13 ms·

Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry

330 points by iProject 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago
Here's another viewpoint. If Google Reader was so good that it made people so mad about it being shut down, and it was so important in people's lives - then it must've been a pretty good app, right? Okay, so even with Reader being this good, the RSS protocol was still dying because most people have moved on to other ways of consuming news. So then if RSS didn't have a reader that was this good, then it would've probably died a lot sooner, and Google Reader actually prolonged its life. Without Google Reader, RSS might have died 2 years ago. So I don't know what's with all this "Google killed RSS". Google didn't kill RSS. Twitter, Facebook and RSS' "geekiness" that made sure it never crossed that "chasm" into mainstream usage (and what doesn't grow will probably die, as nothing is constant) are what killed RSS. As a side note, I'm someone who consumes a lot of news every day, yet I still found a service like Reader to quickly become overwhelming, and I've barely used it occasionally. As we've seen, many of these journalists actually had thousands if not tens of thousands of unread news stories in their Reader, which I think is also why not that many people were using it. It felt overwhelming.
- arocks 14y ago
  > the RSS protocol was still dying because most people have moved on to other ways of consuming news Any evidence to validate this claim? Popularity of Twitter or Facebook doesn't have to be at the cost of RSS. Even if it was, it doesn't make one more relevant or irrelevant. TV did not kill Radio (at least for everyone). New applications like Pulse depend on RSS. Many users depended on Google Reader. Now they have to learn a new application. Some of them use mobile apps which are pointing to Google Reader. It is not going to be an easy change. People are mad for a reason.
  - slacka 14y ago
    Do you have any evidence to invalidate Googles claim of declining usage? I trust Google on this one. It served its purpose in 2005 but much better services have replaced it. Move on and get over it.
    - coldtea 14y ago
      >It served its purpose in 2005 but much better services have replaced it. Move on and get over it. Much better services? Name one! (much less "many"....)
      - ry0ohki 14y ago
        Exactly! It's maddening to hear there are better technologies and services than RSS yet no one can name them...
      - marknutter 14y ago
        Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Flipboard, and any other service that aggregates good content or allows people to easily share content with one another. Have you not been paying attention?
        MatthewPhillips 14y ago
        RSS isn't about aggregating or sharing content it's about following content.
        mkr-hn 14y ago
        How do I avoid missing each post from a handful of people who publish rarely in an endless stream of chatty publishers? RSS is how I sidestep the stream and catch the important things.
        Evbn 14y ago
        Mark them as Close Friends in Facebook.
- lucian1900 14y ago
  I use RSS for low-traffic sporadic blogs and a handful of higher-traffic news magazines. I don't get too many items a day and it's quite easy to quickly remove the ones I'm not interested in. Then I'm left with about 1-10 interesting articles every day, which is pretty much what I want.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  This gets said a lot 'RSS is dead'. It's very much not, in terms of people consuming news through it? Maybe. But it also powers podcasts, for example, and they're going from strength to strength. Plus a lot of sites showed they still get a large amount of traffic via RSS after the announcement. A million users isn't a lot at Google scale, but it's by no means dead.
- vanderZwan 14y ago
  > So I don't know what's with all this "Google killed RSS". Google didn't kill RSS. Twitter, Facebook and RSS' "geekiness" that made sure it never crossed that "chasm" into mainstream usage (and what doesn't grow will probably die, as nothing is constant) are what killed RSS. If you ask me, it's the combination of browsers and websites not properly exposing the existence of RSS that has stunted its growth. Firefox used to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in a webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it (EDIT: that I was aware of - others have pointed out Safari also had this feature for a while), and it was a fairy obscure button too. Then they removed that. So now you actually have to hunt for the RSS feeds - and since many webpages use a gif saying "RSS" (meaning text search is useless) that isn't always easy. It's not difficult to use at all, but it is certainly a very obscure feature of the internet. That halts adoption.
  - objclxt 14y ago
    > Firefox used to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in a webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it I'm pretty sure Safari did this as well - it was removed in Mountain Lion.
    - vanderZwan 14y ago
      Apologies, I should have said only browser I used (Linux & Windows user)
    - anoncow 14y ago
      Opera did it too. Opera mini for lowly java feature phones did it too.
  - taligent 14y ago
    Safari had a button for RSS as well. Not sure why they removed it. That said every single blog I've ever seen has a prominent RSS button. But that isn't the reason for lack of widespread adoption. It's more to do with the fact that most people aren't dedicated "read this every day" consumers of lots of different blogs. Generally it's a small handful which isn't what RSS caters for.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  I use Google Reader a lot but I don't care about RSS. I think RSS is unnecessary for news aggregation and the death of Google Reader has little to do with RSS. If the death of Google Reader was about RSS, Google could have declared RSS legacy and told people to start using the HTML5 article tag plus a few specific metadata attributes. But how would that have helpled G+ compete against Facebook? It would have taken some creativity to figure that out, but since many Reader users were keen on sharing it shouldn't have been an impossible problem to solve compared to self driving cars.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  One can make the argument that Reader's dominance in the market helped push the decline of RSS usage. To try and compete in the same space you have to hide the fact that you are an RSS reader; whether that be with gimmicky layouts or by integrating with social networks, or whatever else. You can't be seen as redundant with Reader. I think we're going to see a lot of advances with RSS due to the closure of Reader and I'm excited to see those.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    It's been great for me. I switched to Feedly after the announcement, and I'm glad I did. It bridges two worlds for me. I get the classic Reader-esque view for the post-a-day people, and the magazine view with features ranked by sharing to filter the top few stories on the 400-a-day sites. I even made special folders: Tech Gaggle, Science Gaggle, Politics Gaggle. I skim these when I've got nothing else to read, and it doesn't overwhelm me with things.
  - Shooti 14y ago
    One counter-point is that the accessibility of Reader due to its presence Google ecosystem also grew the global user base of RSS aggregators. Which is to say its not a given that those using RSS through Google Reader would be using RSS at all if it never existed. It's also not a given that the sync back-ends built in this Never-Reader parallel universe would've matched what would got with Reader in terms of reliability and speed, since regardless of how you feel about them Google infrastructure is best in class.
- pseut 14y ago
  Not providing an RSS feed is like not providing an API; you're giving up control of how scrapers access your website, but I'm sure that readers will find a way to get automate content aggregation either way. It's just annoying to lose standards.
don_draper 14y ago
>>It’s not unlike the widely criticized model that Microsoft pursued in its pre-Millennium days as a monopolist: Embrace, extend, extinguish. Ridiculous. Microsoft works to eliminate the competition, whereas Google is just not supporting it. RSS will not be eliminated due to this decision.
onosendai 14y ago
The whole article makes for some pretty depressing reading, and touches upon some important points. For me, the most crucial and eye opening is the stark contrast of the relatively open ecosystem we had back in 2005 to what we have today. You can't help but feel uncomfortable about the whole direction we're taking with tightly controlled silos of information (Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc.) using extremely limited, or highly monetized, API access, when you read something like this: "One thing that’s definitely coming (and some of these already exist, although haven’t yet been made public) is extremely deep API support. Our general plan here is to expose nearly everything in NewsGator Online via API, and allow folks to build applications that leverage our platform in unique ways." Google is just as guilty as several other parties of bringing about the situation we have now. I get the fact that everyone is looking for ways of increasing revenue, but they're doing it at the expense of openness, instead of leveraging that openness (see RSS for example) and building services and added value on top of it. I hope the death of Reader serves as a wake up call on several fronts.
