has languished, but it still the most powerful way to search a select group you sites you care about (incidentally, the Google Labs custom search engine product is on life support too, if not set to sunset soon) and search for a topical phrase of interest and get a set of results with that matching text.

justips 14y ago

I'm going to try https://ifttt.com https://ifttt.com. It has a few recipes for RSS: RSS -> Instapaper, Readability, email and so on.

i4i 14y ago

I love Reader and hate that it's going away. A pox on Plus I say.

dbcooper 14y ago

Come on Microsoft, this is a good opportunity for you - Bing Reader. Make it happen.

sp332 14y ago
The Windows Live Mail app has a feed reader. I wonder how hard it would really be to add the functionality to the web-app version of outlook.com.
leoc 14y ago
Or Yahoo!? DDG? Anyone?

mikro2nd 14y ago

Next will be Blogger...

spatten 14y ago

I'm assuming that this will also shut down the Google Reader API, but I haven't seen anything definite. Anyone have confirmation either way?

usablebytes 14y ago

Although, it is sad for the current Reader users, good thing about Google is, it admits its failures quickly and get over it.

mikestew 14y ago

It looks like a bit of work to set up, but I might just adjust how I digest things and give this a shot: http://tabs.mediahackers.org http://tabs.mediahackers.org. "Rivers" probably aren't going to have the archiving and what not that Google Reader or others will have (maybe, haven't looked that deeply) but most stuff I just read, or not, and move on.

mhausenblas 14y ago

Not cool, GOOG. Suppose I'll give NewsBlur a try then.

camillomiller 14y ago

Do you this will have a big impact on sites like daring fireball that have a huge rss subscription base?

srinibond 14y ago

One update for all RSS feed fans. If you are in India, US or Casnada, you could SMS enable your feeds by using the RSS feature of http://txtweb.com http://txtweb.com. check it out!

olefoo 14y ago

May I say, Aaeaarrghhhhhhhhh! This was ( I speak in the past tense, even though death does not happen until July 1st ) one of the few reliable guideposts about the internet. Google reader,of the RSS readers, you were the best, reliable, unencumbered by partisanship, unflavored by ideology. You were the best. Too bad, I must say goodbye, too bad I must go to newsbeuter or some other webreader, too bad you must die. Truly I hate google, I hate what Google has become, I love the web, I love what the web was supposed to be. I love RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS and I will mourn you when you are gone.

n2j3 14y ago

let me be the first to say http://nooooooooooooooo.com/ http://nooooooooooooooo.com/

camus 14y ago

Google might drop anything now, groups , appengine, whatever , You just cant trust their Saas anymore.

mattbarrie 14y ago

I'm here with Alan Noble who runs engineering at Google Australia and ran the Google Reader project until 18 months ago. They looked at open sourcing it but it was too much effort to do so because it's tied to closely to Google infrastructure. Basically it's been culled due to long term declining use.

villesundberg 14y ago

I think we all saw this coming when G+ took over some of Reader's functionality. I've been working on a news solution of my own, Scoopinion, since 2011. It's a discovery engine that ranks articles based on how closely they've been read. Users install a browser extension that lets them track their own reading (within a set of whitelisted sites). It's a little bit of quantified self for news. The data is used for recommendations and to help journalists in their work. It's not a drop-in replacement for Reader since you don't get the full firehose of headlines from your feeds, only the most engaging stories. https://www.scoopinion.com https://www.scoopinion.com

aquadrop 14y ago

Don't Be Evil... Heh.

pilooch 14y ago

Just thought I would mention that you can use XPLR unsupervised machine learning API https://xplr.com/developers/ https://xplr.com/developers/ to build your own feed reader in the manner of https://xplr.com/products/illuminate/browser/ https://xplr.com/products/illuminate/browser/ Though this probably applies more to RSS reader developers than end users. In a way, you can build your own little Prismatic-like app, tailored to your needs, or just play with AI and news :)

senegoid 14y ago

what is concerning is that this decision could influence sites making their feeds available. Twitter and G+ are not viable alternatives. Google alerts to RSS were wonderful. I'm sure they will shutter alerts soon too.

senegoid 14y ago

meerita 14y ago

Correct me but the rest of the apps and website application who are RSS readers too use mostly, Google Reader. So this affects also them in a way.

deconq 14y ago

I support this move. For me, RSS is a necessary evil. I always opt for email subscription when I have the choice, because I find it infinitely more convenient to have my subscriptions and emails in the one place, rather than in two separate products. However, for sites that do not offer email subscription but only offer RSS coughHNcough - I reluctantly use Google Reader to subscribe. Meaning an extra account to check each day. Hopefully this won't merely result in everyone switching to just another RSS aggregator - instead, I hope it will prompt websites to start using more convenient subscription methods, whether that be email or something else. RSS is dead. Long live... ???

