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Google Reader is dead
- tvwonline 13y ago3rd party apps are still working, I wonder how long until they are cut off?
- ihuman 13y agoReeder has been cut off (or at least for me). It just had in update that adds feedly and feed wrangler.
- tvwonline 13y agoYep, it's gone now. The reeder update was just in the nick of time. I wonder if someone at google was waiting for it to update ;-)
- elithrar 13y agoNote that Reeder (on iOS) had Feedbin and Feedburner support prior to this update.
- robin_reala 13y agoUnfortunately it was only an iPhone Reeder update, not an iPad/Mac one.
- czzarr 13y agothank god it added feedly just in time :)
- thejosh 13y agoCached perhaps?
- tlrobinson 13y agoRIP
- adamnemecek 13y agoWe hardly knew ye.
- nakedrobot2 13y agoSad, sad. I love seeing all the stealth replacements pop up in the last week or so. Still, it is a sad day for RSS in general. Google, this will not help me use G+. Sad.
- pingbear 13y agoIf they'd integrated it into G+ I would have been less hesitant to use it.
- nakedrobot2 13y agoThey arguably did do a half-ass integration with G+, removing other sharing options and removing the nascent social network that lived inside Reader.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- steve19 13y agoRight up till the 11th hour I held out hope that Google would give Reader a last minute stay of execution. A sad day indeed.
- egeozcan 13y agoExactly my feelings. I actually kept the tab open to see if their API kept working but the feeds stopped loading and I hit F5. Oh, the horror...
- dredmorbius 13y agoI've got a tab still open and it's been updating as of 16 minutes ago (now being Tue Jul 2 15:27:02 UTC 2013), though the same URL in a new tab brings up the tombstone.
- WildUtah 13y agoAnd they actually, truly pulled the plug, with almost no warning. Now I have no idea what I'll do.
- tdicola 13y agoAs annoyed as I am with Reader's demise, you can't really say they gave no warning. Four months heads up, and for the last few weeks daily reminders when you logged in should have gotten the message across.
- Svip 13y agoGo to the websites manually?
- simonw 13y agoApparently you can export your subscriptions using Google Takeout until the 15th of July.
- ersii 13y agoI've gotten a warning/notice almost every day the last months, that Google Reader is about to shut down. That's not "with almost no warning". You can still export your feeds from Google Takeout until the 15th of July.
- shurcooL 13y agoI didn't want to accept this would happen. So it's kinda hard to believe it actually did. Oh well, more free time.
- squidi 13y agoI've not enjoyed using any of the new readers so far, so will be spending my "free" time going though my Pocket and Kindle backlogs (The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches is insiprational).
- binarydreams 13y agoA Sad Day. RIP.
- ensmotko 13y agoThe Android application still seems to be working, but they'll probably kill it soon enough.
- mtowle 13y agoBREAKING: In a surprise belated April Fool's joke, Google revives Reader, according to former CEO Eric Schmidt, "just to fuck with everyone who spent money developing a shitty alternative."
- personlurking 13y agoV2: Google Reader reads you.
- znowi 13y agoHa. Very smooth. Upvote for you :)
- stevewillows 13y agoI've found a decent experience using Feedly in Chrome for the desktop and GReader for Android using the Feedly API. Still not as good as EasyRSS, but it will suffice until the dust settles. In other news: EasyRSS has been open sourced: https://github.com/davidsun/EasyRSS https://github.com/davidsun/EasyRSS
- tdicola 13y agoShould be a fun next couple of weeks as all the Reader replacements get a big spike in traffic and deal with inevitable scaling problems.
- olegp 13y agoIf you still haven't found a replacement, here's our list of alternatives that was on the front page of HN on Friday: https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader It now includes the additions mentioned in the comments and the countries where the service is hosted for those that are concerned by Prism.
- habosa 13y agoRIP Reader. For those looking for a replacement, especially those with an Android phone, check out Newsblur. It's all open source, the developer is accessible, and most importantly it works insanely well. I honestly like it better than Reader.
- davidw 13y agoI'm trying it, but it has a few things that bug me. They messed with the arrow keys - they no longer scroll the page. I'm always accidentally going to the next or previous article. ARGH! I miss the smart sorting order that Reader had - it was really good about bubbling stuff I cared about up to the top and letting me whip through the rest.
- bering 13y agoThe developer has listened to the feedback on scrolling and added configuration options so you can now use the arrow keys. Bugged me as well, but I'm happy with the new options.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoI dislike those options. I do not want to set a percentage to scroll by; I want to use whatever my browser would normally scroll by natively.