- anoncow 14y ago
  the challenge will be how you make money without stifling openness(and thus competition) and privacy.
- bambax 14y ago
  But Twitter doesn't make any money, and Facebook not that much. The bulk of Google's revenue comes from leveraging the openness of the Web; were there only Facebooks and Twitters there would be no Google Search because there would be nothing to index. This may be completely off, but the killing of Reader looks like a desperate move to help Google+: since Google can't kill Facebook, they're willing to hurt themselves instead -- to cut their left arm so that their right arm can grow stronger. If this is indeed the case, it's very shortsighted.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    Facebook definitely make a lot of money.
  - shortformblog 14y ago
gregjor 14y ago
I offered to give Google my first born to keep Reader alive but they didn't even respond. First iGoogle was given a death sentence. Then Reader. If they shut down Currents or Google Print I am going to move to Canada.
taylodl 14y ago
RSS is a technology, not an industry and Google's killing Reader may not necessarily kill RSS. I've switched to Feedly and love it. I wished I'd been using Feedly years ago. Reader is quite pathetic in comparison to Feedly actually. But I didn't know that. I used Reader because it was from Google and all my colleagues were using it. As a result I'm checking out alternatives to other Google services. I've been in a Google rut for many years now and it's time to get out of it. It's all good.
- codingthebeach 14y ago
  You're not alone. Bruce Schneier on migrating away from Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5425713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5425713 Om Malik: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to-yourself/ http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to... James Whittaker: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-... Many others.
- jokermatt999 14y ago
  What do you like better about Feedly? I've switched over as well, but the less compact interface (even after switching views as recommended by the bog post for migrating Reader users) and general sluggishness compared to Reader have annoyed me. I'd like to appreciate some of the differences instead.
  - taylodl 14y ago
    I should have mentioned I'm using Feedly on an iPad. On the desktop Feedly isn't as compact as Reader - but there's a setting where you can make it nearly so. On the iPad I like the magazine layout and swiping to mark an article as read. Having fewer articles presented at a time actually has been helping me better focus on each article. And now that I can see more of the article I can better determine whether it's really something I should read. Whereas before I tended to skim the titles and try to weed out articles and figure I'd get to the articles I might be interested in later. To then find out that I really wasn't interested in that article. But that's me. You might hate Feedly for the exact same reasons I like it. Good thing you have until July 1st to find an alternative that works for you! Good luck!
jswinghammer 14y ago
I love using Google Reader but I don't see what the big deal is. It seems like an RSS reader is something anyone can build in a month maybe. There are alternatives that seem to be less than optimal but I assume they'll get their act in gear. I would be in their place.
- rahoulb 14y ago
  Well the article is about the synchronisation, not the RSS client. I can read the same set of feeds in Flipboard on my phone, Reeder on my ipad and NNW on my mac. The people who were building alternative synchronisation systems gave up when Google moved in with Reader; hopefully someone will step in with an alternative now, but there are a LOT of apps that will need to be updated to take advantage of the new system.
mosselman 14y ago
I don't get all the fuss: "Google Reader was born in October 2005"..."the short life and sad death of Google Reader"? Come one, I think that 8 years is a very long time in the (online) IT world. It was pretty obvious that RSS wouldn't be something for the long-run anyway.
- slug 14y ago
  If RSS is too old to deserve existence, I wonder what we can say about http,smtp,ssh ; tcp/udp/ip ; ethernet/wifi ? :)
  - mosselman 14y ago
    What nonsense. Either way. I said neither of those things. It is not age that is the problem, it is RSS itself. RSS is just not a good solution in the long run because, amongst other things, we a. get better and better at parsing language, which makes a separate protocol unnecessary and b. we, right now, are more into cloud based news delivery, think links on twitter, etc. More semantic alternatives to HTML (like HTML5, but good) will also make things like RSS useless.
nir 14y ago
It might be naive, but my own little protest is avoiding Google+ whenever possible, as a user and in projects I build. RSS isn't dying of natural causes. Plenty of small-medium sites are getting orders of magnitude more traffic from Reader than from G+. Google and other major companies are trying to deprecate it in order to replace with their own, tightly controlled, solutions.
- Supermighty 14y ago
  G+ can't be avoided for too long. Google is using it to tie together Author Rank, which helps for SEO. If you want your content to rank higher post-Panda update you'll leverage G+.
  - weinzierl 14y ago
    I doubt that this will work out for Google in the long term. For one there is the danger that G+ will soon be full with fake profiles created by spammers. Another thing is that coupling of G+ membership with organic ranking reminds me of Microsoft bundling IE with their OS. They leverage their monopoly in one market to take over another.
  - codingthebeach 14y ago
    If that's true then G+ is more of a danger to Google than Facebook ever was. Using the index as a way to strong-arm publishers into using a half-baked Facebook clone may even work, short-term. Long-term this is one way Google can lose Search.
    - weinzierl 14y ago
      It is true, Eric Schmidt said: “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
      - 14y ago
slig 14y ago
I can't see what's the big deal. Those that were using an RSS reader can find another replacement right now. And, as others have said, the replacements are arguably better. If anything, all this buzz may be bringing new people to RSS.
- taligent 14y ago
  Like ? I use Reeder on iOS and OSX (very popular client apps) with hundreds of starred articles. By all means enlighten me as to a suitable replacement. I think people forget that Google Reader was an API as well as a client.
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    Feedly promises to have such an API and is popular enough that Reeder is likely to support it.
chirop 14y ago
To me, the permanent archive of all RSS feeds is far more important than the Google Reader front end. Critical comments that blog owners deleted on their site are still found in the Google RSS archive. In some cases it exposes true malfeasance, when blog admins change the comments of others. I can download whole RSS histories myself, but without a link to an independent archive my own copy is worthless as evidence, since I could have edited it myself.
- gwern 14y ago
  > since I could have edited it myself. You can limit the potential damage by publishing a hash precommitment of the archive; then later if you need it, you can provide the archive itself, let others verify that the hash matches the archive, and then any 'edits' could only have been made before the hash was made (which might have been many years ago, whenever an issue or scandal pops up which motivates a look into the archive).
meerita 14y ago
I never understood why Google didn't profit RSS well by doing a product polish as Flipboard or Zite. They could have done something powerful as those and they didn't. Instead of that, they did a crap app wich it doesn't even get close. I would have been a happy customer of Reader wich such nice interface.
- photorized 14y ago
  Google is a data company. They stand to gain very little from offering a "passive" service like RSS - there just isn't much interesting data in the user experience for them.
  - meerita 14y ago
    Well, the Flipboard UI allows you to insert ads between pages, they could build a new entire way of ads placement, why not.
lclarkmichalek 14y ago
Where does the extend come in? Not that I ever used reader but the article doesn't seem to mention any extensions to RSS other than a thing called "bundles" which I have never heard of. Did reader have a lot of specific extensions that make it hard to build a competing product?
- itafroma 14y ago