jpswade 14y ago

I used to have a news (rss feed) reader on my blackberry, which was great. Now I switched to Android, I've been using Google Reader so I can sync it online too. So now this sucks, what's the alternative?

ohwp 14y ago

I created a poll to keep track of the best alternative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373538

siromoney 14y ago

I'm building an alternative (https://feedreader.co https://feedreader.co) and would like volunteers to test it. The focus is on reading (https://feedreader.co/arpith/labels/read https://feedreader.co/arpith/labels/read should give you an idea) so it's much simpler than newsblur, etc, but the front end is built using a feed sync API (https://feedreader.co/api https://feedreader.co/api) which I think will be useful.

bromagosa 14y ago

I use it daily. A lot. Since they're shutting it down, couldn't they release the code as opensource so we can build our own greader servers? Or is that insane from the technical point of view?

draegtun 14y ago

I use Google Reader a lot so this is a shame|sad|annoying :( Still this video "Hitler finds out Gooder Reader is shutting down" at least put a broad smile back on my face :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=A25VgNZDQ08 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=A25VgNZD... (via Dave Winer tweet - https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/312049161677713408 https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/312049161677713408)

friendofasquid 14y ago

We convert a few big-ish blogs to audio using a professional reader if you're into audiobooks or podcasts. Skip Google Reader listen instead. http://castify.co/ http://castify.co/

crusso 14y ago

Crap, after years of avoiding RSS, yesterday I found a blog that I wanted to follow. I signed up for Google Reader... Sorry, folks - I may have caused the shut-down.

egeozcan 14y ago

well, their "cleaning"s now deserve their own blog; just google this: site:"googleblog.blogspot.com" intitle:cleaning

nakedrobot2 14y ago

Alright Google, I'll make a deal with you: Keep Reader alive and I'll CONSIDER using G+ Until then, I'm not going to touch you.

olgeni 14y ago

As soon as RSS disappeared from Mountain Lion, Google copied the idea: time to sue again.

kondro 14y ago

If they want to make money from it, charge for it. I would gladly pay $40/month to access Google Reader.

oracuk 14y ago

This is affecting me similarly to the announcement of Yahoo killing Delicious. Both Delicious and Google reader became for me definitions of their services. As a result of this all alternatives do not feel right (Even if they're technically more full featured). I have swapped Delicious with Diigo (After shopping around many alternatives). I really hope the process of replacing Google reader isn't as long or as painful as that was. The ending of Delicious and Google Reader is the end of an era of my use of the Internet. I wonder if it's a function of my age that I now see that as a sad and worrying development rather than an opportunity to be grasped.

senegoid 14y ago

baszero 14y ago

FEEDLY has done a great job: - with 4 clicks you find ALL feeds with - ALL feed groups / folders - ALL tags are imported - you even have the complete HISTORY of all feeds again - it is SYNCHED REALTIME with your Google Reader account: if you "like" a post in feedly, you instantly also have a "star" in Google Reader. Any alternative discussed here should have this import and SYNC feature, otherwise it is useless. http://www.feedly.com/ http://www.feedly.com/

anon1385 14y ago

One more for the list of killed Google services: Code Search, Google Search API (twice), Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets), Google Pack, Image Labeller and Google Dictionary. Friends don't let friends rely on free web services.

k3n 14y ago
Wow, at first I was thinking that this was their first shutdown that really affected me, but looking at your list there's many other services that I really enjoyed and utilized very frequently. * Code Search -- how did I forget this awesome tool? What an invaluable, educational, and fun tool that was. * Google Video -- somewhat redundant with YouTube, but I always felt Video had a place in that it seemed to be much more liberal than YT and also allowed larger uploads. * Google Desktop -- ok, this one did hurt. My primary use for it was to search my Outlook mail at work (f'g Outlook search is the worst I've ever seen in any product). Now I'm back to never being able to find an email... * Google Notebook -- a very awesome online clipbook / personal wiki. I still miss it. * GOOG-411 -- I still miss this service too. Going online is just too slow and tedious, not to mention impossible and/or illegal when you're driving (whereas hitting a speeddial for GOOG-411 was quick and easy). And no, the "voice search" on my phone is not the same, not even close. * Google Health -- this was a very neat service that I think was ahead of its time, and I didn't use it much (as I didn't have many health issues at the time), but as I age, I'm wishing more & more I had a centralized location to store my medical history on my terms. * Google Dictionary -- another tool I used on a daily basis. At least there's an official extension[1] that I can use in its place that is functionally equivalent (for my uses); just turn off the pop-ups and invoke it manually from the button. Pretty scary how many of my tools and services that I came to rely on were shuttered; however, I think the powering down of Reader will impact me the most. 1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-by-goog/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...

