5 ms·

So, what's going to happen, exactly? "Influencers" who liked Google Reader, now jilted, are going to use their magic influence beam to halt the growth of Andro

So, what's going to happen, exactly? "Influencers" who liked Google Reader, now jilted, are going to use their magic influence beam to halt the growth of Android, to erode the dominance of Google in search, and prevent the regulatory approval of self-driving cars? Google has quite a few heavy responsibilities on their hands. They have to manage growth and competition in hugely complex, emerging fields. The lesson they learned correctly was that focus is essential. RSS is dead. A handful of nerds enjoy it, it solves a handful of problems, but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google. So they cut it and they're not even going to notice it in the rearview mirror. In an amusing, if anecdotal, aside – Gina Trapani, an OG nerd influencer if ever there was one, tweeted that she'd checked out of Google Reader long ago. https://twitter.com/ginatrapani/status/312451705692385280 https://twitter.com/ginatrapani/status/312451705692385280

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- danilocampos 14y ago
  > You dont know a damn thing about RSS , Aaron Schwartz did not died so a dch like you can claim RSS is dead , go back to your Twitter/Facebook/write your dumb social network here/ sandbox ... you just dont have a clue... Yeah, tell me more about Aaron "Schwartz."
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
    - danilocampos 14y ago
      Stupidity has, indeed, been made abundantly clear here. Bravo.
    - codesuela 14y ago
      congrats for providing a textbook example of a non constructive answer
zanny 14y ago
> RSS is dead What other technology is pervasively available to subscribe to discretized rich text articles, that will automatically fetch new entries, and maintain a history of viewed / favorited articles? RSS serves a very critical function on the Internet - automated retrieval of content from dedicated sources picked by a user. It was never a "platform" or a business model. It is syndication. The end. Everything from blogs, to videos, to art galleries, to music artists, benefit greatly from providing automated syndication to their content. So RSS will always have a place.
- danilocampos 14y ago
  > So RSS will always have a place. Indeed, > but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.
  - Daniel_Newby 14y ago
    Not a hot technology? It is widely used by science and technology leaders who have to stay on top of the literature in their field. We're talking heads of $10M research programs, principal investigators, conference organizers, and so forth. Google could have kept it around just to sell Apps to C*Os. "Apps is like Reader for secretaries."
- saraid216 14y ago
  Yeah, none of those are actually part of the spec. What you're describing isn't RSS: it's the ease-of-use automation that was layered on top of RSS that was made easy to do because RSS was a fairly strict format. (I remember many examples of my newsreader breaking because the spec wasn't followed correctly.) What you're really describing isn't RSS. It's a web archiver.
xaa 14y ago
Search, which provides the majority of Google's revenue, is precarious because there are very low costs for someone to switch to another service. To combat this problem, Google started providing all these associated services -- Finance, Reader, Blogger, etc, etc -- so that people would begin to use their Google ID as a significant component of their online identity. These services were never supposed to be profitable, they were supposed to provide a competitive "moat" for search. If people begin to take their data out of Google services -- which is the only rational response given Google's repeated and blatant disregard toward its "customers" -- these customers might start looking toward Bing and DDG very soon. Then Google will have a problem. Even Android could have a problem if people begin asking the question, "what happens if/when Google sunsets Play? Will I still have access to my apps?"
- danilocampos 14y ago
  They built Gmail. People need it desperately. So far, no one distrusts it or has any reason to. That's their identity moat.
  - stephenr 14y ago
    People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail. To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses. Search and the collaborative part of google docs (ie multiple concurrent editors on a document) is the only thing where it's hard to find a true competitor that you can self host, not to mention hosted solutions.
    - danilocampos 14y ago
      >People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail. To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses. Aren't you a charmer. I'm about as far from a Google fanboy as exists. Trust in this conversation has been about existing tomorrow or not. No one doubts Gmail is going to exist tomorrow. And while you're right about the very obvious assertion that email existed before Gmail, that misses the point. There's a switching cost involved in changing your email. You have to inform all your contacts, update all of your accounts, learn a new web interface. It's a damn good moat.
oliverhunt 14y ago
The point is that the 'influencers' will be aware of alternatives and are vocal about it. If you use a service of google's because there is another service of gooogle's that you use a lot - the tie is a lot looser, and when people are suggested alternatives it becomes a lot easier for them to move away. While looking for a google reader alternative I ended up finding out about owncloud and now I use that to manage and sync my calendars and contacts across my devices, I also moved my domain email to zoho and infact the only service I am tied into of googles now is the android play store. I used google apps for ages and had a free account before it got paid only (except that way of getting a 1 user apps account through some other google service) and I did that because it was so easy, and i reccomended it to anyone getting a domain. That probably won't be the case any more. So, I was in search of a new rss reader, and I had no intention of completely moving out of the google ecosystem, but I ended up finding a system that works better for me, and when people come to me (who come to me because 'i know tech' or whatever), and ask me what they should set up there new domain with, they will get a completely new answer. This is just a personal story and i'm sure its not relevant to everyone but my point is that this move, and others, is damaging their brand and when you introduce people to RSS who have no idea what it is, and then you show them google reader and they love the fact they dont even need to make an account because they already have gmail, they love it. That is gone Maybe my point is better illustrated by this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383495
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  It made me look into Bing and the new Live. I like the web-based Office apps better than the Google equivalents, and Bing produces more of the kind of results I look for. I was among those who pushed Google early on, helped people get away from IE (to Firefox, and later Chrome), and talked up Gmail from the moment they let me in. I won't ditch gmail for what it handles for now, but who knows what things will look like five years from now. Outlook's aliases are much easier to manage than a bunch of account+word@gmail pairs.
SquareWheel 14y ago
I don't see how Gina is a good example. She's been a Twitter fan for a long time. There's too much overlap with GReader, so it makes sense she would pick one over the other. That doesn't make RSS "dead".
snowwrestler 14y ago
Google's biggest risk from the press might be regulatory. Politicians and political appointees still pay close attention to the press, and Microsoft is always agitating in the background for an antitrust proceeding against Google. A pissed-off press corps might decide to "take a closer look" at the power Google wields in the online marketplace. This could help provide political cover to move against them.
smsm42 14y ago
I'm reading all these comments about "RSS is dead" and how everybody uses Facebook for it now and I'm completely confused. How you can even use Facebook for this? Facebook is totally useless as a reading list organizer, it is useful for sharing lolcats pictures, but if you need structure and organize known sources of information and keeping track of what you read and what you didn't - Facebook is as useful as a trombone in a Moon landing mission. The only conclusion I can make is that these people don't mean by reading the same thing as I do. Maybe for them lolcats and pics of each other's dinners is reading...
- philwelch 14y ago
  It's because people don't read.
- wutbrodo 14y ago
  When people say RSS is dead they're not saying its use case has been 100% effectively covered by another product/protocol. What they're saying is that people are using Facebook/Twitter/G+ etc as a replacement in the most basic sense: a feed of content that they can read. Whether you or I think that this is an adequate replacement for RSS is irrelevant because the assertion being made is that enough people think it is a good-enough replacement.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