  Google Reader has a number of features that are above and beyond simple RSS/Atom parsing: * Starring * Sharing amongst other Google Reader users * Smart sorting of feed items * Marking as read * Indefinite retention on feed items Most of these, by themselves, are not hard to replicate (maybe the sorting is, indefinite historical archive definitely is if you haven't already started), but all these "extensions" to RSS/Atom parsing, so to speak, were exposed via an (albeit undocumented) API that spawned a whole ecosystem of feed readers that rely on it, because a major selling point for the past several years has been "syncs with Google Reader".
  - magicalist 14y ago
    None of those are extensions of RSS, they're just features of the reader. By your criteria, any reader that doesn't just display the unparsed xml is "extending" RSS. The key to the "extend" step is that it has to be done in a way that disadvantages others by breaking interoperation when they used to be able to. Not only did RSS (and Atom) feeds continue to work across all feed reader clients, but you can also export many of the features you list in a straightforward and unobfuscated format (and via API, as you note).
    - itafroma 14y ago
      The Google Reader API providing those features is the extend of embrace, extend, extinguish, not merely the features isolated away from the feed parsing (which is I why I put "extensions" in scare quotes). Feed readers, due to market demand, have coded to the API—which provides features above and beyond what you can get from simple feed parsing and are only available from Google—instead of the otherwise-interoperable RSS, Atom, and OPML specs. So while yes, potential competitors could replicate those features (just like Netscape could—and often did—replicate IE-specific extensions to HTML and CSS with their own versions), it can't be done in a competitive manner. As a user, if all my feeds, activity, friends, and retention are within Google's infrastructure, there's no point in switching to another solution that provides all those things—or worse, merely sticks to the simple standard of OPML—unless I'm forced to (just like very few people coded to Netscape's implementation because most were using IE). That's the essence of embrace, extend, and extinguish: adopt a simple standard (RSS, Atom, and OPML), extend it beyond that spec in a way competitors weren't and the specs don't support (the API that adds starring, retention, etc. to the mix of simple feed parsing), then watch as competitors who don't adapt to your new "standard" fail (if you were developing a feed reader and didn't support Google Reader's API, good luck with that).
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anoncow 14y ago
Perhaps there isn't money to be made providing (free) rss sync services. If there was no google reader it might have been newsgator shutting down(or if it was their main product they might have shut down their free service or severely decreased their free quotas). Either way, RSS "going back to 2006" is not a bad thing for anyone. Companies will roll out products if they think there is a market. Google shuttered Reader but they have products that do similar things. With Google+ you can follow people (equivalent to following personal blog feeds on reader) and blogs/websites with plus accounts(equivalent to following websites with feeds on reader). The bright side is with g+ you get more interactivity. I always wanted to comment on posts in a feed without having to visit the website or blog. The dark side is with g+, content and delivery both will be tied to one single service(with RSS atleast your content will still be available after reader dies in july). Google currents is doing something similar to reader too. The difference is the lock in and the magazine like feel. Then there is Keep. So perhaps RSS or atleast the idea behind it is not dead yet. Perhaps Reader wasn't making any profit or perhaps Reader was eating into the potential success of Google's other offerings and so it was killed.
- brownbat 14y ago
  > I always wanted to comment on posts in a feed without having to visit the website or blog. Just imagine if instead of killing them, they somehow entertwined Reader and Sidewiki...
  - anoncow 14y ago
    reader + sidewiki sounds like a good idea. If that came with an option to use a separate nickname, things could be golden. Google+ cannot do this on the scale that reader could, simply because sites with RSS > Sites with g+ accounts. But that is an assumption.
- taligent 14y ago
  You seem to forgetting something. Privacy. I want to subscribe to RSS feeds without letting my friends and work colleagues know what they are. And I sure as hell don't want Google tailoring advertising or search results based on them.
artificialidiot 14y ago
I don't get why RSS is "dying". Many people who create online content that is worth following provide a feed which you can subscribe through so many ways it is not funny. Maybe social network addicted people may not recognize but there is a whole world who use email, instant messaging and other stuff like feeds to communicate, which are very established and not beholden to whims of any single moneymaking scheme. Feeds are a very simple and open idea. Inability to put a toll booth between the communicating parties doesn't mean feeds are useless or dying. It just means you are unimaginative. Browsers may chose to hide the functionality out of a desire to idiot proof their software but it doesn't mean people who have an attention span more than a goldfish have no other ways to subscribe.
Nux 14y ago
RSS is not very good for social networks, they want you to visit and stay on their web page, so that they can control and monetise properly. Nobody is interested in ways to leak content and users outside their empire, at the contrary. One day, when the Internet will have transformed in the Amazon-Facebook-Google-Microsoft walled garden we begin to see today, I shall tell tales of how people used to build and run their own web sites and email servers and visit each other's blogs and so on. And how they all let that go, because it was "too hard" and they "didn't have time" to deal with it all. Ultimately it's us who are at fault. We had it, but gave it all up. We are giving up our privacy and freedom for illusory convenience and safety, to paraphrase a famous saying.
intopieces 14y ago
I'm very put off by thus attitude that Google owes us all a free RSS reader, as if they are the tech equivalent of the social safety net. Google has and always will be a company focused on profits. They would be supremely unprofitable if they sunk time and resources into dying technology just because it had a few fans. It's not hard to make an RSS reader and if you miss Google Reader so much, sign off of HN and make your own, better version. But you won't, because you know that Google is right in their decision to axe the whole thing.
- skymt 14y ago
  I'm very put off by people presuming to tell me what I think or plan to do.
visualcsharp 14y ago
Isn't this all a /tad/ hyperbolic? It's just an application, folks. Applications are born, they live and they die. Nothing is forever.
bborud 14y ago
One of the things I always wanted to get around to while working for Google was to borrow some ideas from Gnus, Lars Ingebrigtsen's brilliant news reader for Emacs. (A rewrite of Masanobu Umeda's Gnus) Gnus has a brilliant system for assigning a score to postings in all sorts of clever ways. You have the simple stuff, like assigning a negative score to a given person, but you can also do more subtle stuff like scoring up postings that are responses to your own postings. It also has various forms of adaptive scoring. The score then influenced the ordering of threads, highlighting threads that need your attention and hiding threads and postings that you do not want to see. (Most news readers had a bozo-filter that could do the latter, but which didn't really do any of the former well). What made Gnus such a great newsreader was that, with the use of scoring, I could spend 10-15 minutes per day getting an overview of dozens of active discussions I was having across a bunch of newsgroups. At one point the total number of postings in the groups I was following was around 6000 postings per day, and it took me mere minutes to get an overview of what had happened that was of interest to me. The idea of scoring applied to RSS feeds would have been brilliant. It would have made following a massive number of RSS feeds a far more attractive proposition. I still think that there is an opportunity to revive RSS and make it relevant again, but I would recommend that people interested in RSS readers have a closer look at Gnus first. RSS readers need to do a lot more than just aggregate and display feeds. There are some great opportunities in figuring out how to add scoring in a way users can understand. Also I think that harnessing social to provide additional signals that can be used for scoring would be neat. Is there an RSS reader today that does any of this?
- milfot 14y ago
  That sounds really interesting. I deliberately avoid high volume RSS feeds due to the difficulty of finding the things I actually want to read. I get the feeling though that the issue with RSS was not altogether an issue of uptake or ux.. but more an issue of sites wanting to track their users. If RSS could allow for some sort of phone home (opt out / anonymisable of course) then maybe there might be more of a push from content creators.