- voltagex_ 13y agoI'd love to use NewsBlur, except when I signed up my screen is filled with French feeds, with no way to get rid of them and no indication of why.
- bdz 13y ago"... we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience." Yeah, Reader held back the development of the robot car, glasses, floating balloon internet and the brazilian social site...
- batiudrami 13y agoI'm pretty sick of this argument. Google is a company, they are not compelled to continue to support a product which is (presumably) not making money, or even if the resources they devote to it could be making more money elsewhere. Honestly I think Google went above and beyond by giving advance notice, having an API which allows feed exporting and allowing subscriptions to continue to be exported after they close it down for those who ignored the advance notice as well as linking to alternative products. Sure it sucks for those who used it, but can you imagine a company like Apple or Facebook doing all that for a product they're killing?
- oelmekki 13y agoEven if I agree with you that google handled reader shutdown pretty well once it's been decided, I'm not sure the "they're a company, they do what they please to make money" is better than the argument it's refuting. You can't say "Please, let all of you use our products, it'll be awesome !", then say "we don't care if you're not satisfied, we do what we please". Having users also imply responsibilities.
- epsylon 13y agoI'm pretty sure plenty of Reader power users would have been glad to pay for it, myself included.
- deweerdt 13y agoThat would have meant customer support, wouldn't it? Google doesn't do that.
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- SCdF 13y ago.
- beaker52 13y agoI wish there was a decent alternative out there. They all seem to be a bit unpolished. The most polished alternative I've seen is Feedly. I wrote to the founder about this many moons ago explaining that in trying to be 'innovative' with the UI, for me the whole user experience detracts so badly from the functionality I want from the app that I don't want to use it. Where is the alternative, with the polish, without the 'innovation'. Perhaps I should build one... I'll get my coat.
- tr4656 13y agoWhat's wrong with Feedbin or Fever?
- greetings 13y agoThere are a few I have come to like: These ones are all simple and much like google reader. Digg, BazQux and The Old reader all have pocket and/or similar services integrated and are all nice. I have decided that I will be using BazQux for my reader needs, it is fastest and seems to be nicely designed and is robust. It will also not be going away because it is currently profitable. The Old Reader http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/ Digg Reader(yes that digg) https://digg.com/reader https://digg.com/reader and BazQux reader https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/ Comma feed http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/
- ivank 13y agoOrganizing the World's Information... and setting it on fire 8 years later.
- chrra 13y agoSo it goes.
- georgebashi 13y agoGoogle Reader kept the content of RSS feeds cached forever, meaning it was the last surviving record of a huge number of dead and deleted blogs. The Archive Team have spent the last month or so fetching those blogs out of Reader to serve as a permanent archive. They posted a few days ago on HN asking for some last minute help, and managed to archive 46.23M feeds. Check out their efforts here: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader
- martinkallstrom 13y agoMy former startup Twingly http://twingly.com http://twingly.com has hundreds of millions of blog posts stored (everything collected since 2006) in 128 MySql shards with a unified query interface. The last few months of data are indexed and searchable for free from their website, but the entire archive is kept forever.
- ersii 13y agoThat's great. However, ArchiveTeam has uploaded all data that they've found (at least 46.23M feeds) to the Internet Archive. That means it's public for everyone to mine through and/or use. I'm not trying to belittle Twingly here - but their "last few months of data" are maybe not really comparable to completely free and public data - kept forever.
- porker 13y agoWould you donate your data to the Internet Archive?
- martinkallstrom 13y agoPerhaps there could be some continuous rollover with all data older than five years being made available through the Internet Archive. I'm no longer affiliated with Twingly but of course know them very well. I can make a proposal! It would be a great idea and I guess for Twingly it could mean increased brand recognition.
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- pjmlp 13y agoSo what! My native RSS reader is still working.
- unicornporn 13y agoFor me, this was a good move. It inspired me to finally look past Google for the web based services I use daily (search, mail, rss, analytics, calendar, video hosting etc). Google's wants to know as much about me as possible. Putting all of my eggs in their basket seems like horrible idea. I've now come quite far in my exodus. Yesterday I found https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ (uses Google) which gives good results (roughly same as Swedish Google but not filter bubbled). DDG (uses different sources, but seems to weight Bing) is downright terrible when not using English as search language.
- mikelat 13y ago> Google's wants to know as much about me as possible. Which is the reason they shut it down most probably. They can data mine your documents, emails, social networking etc but something like google reader doesn't help much. They most they'll get out of it is a few rss feeds and can analyze what you like, but hell they already know what you search for so it's useless data.