danilocampos 14y ago
> You dont know a damn thing about RSS , Aaron Schwartz did not died so a dch like you can claim RSS is dead , go back to your Twitter/Facebook/write your dumb social network here/ sandbox ... you just dont have a clue... Yeah, tell me more about Aaron "Schwartz."
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - danilocampos 14y ago
    Stupidity has, indeed, been made abundantly clear here. Bravo.
  - codesuela 14y ago
    congrats for providing a textbook example of a non constructive answer

zanny 14y ago

> RSS is dead What other technology is pervasively available to subscribe to discretized rich text articles, that will automatically fetch new entries, and maintain a history of viewed / favorited articles? RSS serves a very critical function on the Internet - automated retrieval of content from dedicated sources picked by a user. It was never a "platform" or a business model. It is syndication. The end. Everything from blogs, to videos, to art galleries, to music artists, benefit greatly from providing automated syndication to their content. So RSS will always have a place.

danilocampos 14y ago
> So RSS will always have a place. Indeed, > but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago
  Not a hot technology? It is widely used by science and technology leaders who have to stay on top of the literature in their field. We're talking heads of $10M research programs, principal investigators, conference organizers, and so forth. Google could have kept it around just to sell Apps to C*Os. "Apps is like Reader for secretaries."
saraid216 14y ago
Yeah, none of those are actually part of the spec. What you're describing isn't RSS: it's the ease-of-use automation that was layered on top of RSS that was made easy to do because RSS was a fairly strict format. (I remember many examples of my newsreader breaking because the spec wasn't followed correctly.) What you're really describing isn't RSS. It's a web archiver.