  - bborud 14y ago
    Back in the day when RSS was all new and shiny there were quite a few people that saw RSS as the mechanism that would help blogs become conversations (structurally speaking). Somewhat like on USENET, RSS would be the thing that made it possible to have discussions across blogs and for a reader to be able to follow these discussions. I never quite bought this, but I was willing to entertain the idea. Of course, this never really materialized. What we got was ... well, a mess. I think mainly because a lot of people tried to reinvent the wheel and did so badly. I never saw RSS as something portals would be interested in. (And any time a site's business idea is to keep someone on their site for as long as possible, what you have is, in my opinion, a traditional, late 90s portal). (Back in the early 00s I worked on web crawlers and to me RSS was interesting because it could have been used to aid us in finding fresh content. I talked to a few site owners back then about why they were so reluctant to add it and the sentiment was largely "we want people to find our content from our front page")
moe 14y ago
"RSS industry"? Everything to spin a drama, I guess...
martinced 14y ago
zdnet? really? This "thing" has always been the low of the low and they've been constantly defending MS everytime MS did embrace, extend and extinguish. Actually zdnet is a pro-MS propaganda medium. Who does seriously take this junk seriously? There may a lot to criticize about Google's move regarding RSS but posting links to zdnet isn't helping the cause.
ommunist 14y ago
Rumours of the RSS demise are exaggerated. Just put a notice for your RSS users to encourage them to use Feedly or something like that.
Metapony 14y ago
They need to indent their stylesheet, but that's an interesting perspective, and a nice overview for those needing a refresher as to the history of Google's tactic.
yanw 14y ago
"RSS industry"?! I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them. One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor. Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emergence of social networks to the point that it doesn't make economic sense for them to keep maintaining it?! I don't’ think so. Neither is it a commentary on standards, it’s merely a company that is acting in its own perceived interests, something companies are wont to do. As for the “Industry” part, last I checked those who are actually building a Reader replacement are delighted with opportunity: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-with-full-width-support/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-... http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-sc... http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader When a writer this associated with Microsoft starts framing this situation as yet another flimsy accusation of anti-competitive behaviour, I tend to be skeptic.
- gnosis 14y ago
  "One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor" I'm overjoyed that yet another for-profit corporation is out of this segment of the internet market. If it gets some former Google Reader users move to client-based, open source RSS readers, that makes for less spying on users and more privacy; and the more decentralized the net gets, the better.
  - VMG 14y ago
    I can't wait to get back to the times where I had to poll all my feeds every few minutes and saturate my bandwidth.
    - gnosis 14y ago
      Saturate your bandwidth by polling RSS feeds? What do you use to connect to the Internet, a 300 baud modem?
magic_haze 14y ago
And it's not just Reader: Google Talk is following the exact same strategy as well. It supposedly is the world's largest xmpp network, but with a few extra changes that makes compliant xmpp clients practically useless (e.g., not able to add anyone inside gtalk from the outside: _they_ have to initiate the request, supposedly for spam reasons.) But then again, Facebook does the same thing...
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streptomycin 14y ago
I see the "embrace" part. But I don't see any "extend" or "extinguish". Seems to be just FUD. Lots of cynical people wish Google was as "evil" as 90s MS, but that false equivalence just doesn't hold. It would only hold in some outlandish scenario where Google added proprietary extensions to RSS to make everything that operated with Reader incompatible with anything else, thus eliminating the main advantage of RSS as a common standard (like MS did with Java).
- taligent 14y ago
  I have hundreds of starred articles in Google Reader. So yes it was more than just RSS.
  - magicalist 14y ago
    That's a detail of the reader, not the formt. That's like claiming that offering an option to order entries by date ascending or descending is extending RSS. (moreover, you can export your starred stories and several readers support importing them)
joering2 14y ago
Google has a proven record of killing its own and acquired business/startups. Please, next time you have a buyout offer from Google, please think about your users and DO NOT sell! If you are in a position to receive offer from Google, rather than not you have pending offers from others as well. There is NOTHING Google can give you that will benefit your users more than other interested parties can. Anything other than Google search, Android, Google Cars and Google Glass is doomed to extinct, sooner or later.
- pjbrunet 14y ago
  Search is an easy problem once the hardware/bandwidth is cheap--they'll have more competition soon. The "cars" thing they have to fight everybody--insurance companies, car manufacturers, big oil, the govt. Pipe dream. I don't see Glass going anywhere either, nobody wants to wear a camera on their face--creepy. Adwords is funding the whole circus over there and publishers I talk to aren't happy with how they're treated. Content is king.
cinbun8 14y ago
This has got to be a joke. Just because one company decided to shut their RSS client, the 'RSS industry' is now abandoned ? Tell that to feedly who just welcomed 500k users [1]. These were users that relied on google reader. RSS as a standard / service is not on square 1. It is inadequate in some ways and ATOM was supposed to fix that and was never really adopted as well as RSS. There are tons of aggregators out there that use RSS (and ATOM) to get all your news in one place. Use another client and move on. 1 - http://mashable.com/2013/03/18/500000-google-reader-users-migrate-feedly/ http://mashable.com/2013/03/18/500000-google-reader-users-mi...
- taligent 14y ago
  It was more than a RSS client. It's also an API for third party apps.
andyl 14y ago
One thing that strikes me about the piece is that it reads like actual Journalism. Yes there is opinion and point-of-view, but it is mixed with historical context, real comparables and quotes from actual industry people. A lot of the so-called journalism I see today is fact-free, thinly-sourced advocacy posing as news. Its nice when writers do a bit of legwork and put some meat on their reporting. Disclosure: not associated with ZDNet or Ed Bott. :-)
- forgotAgain 14y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with the content of the original post but I do have a hard time accepting it as journalism. Ed Bott has been a part of the Microsoft eco-system for a long time.
Aqueous 14y ago
There's a really easy solution here. Google should just donate the Google Reader application to the Apache Foundation or another open source initiative so that others can host their own. In fact, it was a mistake to shut down the service without also announcing that they were open sourcing it simultaneously. Look at all the bad PR that's floating to the top of HN right now. They open sourced Google Wave around the same time they shut it down, and that was a far less popular and useful service. It avoided a lot of the bad PR that the Reader shutdown is causing, however.
- guelo 14y ago
  Reader is probably tied in to Google's back end infrastructure too tightly to decouple it into a standalone app.
guelo 14y ago
One big innovation new rss sync engines can provide is linking of posts. For example, showing you blog responses from across the web to a post you are reading. I think Google didn't show it because they have an aversion to exposing the incoming links graph for whatever reason, but this would be a killer feature for users. Reader did have an excellent "recommended" feature that used some kind of social metrics algorithm. That feature stopped being useful after the G+ debacle, but it could also be a killer feature. I'm sure there are many others.
non-sense 14y ago
In a way, isn't it good that Google has discontinued Google Reader. It gives chance to other small players to grow and focus solely on improving their RSS reader? Yes, it was unfair to their users that they were left out suddenly. But I am sure they will find good alternatives.
rafski 14y ago
RSS was a business threat to Google, it allowed people to glance through aricle headers and often read them whole without ads. Google Reader allowed Google to contain this trend, then slowly phase it out as much as they could. People easily forget ads are Google's main product that provides them he bulk of their revenue.

