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The RSS Apocalypse
- brazzy 14y ago> This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad. No, it's not. Paid services are cancelled all the time.
- alecdbrooks 14y agoRight. The problem is that there was a monoculture. Without competing alternatives, innovation stops and the product with a monopoly becomes a single point of failure.
- nekgrim 14y agoI think there is no innovation because : - RSS is a thing from the past. It has no "new and shiny" aspect. - RSS is less used than email, so people are focusing on improving emails, not RSS. - Reader was great, and did everything geeks want. Why try to improve something perfect? - + "it is Google, Google will never kill it, because Google guys are geeks too, like us" myth.
- zanny 14y agoI don't get it, what is supposed to be "new and shiny" about "here is an RSS feed, it will provide dated articles of content to consume from a web source, browse at your leisure". It does its job. It is the only thing on the Internet that does that job. It is the definition of a perfect product... because it just works. And email is in the same class. Rich text formatted letters between individuals. I don't see how you want to "improve" that either, because it does its job right. I do agree Reader did the job and therefor didn't have room to improve. Then again, I don't like all the social parts of feeds, I just want my content in a time ordered list of chunks that I can consume at my leisure. RSS does that just fine.
- zoowar 14y agoThere are plenty of alternative readers http://blog.superfeedr.com/state-of-readers/ http://blog.superfeedr.com/state-of-readers/
- alecdbrooks 14y agoI know, I use one myself -- I meant that Google Reader was so dominant that the competition was much weaker than it could have been, and in some cases the alternatives aren't actually competition because they rely on Google Reader.
- nekgrim 14y agoFeedly is creating an alternate API. Press (on Android) updates its app, saying that it will not go down. It's a double problem: Google Reader was good, AND was also a good API. At least, Google Takeout is working, and giving us all our data.
- eykanal 14y agoI think his argument is that "paid" beats "free" because paid can support, whereas free is by definition relying on other revenue (advertising, other paid products) to support it. When a paid product dies, it's (often) because the product wasn't doing well in the market. When a free product dies, it's because the company couldn't support it through their secondary revenue streams. The product may be the Best Thing EVARRR, but it's a casualty of failures elsewhere. The "bad" comment is likely because it's a lot easier to measure direct risks (i.e., risks associated with your product) than indirect ones (risks associated with your secondary business model, which likely isn't your area of expertise; if it was, you should be in business there). Whether this applies to Google, I'm on the fence.
- streptomycin 14y agoA company gets X in revenue from a product. Whether that X comes from ad revenue or subscription fees seems immaterial.
- gwern 14y agoMy problem with the countless thousands of people who are taking this opportunity to gloat using that argument is that they basically are assuming their conclusion, since their argument goes something like this: "Paid services are less likely to shut down. Google Reader was not paid, therefore Reader was not less likely to shut down. Google Reader shut down, providing more evidence for this claim. We-told-you-so!" But where does the original claim get its support? Are paid services less likely to shut down? We read on HN all the time about post-mortems of, yes, paid services. If we don't know that, then it's just a misleading post hoc argument (and in the counterfactual universe where Reader was a paid service, all the naysayers are now chorusing 'It's a Google service! You can't trust Google! We-told-you-so!').
- jeremyjh 14y agoCan you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down? I think the reason people intuitively believe this is because a free service has to do two things to be successful: provide a good quality, useful service to people, and provide a way to make money tied to that user base. A paid service really just has to provide a good quality, useful service - since that is what the people are paying for.
- nekgrim 14y ago> There are thousands of RSS subscribers. How many will bother to sort out a new RSS system and subscribe again? The ones whom really read your RSS? Or maybe you will gain 10000 twitter followers on July 2? On maybe double your daily visitors? Visitors who care will still be there. And it's the visitors who matters.
- ScottWhigham 14y agoThat's a bit silly IMO. If you've removed the way that those viewers like to view your content, even if they like you, they might not find a suitable replacement in their eyes to the tool they previously used. I have over 200 feeds in my RSS reader that I "consume". If that reader went away (which it is), then I'd probably pay attention to 10ish. Does that mean that I only "care" about those 10? Of course not. I like to monitor the others for headlines or keywords. Just because I don't read every one every day does not mean I don't care. And, when my reader goes away, I won't be back all b/c the medium I use will have changed.