- crdoconnor 13y agoI always just assumed that they were using it to weight web page rankings, and that it probably paid off just for that reason alone. If a website has a lot of genuine RSS subscribers in Google Reader who read it regularly, then that shows a strong degree of trust in the source, and thus a good reason to rank it highly. You can't really mine social networking / emails for the same kind of information. Not unless everybody who used google reader started using G+ the same way (which is not gonna happen).
- tempestn 13y agoWow, that's a good point though. Does anyone know whether Google uses links in private emails to refine search rankings? With gmail being the most popular free email by far, that might be a small but significant edge on the competition. (Not that Google needs such an edge at the moment, but that doesn't mean they'd pass it up.)
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- alolz 13y agoi can not belive..google reader is dead..
- moreentropy 13y agoThis is hardly news now is it?
- rob22 13y agoIn future, G+ also dead like this....... RIP for GReader.....
- petercooper 13y agoIt'll be less important now than it was 3-6 years ago, but get ready for all those FeedBurner subscriber count widgets to show huge subscriber # crashes as Reader no longer checks in. Back in the day, they were a sort of informal auditing system and definitely helped me land advertisers for my blog (simply because I could "prove" I had 20,000 readers or whatever). Thankfully I ditched the Web and moved to e-mail and know exactly how many subscribers I had, but this was certainly more luck and not any great piece of foresight on my part ;-)
- pavel_lishin 13y agoThis is going to sound antagonistic, but I'm genuinely curious: How many subscribers did you lose when you switched from RSS to email, and how do you know that all of them are receiving and reading your dispatches? Personally, getting an e-mail instead of an RSS feed is sub-optimal - I can't easily add things to pocket from e-mail. I'm also wondering how many people trained their clients to re-route to spam.
- petercooper 13y agoI didn't do a like for like switch from the Web to e-mail, it was more specific for the format, so I can't make a direct comparison sadly. Because e-mail proved way more successful for me, I've basically let the Web properties die but that was not the original intent. With e-mail, the engagement and revenue are way higher, and it's possible to get an accurate feel for how big the audience is (as in, I know I have 123k subscribers or whatever) and how many of those are engaged, reading, and clicking on stuff. I was very skeptical at the start and just tried it out because of all the e-mail newsletter hoopla on HN 3-4 years ago but it's now my main business and growing more rapidly than my Web publications ever did. There are, of course, many who are not fans of e-mail but like Facebook oriented businesses can make good money even though not everyone likes Facebook.. so too can e-mail companies do very well off the majority who are still using e-mail.
- otikik 13y agoGood-night, sweet prince.
- csense 13y agoI have no gmail account, no Youtube account, and no Google Reader...Google's always been a little too big for me to want to trust more than I have to, so I've gotten by without accounts on their services... And that means I get to feel smugly superior to everyone else in this discussion.
- piyush_soni 13y agoAnd that also means that in other than a few of these instances, you constantly feel inferior to everyone else in the society, because of the things you are missing :).
- pdevr 13y agoYou can, at least about Gmail. Especially since there is no way to export your Gmail data using Google Takeout.
- smackfu 13y agoThe RSS area was pretty damns sparse outside of Reader. Were you just not using one?
- csense 13y agoFor a while I was manually checking websites. I used RSSowl for a time, then Thunderbird. RSS is a simple, open protocol (heck, they burn two out of three letters in their acronym to say it's "really simple") and there are plenty of alternatives. If they're really unsatisfactory it wouldn't be too hard to roll your own.
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- gmantastic 13y agoI liked Google Reader, but all those great posts queued up with no time to read them properly felt like neglected homework. It's a shame to lose it, but maybe for the best. I won't be rushing to recreate it. Links posted on Hacker News and Twitter allow me to find something interesting to read when I need it, without making any kind of commitment. For the very rare thing that I don't want to miss, I subscribe by email.
- alinspired 13y agoBastards, they killed reader :)
- stephen_mcd 13y agoIf you've left finding a replacement to now, please take a second to check out kouio: https://kouio.com https://kouio.com We posted it to HN a few days ago, and since then have had over 600 signups and processed over 1.5 million feed items! We've made a ton of tiny improvements since then, with many more to come.
- cfinke 13y agoI tried it when you posted it, but I gave up on it when it took 15 seconds to load any content after logging in :-(
- iliaznk 13y agoRIP By the way, I quite like the Digg Reader but it doesn't display the unread count regardless of the settings. Is it only me?
- lake99 13y agoNot just you. I don't see unread counts either, no matter how many times I toggle the odd-looking button in settings.
- Achshar 13y agoIt was showing the count a few days ago. Most probably a bug. They'll fix it soon enough I guess.