330 points by iProject 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago

Here's another viewpoint. If Google Reader was so good that it made people so mad about it being shut down, and it was so important in people's lives - then it must've been a pretty good app, right? Okay, so even with Reader being this good, the RSS protocol was still dying because most people have moved on to other ways of consuming news. So then if RSS didn't have a reader that was this good, then it would've probably died a lot sooner, and Google Reader actually prolonged its life. Without Google Reader, RSS might have died 2 years ago. So I don't know what's with all this "Google killed RSS". Google didn't kill RSS. Twitter, Facebook and RSS' "geekiness" that made sure it never crossed that "chasm" into mainstream usage (and what doesn't grow will probably die, as nothing is constant) are what killed RSS. As a side note, I'm someone who consumes a lot of news every day, yet I still found a service like Reader to quickly become overwhelming, and I've barely used it occasionally. As we've seen, many of these journalists actually had thousands if not tens of thousands of unread news stories in their Reader, which I think is also why not that many people were using it. It felt overwhelming.

arocks 14y ago
> the RSS protocol was still dying because most people have moved on to other ways of consuming news Any evidence to validate this claim? Popularity of Twitter or Facebook doesn't have to be at the cost of RSS. Even if it was, it doesn't make one more relevant or irrelevant. TV did not kill Radio (at least for everyone). New applications like Pulse depend on RSS. Many users depended on Google Reader. Now they have to learn a new application. Some of them use mobile apps which are pointing to Google Reader. It is not going to be an easy change. People are mad for a reason.
- slacka 14y ago
  Do you have any evidence to invalidate Googles claim of declining usage? I trust Google on this one. It served its purpose in 2005 but much better services have replaced it. Move on and get over it.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >It served its purpose in 2005 but much better services have replaced it. Move on and get over it. Much better services? Name one! (much less "many"....)
    - ry0ohki 14y ago
      Exactly! It's maddening to hear there are better technologies and services than RSS yet no one can name them...
    - marknutter 14y ago
      Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Flipboard, and any other service that aggregates good content or allows people to easily share content with one another. Have you not been paying attention?
      - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
        RSS isn't about aggregating or sharing content it's about following content.
      - mkr-hn 14y ago
        How do I avoid missing each post from a handful of people who publish rarely in an endless stream of chatty publishers? RSS is how I sidestep the stream and catch the important things.
        Evbn 14y ago
        Mark them as Close Friends in Facebook.
lucian1900 14y ago
I use RSS for low-traffic sporadic blogs and a handful of higher-traffic news magazines. I don't get too many items a day and it's quite easy to quickly remove the ones I'm not interested in. Then I'm left with about 1-10 interesting articles every day, which is pretty much what I want.
nicholassmith 14y ago
This gets said a lot 'RSS is dead'. It's very much not, in terms of people consuming news through it? Maybe. But it also powers podcasts, for example, and they're going from strength to strength. Plus a lot of sites showed they still get a large amount of traffic via RSS after the announcement. A million users isn't a lot at Google scale, but it's by no means dead.
vanderZwan 14y ago
> So I don't know what's with all this "Google killed RSS". Google didn't kill RSS. Twitter, Facebook and RSS' "geekiness" that made sure it never crossed that "chasm" into mainstream usage (and what doesn't grow will probably die, as nothing is constant) are what killed RSS. If you ask me, it's the combination of browsers and websites not properly exposing the existence of RSS that has stunted its growth. Firefox used to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in a webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it (EDIT: that I was aware of - others have pointed out Safari also had this feature for a while), and it was a fairy obscure button too. Then they removed that. So now you actually have to hunt for the RSS feeds - and since many webpages use a gif saying "RSS" (meaning text search is useless) that isn't always easy. It's not difficult to use at all, but it is certainly a very obscure feature of the internet. That halts adoption.
- objclxt 14y ago
  > Firefox used to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in a webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it I'm pretty sure Safari did this as well - it was removed in Mountain Lion.
  - vanderZwan 14y ago
    Apologies, I should have said only browser I used (Linux & Windows user)
  - anoncow 14y ago
    Opera did it too. Opera mini for lowly java feature phones did it too.
- taligent 14y ago
  Safari had a button for RSS as well. Not sure why they removed it. That said every single blog I've ever seen has a prominent RSS button. But that isn't the reason for lack of widespread adoption. It's more to do with the fact that most people aren't dedicated "read this every day" consumers of lots of different blogs. Generally it's a small handful which isn't what RSS caters for.
fauigerzigerk 14y ago
I use Google Reader a lot but I don't care about RSS. I think RSS is unnecessary for news aggregation and the death of Google Reader has little to do with RSS. If the death of Google Reader was about RSS, Google could have declared RSS legacy and told people to start using the HTML5 article tag plus a few specific metadata attributes. But how would that have helpled G+ compete against Facebook? It would have taken some creativity to figure that out, but since many Reader users were keen on sharing it shouldn't have been an impossible problem to solve compared to self driving cars.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
One can make the argument that Reader's dominance in the market helped push the decline of RSS usage. To try and compete in the same space you have to hide the fact that you are an RSS reader; whether that be with gimmicky layouts or by integrating with social networks, or whatever else. You can't be seen as redundant with Reader. I think we're going to see a lot of advances with RSS due to the closure of Reader and I'm excited to see those.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  It's been great for me. I switched to Feedly after the announcement, and I'm glad I did. It bridges two worlds for me. I get the classic Reader-esque view for the post-a-day people, and the magazine view with features ranked by sharing to filter the top few stories on the 400-a-day sites. I even made special folders: Tech Gaggle, Science Gaggle, Politics Gaggle. I skim these when I've got nothing else to read, and it doesn't overwhelm me with things.
- Shooti 14y ago
  One counter-point is that the accessibility of Reader due to its presence Google ecosystem also grew the global user base of RSS aggregators. Which is to say its not a given that those using RSS through Google Reader would be using RSS at all if it never existed. It's also not a given that the sync back-ends built in this Never-Reader parallel universe would've matched what would got with Reader in terms of reliability and speed, since regardless of how you feel about them Google infrastructure is best in class.
pseut 14y ago
Not providing an RSS feed is like not providing an API; you're giving up control of how scrapers access your website, but I'm sure that readers will find a way to get automate content aggregation either way. It's just annoying to lose standards.

don_draper 14y ago

>>It’s not unlike the widely criticized model that Microsoft pursued in its pre-Millennium days as a monopolist: Embrace, extend, extinguish. Ridiculous. Microsoft works to eliminate the competition, whereas Google is just not supporting it. RSS will not be eliminated due to this decision.

onosendai 14y ago

The whole article makes for some pretty depressing reading, and touches upon some important points. For me, the most crucial and eye opening is the stark contrast of the relatively open ecosystem we had back in 2005 to what we have today. You can't help but feel uncomfortable about the whole direction we're taking with tightly controlled silos of information (Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc.) using extremely limited, or highly monetized, API access, when you read something like this: "One thing that’s definitely coming (and some of these already exist, although haven’t yet been made public) is extremely deep API support. Our general plan here is to expose nearly everything in NewsGator Online via API, and allow folks to build applications that leverage our platform in unique ways." Google is just as guilty as several other parties of bringing about the situation we have now. I get the fact that everyone is looking for ways of increasing revenue, but they're doing it at the expense of openness, instead of leveraging that openness (see RSS for example) and building services and added value on top of it. I hope the death of Reader serves as a wake up call on several fronts.

