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Right. The problem is that there was a monoculture. Without competing alternatives, innovation stops and the product with a monopoly becomes a single point of f
by alecdbrooks 14y ago
Right. 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.