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"Reader is (was?) for information junkies; not just tech nerds. This market totally exists and is weirdly under-served (and is possibly affluent)." This is wha

"Reader is (was?) for information junkies; not just tech nerds. This market totally exists and is weirdly under-served (and is possibly affluent)." This is what I don't understand about the death of the RSS ecosystem. A whole class of professionals spend their days reading text -- in government, in finance, in specialist journalism. Many would pay for a decent reader; it's a tool of their trade, after all. You don't need mass adoption; a few thousand people at $20/month would keep you ticking over. So why haven't there been more companies in this space.

616c 14y ago
I have seen companies tried, and worked for a strategic consulting firm at one time who was heavily reliant on RSS feeds for sending information (we were basicly human parsers on very topic-specific items). And they used NewsGator. I get the impression NewGator is not doing that well, and the "I will pay good money" sector you suggest exists does not; very few people are willing to pay for good interface, despite a strong use case. I say the same about movies and television. There is a self-serving expectation of free, and few buck this trend unless they really need it and the pay-for services are not worth it, or do just enough. Maybe others can tell me their experiences. I am definitely someone affected by this, and continue to look into better RSS management every year or so for this reason. It appears building my own solution is by far the best approach, and that is true for a whole bunch of software anyway. Oh well.
- chubot 14y ago
  I considered building my own too, but it seems like a lot of work for something I can sort of do without. Are there any open source web-based feed readers that are worth setting up and running?
  - shrikant 14y ago
    Tiny Tiny RSS maybe? http://tt-rss.org/ http://tt-rss.org/
  - Semaphor 14y ago
    Selfoss [1] looks pretty cool (imo more usable than TT RSS) but is missing OPML import. GPL v3. [1] http://selfoss.aditu.de/ http://selfoss.aditu.de/
- dodyg 14y ago
  It is time consuming. I have been working on my own open source reader and it takes a lot of effort to get right. Even worse, I am having a hard time to get people to try it out so I can get feedback to improve it. I keep working on it just because I rely on it for my daily news/podcast.
  - ersii 14y ago
    This is a great opportunity to get a few testers/users, if you'd like to continue developing it. I do however understand that this can be quite overwhelming - so I'd recommend you'd only take in people manually (ie. no automatic signup - that'll probably be quite the load..)
    - dodyg 14y ago
      It's Android client based http://goo.gl/kShgp http://goo.gl/kShgp so it has no server limitation and it is actively being developed https://github.com/dodyg/AndroidRivers https://github.com/dodyg/AndroidRivers I am helping out Cartulary as well https://github.com/daveajones/cartulary https://github.com/daveajones/cartulary that will provide S3 based RSS aggregation functionality.
  - camus 14y ago
    maybe because people used google reader ... i'm sure there wil be a lot more people interested in your project , a good rss reader is just an invaluable tool for my organisation and some exec may be willing to pay good money for a perfect google reader clone.
    - dodyg 14y ago
      The bigger issue is that we are relying more and more to few centralized services on the Web, which doesn't really interop well with each other and does not respect continuity in terms of data or API. Take a look at Twitter API 1.1 changes, etc. There are more examples of this. At least Google Reader support export subscription list using OPML format.
- udfalkso 14y ago
  People were not willing to switch or to pay because Google Reader offered a very decent alternative for free. Now that this is changing, the landscape may shift. Will be interesting to see what happens.
marssaxman 14y ago
Why don't they just use local apps? Why does this have to be a web service in the first place?

616c 14y ago

I have seen companies tried, and worked for a strategic consulting firm at one time who was heavily reliant on RSS feeds for sending information (we were basicly human parsers on very topic-specific items). And they used NewsGator. I get the impression NewGator is not doing that well, and the "I will pay good money" sector you suggest exists does not; very few people are willing to pay for good interface, despite a strong use case. I say the same about movies and television. There is a self-serving expectation of free, and few buck this trend unless they really need it and the pay-for services are not worth it, or do just enough. Maybe others can tell me their experiences. I am definitely someone affected by this, and continue to look into better RSS management every year or so for this reason. It appears building my own solution is by far the best approach, and that is true for a whole bunch of software anyway. Oh well.

chubot 14y ago
I considered building my own too, but it seems like a lot of work for something I can sort of do without. Are there any open source web-based feed readers that are worth setting up and running?
- shrikant 14y ago
  Tiny Tiny RSS maybe? http://tt-rss.org/ http://tt-rss.org/
- Semaphor 14y ago
  Selfoss [1] looks pretty cool (imo more usable than TT RSS) but is missing OPML import. GPL v3. [1] http://selfoss.aditu.de/ http://selfoss.aditu.de/
dodyg 14y ago
It is time consuming. I have been working on my own open source reader and it takes a lot of effort to get right. Even worse, I am having a hard time to get people to try it out so I can get feedback to improve it. I keep working on it just because I rely on it for my daily news/podcast.
- ersii 14y ago
  This is a great opportunity to get a few testers/users, if you'd like to continue developing it. I do however understand that this can be quite overwhelming - so I'd recommend you'd only take in people manually (ie. no automatic signup - that'll probably be quite the load..)
  - dodyg 14y ago
    It's Android client based http://goo.gl/kShgp http://goo.gl/kShgp so it has no server limitation and it is actively being developed https://github.com/dodyg/AndroidRivers https://github.com/dodyg/AndroidRivers I am helping out Cartulary as well https://github.com/daveajones/cartulary https://github.com/daveajones/cartulary that will provide S3 based RSS aggregation functionality.
- camus 14y ago
  maybe because people used google reader ... i'm sure there wil be a lot more people interested in your project , a good rss reader is just an invaluable tool for my organisation and some exec may be willing to pay good money for a perfect google reader clone.
  - dodyg 14y ago
    The bigger issue is that we are relying more and more to few centralized services on the Web, which doesn't really interop well with each other and does not respect continuity in terms of data or API. Take a look at Twitter API 1.1 changes, etc. There are more examples of this. At least Google Reader support export subscription list using OPML format.
udfalkso 14y ago
People were not willing to switch or to pay because Google Reader offered a very decent alternative for free. Now that this is changing, the landscape may shift. Will be interesting to see what happens.

marssaxman 14y ago

Why don't they just use local apps? Why does this have to be a web service in the first place?