anoncow 14y ago
the challenge will be how you make money without stifling openness(and thus competition) and privacy.
bambax 14y ago
But Twitter doesn't make any money, and Facebook not that much. The bulk of Google's revenue comes from leveraging the openness of the Web; were there only Facebooks and Twitters there would be no Google Search because there would be nothing to index. This may be completely off, but the killing of Reader looks like a desperate move to help Google+: since Google can't kill Facebook, they're willing to hurt themselves instead -- to cut their left arm so that their right arm can grow stronger. If this is indeed the case, it's very shortsighted.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Facebook definitely make a lot of money.
- shortformblog 14y ago

gregjor 14y ago

I offered to give Google my first born to keep Reader alive but they didn't even respond. First iGoogle was given a death sentence. Then Reader. If they shut down Currents or Google Print I am going to move to Canada.

taylodl 14y ago

RSS is a technology, not an industry and Google's killing Reader may not necessarily kill RSS. I've switched to Feedly and love it. I wished I'd been using Feedly years ago. Reader is quite pathetic in comparison to Feedly actually. But I didn't know that. I used Reader because it was from Google and all my colleagues were using it. As a result I'm checking out alternatives to other Google services. I've been in a Google rut for many years now and it's time to get out of it. It's all good.

codingthebeach 14y ago
You're not alone. Bruce Schneier on migrating away from Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5425713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5425713 Om Malik: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to-yourself/ http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to... James Whittaker: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-... Many others.
jokermatt999 14y ago
What do you like better about Feedly? I've switched over as well, but the less compact interface (even after switching views as recommended by the bog post for migrating Reader users) and general sluggishness compared to Reader have annoyed me. I'd like to appreciate some of the differences instead.
- taylodl 14y ago
  I should have mentioned I'm using Feedly on an iPad. On the desktop Feedly isn't as compact as Reader - but there's a setting where you can make it nearly so. On the iPad I like the magazine layout and swiping to mark an article as read. Having fewer articles presented at a time actually has been helping me better focus on each article. And now that I can see more of the article I can better determine whether it's really something I should read. Whereas before I tended to skim the titles and try to weed out articles and figure I'd get to the articles I might be interested in later. To then find out that I really wasn't interested in that article. But that's me. You might hate Feedly for the exact same reasons I like it. Good thing you have until July 1st to find an alternative that works for you! Good luck!

jswinghammer 14y ago

I love using Google Reader but I don't see what the big deal is. It seems like an RSS reader is something anyone can build in a month maybe. There are alternatives that seem to be less than optimal but I assume they'll get their act in gear. I would be in their place.

rahoulb 14y ago
Well the article is about the synchronisation, not the RSS client. I can read the same set of feeds in Flipboard on my phone, Reeder on my ipad and NNW on my mac. The people who were building alternative synchronisation systems gave up when Google moved in with Reader; hopefully someone will step in with an alternative now, but there are a LOT of apps that will need to be updated to take advantage of the new system.

mosselman 14y ago

I don't get all the fuss: "Google Reader was born in October 2005"..."the short life and sad death of Google Reader"? Come one, I think that 8 years is a very long time in the (online) IT world. It was pretty obvious that RSS wouldn't be something for the long-run anyway.

slug 14y ago
If RSS is too old to deserve existence, I wonder what we can say about http,smtp,ssh ; tcp/udp/ip ; ethernet/wifi ? :)
- mosselman 14y ago
  What nonsense. Either way. I said neither of those things. It is not age that is the problem, it is RSS itself. RSS is just not a good solution in the long run because, amongst other things, we a. get better and better at parsing language, which makes a separate protocol unnecessary and b. we, right now, are more into cloud based news delivery, think links on twitter, etc. More semantic alternatives to HTML (like HTML5, but good) will also make things like RSS useless.

nir 14y ago

It might be naive, but my own little protest is avoiding Google+ whenever possible, as a user and in projects I build. RSS isn't dying of natural causes. Plenty of small-medium sites are getting orders of magnitude more traffic from Reader than from G+. Google and other major companies are trying to deprecate it in order to replace with their own, tightly controlled, solutions.

Supermighty 14y ago
G+ can't be avoided for too long. Google is using it to tie together Author Rank, which helps for SEO. If you want your content to rank higher post-Panda update you'll leverage G+.
- weinzierl 14y ago
  I doubt that this will work out for Google in the long term. For one there is the danger that G+ will soon be full with fake profiles created by spammers. Another thing is that coupling of G+ membership with organic ranking reminds me of Microsoft bundling IE with their OS. They leverage their monopoly in one market to take over another.
- codingthebeach 14y ago
  If that's true then G+ is more of a danger to Google than Facebook ever was. Using the index as a way to strong-arm publishers into using a half-baked Facebook clone may even work, short-term. Long-term this is one way Google can lose Search.
  - weinzierl 14y ago
    It is true, Eric Schmidt said: “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
    - 14y ago

slig 14y ago

I can't see what's the big deal. Those that were using an RSS reader can find another replacement right now. And, as others have said, the replacements are arguably better. If anything, all this buzz may be bringing new people to RSS.

taligent 14y ago
Like ? I use Reeder on iOS and OSX (very popular client apps) with hundreds of starred articles. By all means enlighten me as to a suitable replacement. I think people forget that Google Reader was an API as well as a client.
- lucian1900 14y ago
  Feedly promises to have such an API and is popular enough that Reeder is likely to support it.

chirop 14y ago

To me, the permanent archive of all RSS feeds is far more important than the Google Reader front end. Critical comments that blog owners deleted on their site are still found in the Google RSS archive. In some cases it exposes true malfeasance, when blog admins change the comments of others. I can download whole RSS histories myself, but without a link to an independent archive my own copy is worthless as evidence, since I could have edited it myself.

gwern 14y ago
> since I could have edited it myself. You can limit the potential damage by publishing a hash precommitment of the archive; then later if you need it, you can provide the archive itself, let others verify that the hash matches the archive, and then any 'edits' could only have been made before the hash was made (which might have been many years ago, whenever an issue or scandal pops up which motivates a look into the archive).

meerita 14y ago

I never understood why Google didn't profit RSS well by doing a product polish as Flipboard or Zite. They could have done something powerful as those and they didn't. Instead of that, they did a crap app wich it doesn't even get close. I would have been a happy customer of Reader wich such nice interface.

photorized 14y ago
Google is a data company. They stand to gain very little from offering a "passive" service like RSS - there just isn't much interesting data in the user experience for them.
- meerita 14y ago
  Well, the Flipboard UI allows you to insert ads between pages, they could build a new entire way of ads placement, why not.

lclarkmichalek 14y ago

Where does the extend come in? Not that I ever used reader but the article doesn't seem to mention any extensions to RSS other than a thing called "bundles" which I have never heard of. Did reader have a lot of specific extensions that make it hard to build a competing product?