- snogglethorpe 13y agoI don't see any unread counts either, despite turning them on in settings (the FAQ mentions that there's such a setting, although it implies it's turned on by default, whereas it was turned off for me...). In fact, I also don't get any icons—or text, they're just blank space—for buttons... to even open the settings dialog I had to click randomly in likely-looking blank spaces on the main page. >< I get the feeling they really rushed this out, and maybe didn't do a whole lot of testing...
- iamkhush 13y agoJust cant figure it out why?? Anyways , using Feedly on web and android. Looks ok!!
- bdz 13y agoSerious question: Why no one offered to buy or take over the service? Like Google Wave - Apache Wave
- fpgeek 13y agoFrom what I understand, Google Reader was fairly tied into Google's infrastructure (e.g. piggybacking off of Google's web crawler for feed updates), so there wouldn't be much left if you separated Google Reader from Google.
- Confusion 13y agoNow if only Feedly will allow me some way to pay them...
- unicornporn 13y agoThere's NewsBlur for that... :)
- easyfrag 13y agoFeedbin have been using the money I and others have been paying to enhance their service. http://blog.feedbin.me/ http://blog.feedbin.me/
- workbench 13y agoLast time I ever trust that company with a service I rely on. and before you ask no I have never used GMail
- icebraining 13y agoBecause they closed a service? I think you'll be hard pressed to find anyone - company, non-profit, whoever - who will maintain a service indefinitely. If you want to keep something running for as long as possible, you need to eliminate single points of failure like those (except yourself, of course). That means building a stack where each part is either ran by you or a replaceable commodity. For example, I run my email, RSS and website on a generic VPS (of which there are many providers) which runs an open source stack that I know how to configure and maintain. I still rely on other people, but not on a single person or company.
- radiac 13y agoI feel exactly the same way - wherever possible I run my own services on my own servers, so I know where my data's going, and I'm not at the mercy of someone else changing or removing a feature I like, or shutting it down completely. If I fall out with the hosting company, I can just get another server elsewhere. I only switched to self hosted for RSS recently though - when google announced they were shutting reader, I figured I'd write my own for an existing django site. Quick shameless plug: I released it on Sunday, in case anyone's interested - https://github.com/radiac/django-yarr https://github.com/radiac/django-yarr Which brings me on to my main exception for self-hosting: public repositories on github. The collaborative features they provide seem worth the loss of control - although their recent UI enhancements (making it harder to check issue counts, find repo addresses etc) does rather prove my point.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Because they closed a service? I think you'll be hard pressed to find anyone - company, non-profit, whoever - who will maintain a service indefinitely. If a company isn't willing to ever close a service voluntarily, its going to have a much higher risk (because it can't adapt to market changes) of having to close all of its services involuntarily. So, yeah, I'd agree with that.
- tzury 13y agono news. has been chewed over and over. here and everywhere. yet, get the top position at HN. What does this means?
- mwexler 13y agoThe stages of grief each take time, and the amount of time varies from person to person. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model
- Narretz 13y agoI use The Old Reade, which I can use exactly like Google Reader, with the exception that k does not always skip to the next article; if you're reading an article it skips to the top of that. Same strange behavior as Google Reader is that while the number of unread posts is correct, the content of your feed is not up-to-date, so you first have to click on the result number, then it is updated. Apart from that, it's really nice. I never used any social features of the Reader, just the aggregation. That's why I couldn't care less if they implement RSS support or a recommendation engine in G+.
- chii 13y agogoogle reader had this feature where you could subscribe to an rss feeds filtered by label (or folders). I wish the old reader had it (i tried inoreader, and old reader, and neither has this feature unfortunately).
- greyman 13y agoWe'll see how it takes off when more users will come. It works fine feature-wise for me, it's just noticeably slower than Google Reader was... they probably don't have a large enough infrastructure yet.
- lunchladydoris 13y agoThis sucks. Hitting RE in Alfred has become muscle memory by now. I've switched to Feedly and it's pretty decent. Something feels a little off, but it does most of what I want. Sigh.
- prfeedreader 13y agoEven though Google Reader is dead you can still migrate to alternative services, like Feedreader Online: http://feedreader.com/online/ http://feedreader.com/online/ Just use OPML files to import your feeds and categories.
- lsdkfj 13y agoFuck google. Seriously. Really? Couldn't keep it running? Bastards.
- thomasf1 13y agoQuick poll: Where do you stand on this? -> Focus (1...10) Keeping the product I´m a bit conflicted.. on one hand they lost user confidence by discontinuing Reader, on the other I completely get the approach to focus on a few things and really do them well.
- pgambling 13y ago"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
- camus 13y agoLong live to Google Reader! I hope, it will allow some startup to come up with great products, but please ,think users first , not showing off your html5 skills or whatever... RSS is about reading text content and suscribing to feeds , not bells and whistles or closed social networking plateforms.