xaa 14y ago

Search, which provides the majority of Google's revenue, is precarious because there are very low costs for someone to switch to another service. To combat this problem, Google started providing all these associated services -- Finance, Reader, Blogger, etc, etc -- so that people would begin to use their Google ID as a significant component of their online identity. These services were never supposed to be profitable, they were supposed to provide a competitive "moat" for search. If people begin to take their data out of Google services -- which is the only rational response given Google's repeated and blatant disregard toward its "customers" -- these customers might start looking toward Bing and DDG very soon. Then Google will have a problem. Even Android could have a problem if people begin asking the question, "what happens if/when Google sunsets Play? Will I still have access to my apps?"

danilocampos 14y ago
They built Gmail. People need it desperately. So far, no one distrusts it or has any reason to. That's their identity moat.
- stephenr 14y ago
  People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail. To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses. Search and the collaborative part of google docs (ie multiple concurrent editors on a document) is the only thing where it's hard to find a true competitor that you can self host, not to mention hosted solutions.
  - danilocampos 14y ago
    >People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail. To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses. Aren't you a charmer. I'm about as far from a Google fanboy as exists. Trust in this conversation has been about existing tomorrow or not. No one doubts Gmail is going to exist tomorrow. And while you're right about the very obvious assertion that email existed before Gmail, that misses the point. There's a switching cost involved in changing your email. You have to inform all your contacts, update all of your accounts, learn a new web interface. It's a damn good moat.

oliverhunt 14y ago

The point is that the 'influencers' will be aware of alternatives and are vocal about it. If you use a service of google's because there is another service of gooogle's that you use a lot - the tie is a lot looser, and when people are suggested alternatives it becomes a lot easier for them to move away. While looking for a google reader alternative I ended up finding out about owncloud and now I use that to manage and sync my calendars and contacts across my devices, I also moved my domain email to zoho and infact the only service I am tied into of googles now is the android play store. I used google apps for ages and had a free account before it got paid only (except that way of getting a 1 user apps account through some other google service) and I did that because it was so easy, and i reccomended it to anyone getting a domain. That probably won't be the case any more. So, I was in search of a new rss reader, and I had no intention of completely moving out of the google ecosystem, but I ended up finding a system that works better for me, and when people come to me (who come to me because 'i know tech' or whatever), and ask me what they should set up there new domain with, they will get a completely new answer. This is just a personal story and i'm sure its not relevant to everyone but my point is that this move, and others, is damaging their brand and when you introduce people to RSS who have no idea what it is, and then you show them google reader and they love the fact they dont even need to make an account because they already have gmail, they love it. That is gone Maybe my point is better illustrated by this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383495

mkr-hn 14y ago
It made me look into Bing and the new Live. I like the web-based Office apps better than the Google equivalents, and Bing produces more of the kind of results I look for. I was among those who pushed Google early on, helped people get away from IE (to Firefox, and later Chrome), and talked up Gmail from the moment they let me in. I won't ditch gmail for what it handles for now, but who knows what things will look like five years from now. Outlook's aliases are much easier to manage than a bunch of account+word@gmail pairs.

SquareWheel 14y ago

I don't see how Gina is a good example. She's been a Twitter fan for a long time. There's too much overlap with GReader, so it makes sense she would pick one over the other. That doesn't make RSS "dead".

snowwrestler 14y ago

Google's biggest risk from the press might be regulatory. Politicians and political appointees still pay close attention to the press, and Microsoft is always agitating in the background for an antitrust proceeding against Google. A pissed-off press corps might decide to "take a closer look" at the power Google wields in the online marketplace. This could help provide political cover to move against them.

smsm42 14y ago

I'm reading all these comments about "RSS is dead" and how everybody uses Facebook for it now and I'm completely confused. How you can even use Facebook for this? Facebook is totally useless as a reading list organizer, it is useful for sharing lolcats pictures, but if you need structure and organize known sources of information and keeping track of what you read and what you didn't - Facebook is as useful as a trombone in a Moon landing mission. The only conclusion I can make is that these people don't mean by reading the same thing as I do. Maybe for them lolcats and pics of each other's dinners is reading...

philwelch 14y ago
It's because people don't read.
wutbrodo 14y ago
When people say RSS is dead they're not saying its use case has been 100% effectively covered by another product/protocol. What they're saying is that people are using Facebook/Twitter/G+ etc as a replacement in the most basic sense: a feed of content that they can read. Whether you or I think that this is an adequate replacement for RSS is irrelevant because the assertion being made is that enough people think it is a good-enough replacement.