itafroma 14y ago
Google Reader has a number of features that are above and beyond simple RSS/Atom parsing: * Starring * Sharing amongst other Google Reader users * Smart sorting of feed items * Marking as read * Indefinite retention on feed items Most of these, by themselves, are not hard to replicate (maybe the sorting is, indefinite historical archive definitely is if you haven't already started), but all these "extensions" to RSS/Atom parsing, so to speak, were exposed via an (albeit undocumented) API that spawned a whole ecosystem of feed readers that rely on it, because a major selling point for the past several years has been "syncs with Google Reader".
- magicalist 14y ago
  None of those are extensions of RSS, they're just features of the reader. By your criteria, any reader that doesn't just display the unparsed xml is "extending" RSS. The key to the "extend" step is that it has to be done in a way that disadvantages others by breaking interoperation when they used to be able to. Not only did RSS (and Atom) feeds continue to work across all feed reader clients, but you can also export many of the features you list in a straightforward and unobfuscated format (and via API, as you note).
  - itafroma 14y ago
    The Google Reader API providing those features is the extend of embrace, extend, extinguish, not merely the features isolated away from the feed parsing (which is I why I put "extensions" in scare quotes). Feed readers, due to market demand, have coded to the API—which provides features above and beyond what you can get from simple feed parsing and are only available from Google—instead of the otherwise-interoperable RSS, Atom, and OPML specs. So while yes, potential competitors could replicate those features (just like Netscape could—and often did—replicate IE-specific extensions to HTML and CSS with their own versions), it can't be done in a competitive manner. As a user, if all my feeds, activity, friends, and retention are within Google's infrastructure, there's no point in switching to another solution that provides all those things—or worse, merely sticks to the simple standard of OPML—unless I'm forced to (just like very few people coded to Netscape's implementation because most were using IE). That's the essence of embrace, extend, and extinguish: adopt a simple standard (RSS, Atom, and OPML), extend it beyond that spec in a way competitors weren't and the specs don't support (the API that adds starring, retention, etc. to the mix of simple feed parsing), then watch as competitors who don't adapt to your new "standard" fail (if you were developing a feed reader and didn't support Google Reader's API, good luck with that).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

anoncow 14y ago

Perhaps there isn't money to be made providing (free) rss sync services. If there was no google reader it might have been newsgator shutting down(or if it was their main product they might have shut down their free service or severely decreased their free quotas). Either way, RSS "going back to 2006" is not a bad thing for anyone. Companies will roll out products if they think there is a market. Google shuttered Reader but they have products that do similar things. With Google+ you can follow people (equivalent to following personal blog feeds on reader) and blogs/websites with plus accounts(equivalent to following websites with feeds on reader). The bright side is with g+ you get more interactivity. I always wanted to comment on posts in a feed without having to visit the website or blog. The dark side is with g+, content and delivery both will be tied to one single service(with RSS atleast your content will still be available after reader dies in july). Google currents is doing something similar to reader too. The difference is the lock in and the magazine like feel. Then there is Keep. So perhaps RSS or atleast the idea behind it is not dead yet. Perhaps Reader wasn't making any profit or perhaps Reader was eating into the potential success of Google's other offerings and so it was killed.

brownbat 14y ago
> I always wanted to comment on posts in a feed without having to visit the website or blog. Just imagine if instead of killing them, they somehow entertwined Reader and Sidewiki...
- anoncow 14y ago
  reader + sidewiki sounds like a good idea. If that came with an option to use a separate nickname, things could be golden. Google+ cannot do this on the scale that reader could, simply because sites with RSS > Sites with g+ accounts. But that is an assumption.
taligent 14y ago
You seem to forgetting something. Privacy. I want to subscribe to RSS feeds without letting my friends and work colleagues know what they are. And I sure as hell don't want Google tailoring advertising or search results based on them.

artificialidiot 14y ago

I don't get why RSS is "dying". Many people who create online content that is worth following provide a feed which you can subscribe through so many ways it is not funny. Maybe social network addicted people may not recognize but there is a whole world who use email, instant messaging and other stuff like feeds to communicate, which are very established and not beholden to whims of any single moneymaking scheme. Feeds are a very simple and open idea. Inability to put a toll booth between the communicating parties doesn't mean feeds are useless or dying. It just means you are unimaginative. Browsers may chose to hide the functionality out of a desire to idiot proof their software but it doesn't mean people who have an attention span more than a goldfish have no other ways to subscribe.

Nux 14y ago

RSS is not very good for social networks, they want you to visit and stay on their web page, so that they can control and monetise properly. Nobody is interested in ways to leak content and users outside their empire, at the contrary. One day, when the Internet will have transformed in the Amazon-Facebook-Google-Microsoft walled garden we begin to see today, I shall tell tales of how people used to build and run their own web sites and email servers and visit each other's blogs and so on. And how they all let that go, because it was "too hard" and they "didn't have time" to deal with it all. Ultimately it's us who are at fault. We had it, but gave it all up. We are giving up our privacy and freedom for illusory convenience and safety, to paraphrase a famous saying.

intopieces 14y ago

I'm very put off by thus attitude that Google owes us all a free RSS reader, as if they are the tech equivalent of the social safety net. Google has and always will be a company focused on profits. They would be supremely unprofitable if they sunk time and resources into dying technology just because it had a few fans. It's not hard to make an RSS reader and if you miss Google Reader so much, sign off of HN and make your own, better version. But you won't, because you know that Google is right in their decision to axe the whole thing.

skymt 14y ago
I'm very put off by people presuming to tell me what I think or plan to do.

visualcsharp 14y ago

Isn't this all a /tad/ hyperbolic? It's just an application, folks. Applications are born, they live and they die. Nothing is forever.

bborud 14y ago

One of the things I always wanted to get around to while working for Google was to borrow some ideas from Gnus, Lars Ingebrigtsen's brilliant news reader for Emacs. (A rewrite of Masanobu Umeda's Gnus) Gnus has a brilliant system for assigning a score to postings in all sorts of clever ways. You have the simple stuff, like assigning a negative score to a given person, but you can also do more subtle stuff like scoring up postings that are responses to your own postings. It also has various forms of adaptive scoring. The score then influenced the ordering of threads, highlighting threads that need your attention and hiding threads and postings that you do not want to see. (Most news readers had a bozo-filter that could do the latter, but which didn't really do any of the former well). What made Gnus such a great newsreader was that, with the use of scoring, I could spend 10-15 minutes per day getting an overview of dozens of active discussions I was having across a bunch of newsgroups. At one point the total number of postings in the groups I was following was around 6000 postings per day, and it took me mere minutes to get an overview of what had happened that was of interest to me. The idea of scoring applied to RSS feeds would have been brilliant. It would have made following a massive number of RSS feeds a far more attractive proposition. I still think that there is an opportunity to revive RSS and make it relevant again, but I would recommend that people interested in RSS readers have a closer look at Gnus first. RSS readers need to do a lot more than just aggregate and display feeds. There are some great opportunities in figuring out how to add scoring in a way users can understand. Also I think that harnessing social to provide additional signals that can be used for scoring would be neat. Is there an RSS reader today that does any of this?