mrgreenfur 14y ago

They shut down the products API, in case anyone was using it. It was a quick way to get pricing info into apps..

oivvio 14y ago

I've looking into building a Google Reader alternative for quite some time now. Because let's face it, Google Reader has been neglected since forever. This news prompts me to finally do it. Tell me what you think: http://getfishwrap.com/ http://getfishwrap.com/

olifante 14y ago

Shutting down Google Reader makes a mockery of their famous mission statement: "Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

forgotAgain 14y ago

Sounds like an opportunity for Yahoo to raise its profile.

prathibhanu 14y ago

Checkout http://multiplx.com http://multiplx.com as an alternate to Google Reader.

mkr-hn 14y ago

HN deaded this when I tried to submit it: http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network I don't know why. It's a great eulogy for Reader, written in 2012.

wglb 14y ago
I think buzzfeed gets automatically marked dead.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  That's unfortunate. It has a lot of quality content mixed with the revenue-generating pop stuff.

forgotAgain 14y ago

I wonder if bit by bit ending secondary products like this doesn't separate Google from its customers. Part of my reason for not using search services like Bing is that I'm tied to Google by their secondary products such as Reader. The end of Reader will loosen Google's hold on me. As will the end of iGoogle.

avaku 14y ago

At readrz.com, we will be releasing a related tool in a few weeks. It is not a pure RSS reader, but it's useful for aggregating information. See more details and subscribe for updates at http://eepurl.com/d48hj http://eepurl.com/d48hj

mimor 14y ago

For the people running their own OwnCloud setup: https://github.com/owncloud/apps/tree/master/news https://github.com/owncloud/apps/tree/master/news

neves 14y ago

At least now I'll have to search for another reader. I've always were worried that Google knows too much about me. They can access my email, see what I search and download, and every news/blog that I follow.

zmanian 14y ago

I was hoping for a different fate for Google Reader. - The feed digesting functionality could have been merged into Google+ -Google Reader could have become a news reader skin on the of G+ As long as Google Reader remained a stand alone service and yet deeply tied into the search index, it has been doomed.

calgaryeng 14y ago

Are there any open source alternatives (I'm thinking Ruby/Rails/Sinatra) where I could throw up my own RSS read/sync server onto Heroku or something?

draegtun 14y ago
Have a look to see if there are any Planet type solutions for Ruby - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) I'm going to spend some time looking at the two main Perl solutions, Perlanet & Plagger (used respectively by http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org & http://perlsphere.net http://perlsphere.net). * Perlanet - https://metacpan.org/module/perlanet https://metacpan.org/module/perlanet * Plagger - https://metacpan.org/module/Plagger https://metacpan.org/module/Plagger Failing that I may produce a custom solution with a feed aggregator library (for eg. https://metacpan.org/module/XML::Feed::Aggregator https://metacpan.org/module/XML::Feed::Aggregator).

pit 14y ago

Hooray! One time I read the Fleshbot RSS feed, and I've never been able to un-read it -- it just stays in my "Read items" queue.

samspot 14y ago

Between the massive interest in this topic and the fact that many google reader competitors were crushed by load last night, I'm having a hard time believing use has 'declined' as much as Google is implying.

ireadzalot 14y ago

One of the first 2 sites I go to when I launch my browser in the morning everyday (gmail and reader). I will sorely miss it.

fakeer 14y ago

If one think devs must learn from this development, that would be - go for an open standard now. The way Rackspace is doing with OpenStack for cloud. Similarly sth for feed sync/tag etc - where a services changes with an URL and few more things like an UUID etc. Devs in this field might be having a better picture of this. I just want sth like email. Like currently I host my mails with Google Apps with my domain but I can take it to my VPS any minute and my email will still be up and will keep syncing to my desktop/mobile clients without a problem. Or maybe I would shift to some free provider like ABC, XYZ etc.

VictorZ 14y ago

http://ifgooglekillsreader.tumblr.com/ http://ifgooglekillsreader.tumblr.com/

devesh 14y ago

It’s sad to see google killing one of the most useful service. Though, there’s a petition going on to keep the Google Reader running https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-running https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-r... and more than 40k+ people have signed it. If Google still decides to kill the service, I am going to use Feedly ;).