- nekgrim 14y agoIt depends. If you use GReader to read 10 RSS, you can move to FB/Twitter/Mail newsletter. If, like you or me, use GReader to read 200 feeds, you will find an alternative that suits your needs. Or code it, be it a full RSS parser, or just a greasemonkey addon to change feedly appearance. Because you care about reading your news, one way or another. Edit: one thing is special in this case: GReader users are more "power users" than usual. So we are not talking about TMZ site going down. That's why I think that people who really care will try to find an alternative.
- zanny 14y agoI suspect any real competitor in the rss space will provide an instant import via the zip of bookmarks / feeds / etc soon anyway. I'm just worried about an Android app that can fill Readers roll. I use it for reading webcomics since I can swipe left or right to move through my subscriptions, which is much more efficient than any other means to browse them on mobile.
- p6v53as 14y ago> It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all. If not for the Google Reader, I wouldn't use RSS at all.
- jkldotio 14y agoWhen I was building the source list for jkl.io noticed at lot of sites no longer offering RSS and even sites like Wordpress seem to be not offering it frequently (is this authors not turning it on, turning it off, or am I missing something?). Hand scraping all these sites would be an exercise in insanity so now building an intelligent crawler is already something I have to do much earlier than I wanted. RSS really matters for the open web.
- pchristensen 14y agoMost sites still have a feed even if the UI doesn't surface it. Pull up the source or Inspector and search for feed, atom, or rss. It's usually in the <head>
- Danieru 14y agoAnd even if the rss meta elemnets are missing wordpress will still generate rss at /feed/. For example: http://danieru.com/feed/ http://danieru.com/feed/ This same method works for category specific feeds: http://danieru.com/category/life/feed/ http://danieru.com/category/life/feed/
- Turing_Machine 14y agoYou can even get a specific flavor of feed, in some cases. /feed gets you an RSS feed on WordPress. /feed/atom gets you the Atom feed on WordPress. /feeds/posts/default gets you the Atom feed on BlogSpot blogs (no RSS there, AFAIK). /rss gets RSS on Tumblr (no Atom there, AFAIK). Edit: trying to fix broken formatting.
- genwin 14y agoFor niflet.com I skip sites that don't have an RSS / Atom feed. It's maybe 2% of them. For political sites maybe 10%; it seems a lot of those sites predated WordPress et al. You probably know this already, but for WordPress try adding "/feed" to the URL. This works for lots of other non-WP sites too. The blog author might not even know what an RSS feed is.
- neovive 14y agoRSS as a content discovery tool is very valuable, especially on mobile devices where sifting through bookmarks and downloading entire pages is nearly impossible. The Google Reader app for Android works so well that it earned a spot on my phones home screen (one of the few apps besides email and messaging). I hope the next iteration of readers really focuses on mobile, where the greatest opportunity/need exists for RSS.
- zdw 14y agoRSS is having it's "Internet Explorer 6" moment. A free product enters the paid marketspace, kills all 3rd party competition, then became the defacto standard. Then it languished for years, but in RSS's case, the product with overwhelming market share gets killed rather than having 3rd parties slowly catch up. Fortunately RSS aggregation is simpler to replace than an entire browser...
- streptomycin 14y agoWas the paid market for RSS readers really that big before Google Reader? There were tons of free readers (as you say, it's a pretty simple product to make). I don't remember any big-name paid RSS readers.
- zdw 14y agoNetNewsWire was huge if you were a Mac user, and was released in 2002. NewsGator had a Windows app and paid syncing service, and bought NNW (it's changed hands a few times, now at Black Pixel). Both of these predated Google Reader and were paid apps. There are also plenty of paid apps in the mobile space that sync with Google Reader.
- leejoramo 14y agoTo give this some context, Brent Simmons (the create of NetNewsWire) was discussed by The Economist in a 2004 article. http://www.economist.com/node/2476892 http://www.economist.com/node/2476892
- meej 14y agoRSS aggregation is simple to replace, but feed browsing history and the search might be impossible to replace.