milfot 14y ago
That sounds really interesting. I deliberately avoid high volume RSS feeds due to the difficulty of finding the things I actually want to read. I get the feeling though that the issue with RSS was not altogether an issue of uptake or ux.. but more an issue of sites wanting to track their users. If RSS could allow for some sort of phone home (opt out / anonymisable of course) then maybe there might be more of a push from content creators.
- bborud 14y ago
  Back in the day when RSS was all new and shiny there were quite a few people that saw RSS as the mechanism that would help blogs become conversations (structurally speaking). Somewhat like on USENET, RSS would be the thing that made it possible to have discussions across blogs and for a reader to be able to follow these discussions. I never quite bought this, but I was willing to entertain the idea. Of course, this never really materialized. What we got was ... well, a mess. I think mainly because a lot of people tried to reinvent the wheel and did so badly. I never saw RSS as something portals would be interested in. (And any time a site's business idea is to keep someone on their site for as long as possible, what you have is, in my opinion, a traditional, late 90s portal). (Back in the early 00s I worked on web crawlers and to me RSS was interesting because it could have been used to aid us in finding fresh content. I talked to a few site owners back then about why they were so reluctant to add it and the sentiment was largely "we want people to find our content from our front page")

moe 14y ago

"RSS industry"? Everything to spin a drama, I guess...

martinced 14y ago

zdnet? really? This "thing" has always been the low of the low and they've been constantly defending MS everytime MS did embrace, extend and extinguish. Actually zdnet is a pro-MS propaganda medium. Who does seriously take this junk seriously? There may a lot to criticize about Google's move regarding RSS but posting links to zdnet isn't helping the cause.

ommunist 14y ago

Rumours of the RSS demise are exaggerated. Just put a notice for your RSS users to encourage them to use Feedly or something like that.

Metapony 14y ago

They need to indent their stylesheet, but that's an interesting perspective, and a nice overview for those needing a refresher as to the history of Google's tactic.

yanw 14y ago

"RSS industry"?! I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them. One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor. Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emergence of social networks to the point that it doesn't make economic sense for them to keep maintaining it?! I don't’ think so. Neither is it a commentary on standards, it’s merely a company that is acting in its own perceived interests, something companies are wont to do. As for the “Industry” part, last I checked those who are actually building a Reader replacement are delighted with opportunity: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-with-full-width-support/ http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-... http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-sc... http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader When a writer this associated with Microsoft starts framing this situation as yet another flimsy accusation of anti-competitive behaviour, I tend to be skeptic.

gnosis 14y ago
"One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor" I'm overjoyed that yet another for-profit corporation is out of this segment of the internet market. If it gets some former Google Reader users move to client-based, open source RSS readers, that makes for less spying on users and more privacy; and the more decentralized the net gets, the better.
- VMG 14y ago
  I can't wait to get back to the times where I had to poll all my feeds every few minutes and saturate my bandwidth.
  - gnosis 14y ago
    Saturate your bandwidth by polling RSS feeds? What do you use to connect to the Internet, a 300 baud modem?

magic_haze 14y ago

And it's not just Reader: Google Talk is following the exact same strategy as well. It supposedly is the world's largest xmpp network, but with a few extra changes that makes compliant xmpp clients practically useless (e.g., not able to add anyone inside gtalk from the outside: _they_ have to initiate the request, supposedly for spam reasons.) But then again, Facebook does the same thing...

deleted 14y ago

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streptomycin 14y ago

I see the "embrace" part. But I don't see any "extend" or "extinguish". Seems to be just FUD. Lots of cynical people wish Google was as "evil" as 90s MS, but that false equivalence just doesn't hold. It would only hold in some outlandish scenario where Google added proprietary extensions to RSS to make everything that operated with Reader incompatible with anything else, thus eliminating the main advantage of RSS as a common standard (like MS did with Java).

taligent 14y ago
I have hundreds of starred articles in Google Reader. So yes it was more than just RSS.
- magicalist 14y ago
  That's a detail of the reader, not the formt. That's like claiming that offering an option to order entries by date ascending or descending is extending RSS. (moreover, you can export your starred stories and several readers support importing them)

joering2 14y ago

Google has a proven record of killing its own and acquired business/startups. Please, next time you have a buyout offer from Google, please think about your users and DO NOT sell! If you are in a position to receive offer from Google, rather than not you have pending offers from others as well. There is NOTHING Google can give you that will benefit your users more than other interested parties can. Anything other than Google search, Android, Google Cars and Google Glass is doomed to extinct, sooner or later.

pjbrunet 14y ago
Search is an easy problem once the hardware/bandwidth is cheap--they'll have more competition soon. The "cars" thing they have to fight everybody--insurance companies, car manufacturers, big oil, the govt. Pipe dream. I don't see Glass going anywhere either, nobody wants to wear a camera on their face--creepy. Adwords is funding the whole circus over there and publishers I talk to aren't happy with how they're treated. Content is king.

cinbun8 14y ago

This has got to be a joke. Just because one company decided to shut their RSS client, the 'RSS industry' is now abandoned ? Tell that to feedly who just welcomed 500k users [1]. These were users that relied on google reader. RSS as a standard / service is not on square 1. It is inadequate in some ways and ATOM was supposed to fix that and was never really adopted as well as RSS. There are tons of aggregators out there that use RSS (and ATOM) to get all your news in one place. Use another client and move on. 1 - http://mashable.com/2013/03/18/500000-google-reader-users-migrate-feedly/ http://mashable.com/2013/03/18/500000-google-reader-users-mi...

taligent 14y ago
It was more than a RSS client. It's also an API for third party apps.

andyl 14y ago

One thing that strikes me about the piece is that it reads like actual Journalism. Yes there is opinion and point-of-view, but it is mixed with historical context, real comparables and quotes from actual industry people. A lot of the so-called journalism I see today is fact-free, thinly-sourced advocacy posing as news. Its nice when writers do a bit of legwork and put some meat on their reporting. Disclosure: not associated with ZDNet or Ed Bott. :-)

forgotAgain 14y ago
I'm not disagreeing with the content of the original post but I do have a hard time accepting it as journalism. Ed Bott has been a part of the Microsoft eco-system for a long time.

Aqueous 14y ago

There's a really easy solution here. Google should just donate the Google Reader application to the Apache Foundation or another open source initiative so that others can host their own. In fact, it was a mistake to shut down the service without also announcing that they were open sourcing it simultaneously. Look at all the bad PR that's floating to the top of HN right now. They open sourced Google Wave around the same time they shut it down, and that was a far less popular and useful service. It avoided a lot of the bad PR that the Reader shutdown is causing, however.

guelo 14y ago
Reader is probably tied in to Google's back end infrastructure too tightly to decouple it into a standalone app.

guelo 14y ago

One big innovation new rss sync engines can provide is linking of posts. For example, showing you blog responses from across the web to a post you are reading. I think Google didn't show it because they have an aversion to exposing the incoming links graph for whatever reason, but this would be a killer feature for users. Reader did have an excellent "recommended" feature that used some kind of social metrics algorithm. That feature stopped being useful after the G+ debacle, but it could also be a killer feature. I'm sure there are many others.

non-sense 14y ago

In a way, isn't it good that Google has discontinued Google Reader. It gives chance to other small players to grow and focus solely on improving their RSS reader? Yes, it was unfair to their users that they were left out suddenly. But I am sure they will find good alternatives.

rafski 14y ago

RSS was a business threat to Google, it allowed people to glance through aricle headers and often read them whole without ads. Google Reader allowed Google to contain this trend, then slowly phase it out as much as they could. People easily forget ads are Google's main product that provides them he bulk of their revenue.