Fuzzwah 14y ago

Since I'm one of those "weekend hackers who likes to use PHP like a newb"...... I use a self hosted and rather hacked up rnews install: http://rnews.sourceforge.net/ http://rnews.sourceforge.net/ It uses magpierss to grab feeds: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/ http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/ I also make heavy use of yahoo pipes to munge together a few rss feeds and do other regex'y type things to a feeds: http://pipes.yahoo.com http://pipes.yahoo.com (pls yahoo, never kill pipes!) The reason I like rnews is the boxed layout (where each feed is seperated), rather than every other rss reader which jams everything into a single feed. With the boxed way I have the feeds I read daily up top and then progressively have boxes for sites which I only skim headlines for every week down lower. I have a side question which I've been meaning to float on HN for some time: is there anything cool I could do with the fact that my self hosted rss aggregator receives roughly 2,000 hits a day from search bots? I mean I get scraped constantly all day, from ALL engines.

mkr-hn 14y ago

When choosing your new reader, look for the one that's already monetized. Feedly has ads and plans for premium. NewsBlur has a paid option. Any hosted option without financial incentive lives at the whim of the developer.

binderbizingdos 14y ago

- apt-get install rss2email - add some feeds - be done with it

autotravis 14y ago
I tried this a while back and totally forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder! To run it, use the r2e command and you can follow the guide here:http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/getting-started-with-rss2email/#unix http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/getting-started-with-r... I think I will try this and set up some filters to move the feed emails out of my inbox for later viewing.

SaveReader 14y ago

Save Google Reader : http://www.savereader.info http://www.savereader.info

polochon 14y ago

I am using KrISS Feed, https://github.com/tontof/kriss_feed https://github.com/tontof/kriss_feed If you speak French, a little help here: http://tontof.net/?2013/03/14/18/12/56-presque-nouveau-lecteur-rss-kriss-feed-est-vraiment-tout-terrain http://tontof.net/?2013/03/14/18/12/56-presque-nouveau-lecte... and a demo there: http://tontof.net/feed http://tontof.net/feed

vijayboyapati 14y ago

Can someone explain to me why no one is doing a direct, pixel for pixel clone of Google Reader? I mean, the thing is popular enough that any startup would die for its traffic. Not to mention its users absolutely love it. As Paul Bucheit said, it's better to have a small number of users who love your product than a large number that like it. And well, Greader has a large number of users who love it (bordering on fanatical about it). So why not do a blatant clone as a f* you to Google for nuking a product that its users are absolutely devoted to.

srean 14y ago
While not quite pixel to pixel oldreader seems to be quite close, they want to be close to the older UI which makes it even better in my eyes. They are sort of keeling over with the new load, but have scheduled an import, will see how it goes. Unfortunaately as of now they only import the subscriptions not he stars. Not sure how they plan to support the service.

prathibhanu 14y ago

Guys, try this goo.gl/r861h Visually rich RSS reader

dogada 14y ago

A year ago near last Google Reader redesign I made my own online RSS-reader http://www.cliws.com/ http://www.cliws.com/ and now don't care. We should less depend on the large corporations. The idea about I think last time is that we need some kind of distributed Twitter (like we have perfectly worked distributed email now). If you can't replace one tool with another you are in trouble definitely.

Nux 14y ago

This is a good opportunity for all you smart developers around here to come up with an open source self-hosted thing to replace gugl reader.

sbirchall 14y ago

I've got to mention the FF add-on "InfoRSS" which I haven't used in a while, but I just exported my feeds to it rather painlessly and it offers some nice features if you're willing to put a bit of time into customizing what you want from it. Deals with podcasts as well.

tonyblundell 14y ago

Lots of people rushing to build RSS clients, but why not build something better? If you can build something that will take any URL, figure out which bits are changing regularly (the news items, etc), and push the changes to a Reader style interface, you might be on to a winner. It's 2013, a reader should be possible without RSS.

r4ps 14y ago

I bought SimpleRSS.com a little while ago with the intention of building an alternative and open-source RSS reader. If anyone's interested in acquiring the domain, message me! ;)

jobigoud 14y ago

Could someone underline the advantages of Google Reader and the features that will be missed ? What had it that other free products don't ? (I use a desktop reader for news (FeedDemon) and an Android app for podcasts, I don't really know what I'm missing by not using something like reader.)

deleted 14y ago

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taimoorq 14y ago

This one works well on mobile devices and lets you add feeds from around the web and tag them for retrieval later. It also keeps you focused on one feed at a time instead of letting you put 100 feeds on one page which makes it hard to read any one. http://newsfeedreader.com http://newsfeedreader.com

cmatteson 14y ago

Though we focus more on industry/professional news, Delve (delvenews.com) just launched Google Reader integration. Now you can sync your data and we'll pull in sources, generate topics and turn your folders into 'channels' for fast news filtering. It's free to use Delve as an individual and we're launching our mobile apps soon!