- rssident 14y agoTry http://rssident.com http://rssident.com Browsing history and a bunch of other features are still being added to the UI but search already works.
- LinaLauneBaer 14y agoMaybe OT: When RSS gained popularity I got myself a decent RSS reader and subscribed to a lot of feeds. What happened was that after a short period of time I had +1000 unread posts. At this point I stopped using RSS for a while because it was just too much noise. A few months back I discovered RSS again for myself but this time I did not subscribe to every site I found interesting. There are a lot of news sites which I visit often and they also have a feed in most cases. I do not subscribe to them because I visit them anyway and they are most of the time high volume feeds. Instead I only subscribe to sites (almost always interesting blogs from fellow developers) who write a new post maybe three times a year or so and I only subscribe to blogs from developers/people who only post if they have something very important to say. This made RSS useful to me again because I would never every remember to visit all those sites twice a year… If I see a unread item in my RSS reader I know that I have to read this post soon because it will blow my mind again. Who of you is doing it in a similar way?
- SaulOfTheJungle 14y agoI am doing exactly that and I'm very picky with my subscriptions. To put it in perspective: > Since March 20, 2007 you have read a total of 9,085 items.
- api 14y ago"Free is so often bad..." Very interesting point. I think free is good when it comes to code, apps, etc... things that can be copied and distributed. It creates a good shared base of stuff on which to build. But when it comes to services, totally free can sometimes be bad. That's because there's no such thing as a service that's free to run, so the money has to come from somewhere. Either the service is being monetized through some backdoor method -- usually something involving privacy intrusion or data mining -- or it's what economists call "dumping." Dumping is when you flood a market with free or below-cost goods to kill competitors, and then jack up the price or even kill the market when the competitors are gone. The best example in software is Internet Explorer, which (prematurely) killed the market for browsers and led to the horrible age of total IE dominance of the web. Google Reader may well have been -- whether intentionally or not -- dumping. If it was intentional, it might be an effort to kill RSS entirely. The big players -- Google, Facebook, etc. (are there more?) -- all have a vested interest in killing independent less centralized ways of aggregating knowledge in order to steer all traffic to them. I still use a Mac reader called NewsFire. It hasn't been updated in a long time though. I don't even remember if I paid for it, but if it's free I would certainly be willing to pay. Maybe the authors of such apps can capitalize on this.
- gz5 14y agoif not there already, we should put up quick poll of top x Google Reader alternatives that everyone can vote on (put it on Google Docs to add a bit of irony) w/ a light column for use case (which OS, browsers, etc). every blog publisher then points to the poll as addendum to each post going fwds, informing readers to choose one in order to keep reading via rss. can include some directions on exporting GR feeds for any of the GR subs that don't already help the reader do so. granted requires some work, and we still will lose some users, but overall isn't something like this (or a better idea?) required to ensure blogs/rss ecosystem don't lose readers that don't know there are good alternatives and won't necessarily seek alternatives on their own?
- mkr-hn 14y agoAlready done: http://www.replacereader.com/ http://www.replacereader.com/
- webwanderings 14y agoWell I hope RSS does not become the Lexis Nexis service where only the privileged users with resources ($$) could access the information with ease.
- yk 14y agoCan someone explain me, why Google shutting down their reader is such a big deal? I use Thunderbird as my RSS reader, and after two days of everyone panicking I feel like I missed something about RSS/Google Reader.
- mikeash 14y agoSame here. I use NetNewsWire which attempts to use Reader to sync, and does a somewhat poor job of it. Won't be a big deal, in any case. I had no idea so many people used Reader like this.
- chenster 14y agoI felt the same way. What's dying down is the service NOT the RSS itself. There are still plenty of alterative to choose from. I use Feedly mainly now though honestly I don't use Feedly as much as before.
- mkr-hn 14y agoGoogle Reader was one of the most popular RSS readers, either directly or through its API.
- easyfrag 14y agoOne of the biggest impacts are on those of us who use multiple devices to read feeds, Google Reader synchronized the read/unread status of all the elements so if you saw something on your phone you wouldn't see it again on your desktop (unless you starred it which is like +1 but just for yourself).