- ciniglio 13y agoIf you're looking for a new reader to try, check out www.readuction.com . It's a different take on RSS, that intelligently gives you fewer articles to read. A friend and I built it over a few months, and we'd love any feedback you have. You can import and export your feeds, so no need to worry about having data locked in.
- finnw 13y agoLooks good. But how do you resync?
- shreeshga 13y agoIts for the better. First step towards a 'news push'[ex. Google currents] rather than a 'news pull'
- magoon 13y agoGmail's days may be numbered -- you never know..
- bdcravens 13y agoPerhaps, but I doubt it - it's a freaking goldmine of data. RSS feeds - lets Google know a little bit about you, but not in the way that your personal searches and your personal communications do.
- mikemoka 13y agoIt is their right to choose to discontinue a product, I would have appreciated them more anyway if they would have chosen to give back to the community and put in the limited amount of work needed to opensource it though. Goodbye Reader.
- faizanaziz 13y agoHappens all the time… You are the product not the customer… Thats why we built Pixter - http://pixter.in http://pixter.in
- mmuro 13y agoUltimate dick move for them to link to Google Reader alternatives.
- kyle_wm 13y agoReally, or are you being sarcastic? That seems pretty classy to me...
- roberthahn 13y agoOn the topic of Google Reader alternatives: most of the popular alternatives involve a central online storage. I may be unique, but I'd be quite happy for an iOS app that allows me to import my OPML file of feeds and sync it locally. Given those constraints, could anyone suggest an app that would fit the bill? I've been looking, and the only app I could find that fit the criteria so far is RSSRunner by golden-apps.com -- which I'm not quite happy with.
- johnminter 13y agoSounds like Vienna would interest you... Not sure you could import your feeds directly, but it is not hard to set them up...
- roberthahn 13y agounless I missed something, Vienna looks like a Mac OS X app… I was looking for an iPhone/iPad app
- jdechko 13y agoThere are tons of RSS apps with little or no syncing. My app of choice is Reeder, which can be used with or without a syncing service.
- roberthahn 13y agothe problem when you have 'tons of RSS apps with little or no syncing is that it becomes hard to find the ones that work in standalone mode from the rest. Thanks for the tip on Reeder. It looks great but I can't figure out where the OPML import is.
- frankcaron 13y agoI'm curious; given that HN represents a community that could very well be construed as the "power user" archetype, how much would people here have paid for Reader as a service? $5/month? $100/year? Free with a Google Drive subscription?
- pavel_lishin 13y agoFor Google Reader specifically, probably $0.00 - it would feel too much like a hostage negotiation at this point. I am, however, paying $24/year for NewsBlur right now, so I guess $2/month is my starting bid.
- Ultron 13y agoGood Lord people. Get on with your lives!
- d2ncal 13y agoNobody mentioned tinytinyrss - I found it to be the best rss reader as a google reader alternative. Its open source and also has an android app that rocks.
- mikejarema 13y agoI've been using Google Alerts via RSS for years now, primarily consuming the alerts by way of Reader, but more recently Feedly. One thing I didn't expect was to have Alerts drop RSS support coinciding with Reader's death. However, today in Feedly I'm staring at a wall of "Google Alerts no longer supports RSS delivery" items. This suggests to me that RSS was an output for Google products insofar as it served as a way of feeding content (and eyeballs) into Reader. Now that Reader is gone, why would Google output RSS? Anyone seeing any other Google RSS feeds failing in a similar fashion?
- BenoitEssiambre 13y agoGoogle lost a lot of trust and goodwill from a lot of its power users with this move. I hope for them they had a good reason.
- pohl 13y agoOf course it's a good reason: they needed create company-wide, laser-like focus on making it possible for rich pervs to shoot amateur POV hands-free.
- debt 13y agoWhy do they need the trust and goodwill of a lot of power users?
- ddunkin 13y agoWhen people work in a the tech field, they assume a large percentage of people are power users, because they probably don't get out enough. Every non-technical person I know has a Gmail account, they sure don't know what reader is.
- gizmo686 13y agoThe question is, how many of those people would have become Gmail users if not for Gmail's early success with the technical people. I do not know the answer to that (or even if it is an accurate premise), but one theory would be that in order to get non-technical users, you must first get the technical users, who will give your product good word of mouth and help it spread.
- ddunkin 13y agoWho actually paid money directly to Google for this service? If your answer is 'not me', then I find it tough to complain.
- cypherpnks 13y agoAll data deleted is a dick move. Google should at least be able to preserve takeout data for eternity.