- hazov 14y agoSynchronization, I use 5 computers (some with 2 OSs), 2 tablets and a phone for a great quantity of feeds with different frequency of weekly/monthly posts. I do not care how I read these posts but I care to sync them in all these device.
- cs702 14y agoThis is the evolution of "embrace, extend, and extinguish," a successful tactic used by Microsoft for many years.[1] I'm calling it "embrace, give away, and extinguish." (For most non-techies, RSS is now history.) -- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish -- Edit: added "(For most non-techies..."
- icebraining 14y agoIn the original EEE, the only extinguished products would be the competitors', not Microsoft's. The point was to capture market share, and that doesn't quite work if you eliminate yourself as well. And Google never really "extended" either. They didn't add new fields to RSS or made it incompatible in any way. The proof is that I was able to move to Tiny in 5 minutes using Google's own export tool.
- 7rurl 14y agoRSS was dead for non-techies before this too, which is why the audience for Google Reader was so small: it was only techies. Non-techies have simply been using Facebook and Twitter all this time, and now they will just continue to use Facebook and Twitter. Techies on the other hand will migrate to other products, and RSS will keep chugging along as a techie-only protocol.
- ANTSANTS 14y agoRSS and Google Reader itself has an awareness problem. These are just anecdotes, but I introduced Google Reader to multiple profoundly nontechnical friends and family members over the years. Literally every single one of them immediately fell in love with it, and never stopped using it. My mother, who completely lacks understanding of the idea that she can save a file to her computer and get it back later, for whom the web IS the computer, uses Google Reader daily to follow dozens of blogs. It's not that Reader or RSS have no potential value to anyone who isn't "good with computers." It's that Google never bothered to tell anyone it existed! And why should they? Modern Google doesn't give a shit about the open web or decentralized culture, they want to "own social" and keep everything contained within their cancerous Facebook clone.
- mapgrep 14y agoFunny how when unsustainable startups threaten old line industries - newspapers, taxis, hotels, music - with free or rock bottom pricing it's innovation. But when internet companies do this to one another it's the end of the world (literally described as "the apocalypse"). How about we be consistent and say to the developers of paid RSS aggregators -- who built their products on free content in the first place -- that if they don't like innovation or hopeful investments driving prices to zero, they are in the wrong business. Somehow I think if Google had offered any one of them a ton of money to buy their reader and make it free they'd have jumped at the chance. Instead Google built an excellent offering of their own and people are whining.
- mattmanser 14y agoHe's saying that non-techies don't realise that Google Reader != RSS. So won't seek an alternative rss product, hence blogs losing lots of readers. The apocolypse refers to that. I suspect that won't happen as plenty of 'alternative to google reader' articles popping up.
- mapgrep 14y agoHe outright says Google ruined the market: "I remember back when RSS was amazing and something you paid for. I also remember when Google Reader showed up and very quickly started taking over. It was free. It was Google (back before we were all scared of Google) and it wrecked the market for all of the paid RSS services." His last sentence: "This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad." I see what you're saying, that he thinks users are part of the mechanism, but the bottom line is he thinks this apocalypse can be traced back to Google Reader being free.
- zaphar 14y agoAn alternative Narrative might be that RSS has a renaissance. People who used to think Reader was a magic way to read websites may now be forced to think about RSS as the way that happened. The standard may get some press again as a result. Already is getting some press in fact.
- timeshifter 14y agoThis is a great example of a whole bunch of people who need to open their eyes to the internet around them. There is no "RSS apocalypse" happening here. Use your browser. Use your email client. Or, perhaps the most incredulous option that nobody seems to be considering.... search for a new app. Seriously, Firefox's built in RSS handling works great. Why are people so uptight about losing a service (provided by a company notorious for canning services like this, no less) that they access via a program that provides the same functionality? It's just stupid, and I really wish everyone would just collectively shut the fuck up and just move on. No, this is not an apocalypse, no this is not the end of your internet.
- teeja 14y agoI never found a Reader I liked until I began using KDE's <b>Akregator</b> (works fine in Mint XFCE as well) a few months ago. Very easy to use and add feeds to (nerdship not needed). I follow three-dozen podcasts and blogs daily ... impossible without it.