Whatever was said at the time, I’m convinced Google Reader was collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had social features (which I honestly never used) and anything social had to be G+.
Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.
In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how Google was perceived. There were grumblings before that but Google was still the darling of the web.
As you say, Google+ was consuming Google at that time. So when they killed Reader it was not just killing a beloved service. It also acted like a lightning rod for the discontent that had started to swell. A lot of people would never again view Google through a rose tinted lens.
I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google got a lot of early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of proprietary secrets), it certainly seemed like the slippery slope towards evil in the "extinguish" part of the triple-E "bad guy mentality" most often referenced when talking about 90s Microsoft.
Google Reader was built top to bottom on RSS and OPML (and Atom), which were open web standards. You could import an RSS feed from just about anywhere and read in in Reader. You could export your list of feeds back out as OPML which a bunch of other readers supported. Google+ was much more a walled garden with proprietary everything.
It happened in other areas too, such as Google moving away from the XMPP/Jabber-standardized (and federated!) Talk system to ones entirely proprietary. Wave was announced and designed to be XMPP-backed and federated as well. It seems like Wave died as much because they wanted to lock that down too. You can't just subscribe to Google Docs as a federated XMPP user and run a custom Google Docs frontend, Google Docs is just another proprietary walled garden now.
> I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now"
And when they removed the discussion filter from searches, so that looking for opinions on a product from blogs/forums suddenly became next to impossible without being inundated by results of shops advertising that product.
The technical cost of leaving that filter in place would have been zero, but apparently there were other priorities; that was the day everything cool I associated with Google ceased to exist.
Minor nit: Page Rank is pretty much spelled out publicly in the patent. I haven't read the implementation code, but I was on the indexing team. I don't think the source / root node(s) of the graph were ever made public, but other than that, the algorithm itself is known.
Ascorer, Amit's Scorer is where the ranking magic happens. My team generated a few of the hundreds/thousands of signals that went into Ascorer. I'm not sure if learn-to-rank is still considered Ascorer, or its replacement. I left before Amit, but seeing the things that came out leading to his departure, I'm sure it's no longer called Ascorer.
(On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)
> (On a side note... what's the word for scratching the name of a disgraced Egyptian pharaoh off a monument? Iconoclasm and ostracization aren't quite the phrase I'm looking for.)
Damnatio memoriae?
> Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC.
"Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication.
(for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)
> (for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping,
One thing I learned from poking around financial models (I was/am a maintainer for a domain-specific financial modeling language used by a Fortune 500 financial services company) is that some ships are capesize[0], meaning they're too big for either the Panama or Suez canal and must transit Cape Horn and/or Cape Agulhas.
In our language, Booleans are represented as IEEE-754 double-precision floating point numbers (0.0 is False, everything else is true, with the constant True being 1.0), so for a bit I was imagining gigantic container ships dressing up as superheroes and putting on capes, and going to parties out in the middle of the ocean. Digging a bit deeper, I discovered this particular field was being used as a Boolean, and a quick web search ruined the magic of what capesize really meant.
I presume this wound up in our financial models because whether a ship is capesize affects its value, which affects the value of corporate bonds (or other corporate debt instruments) partially backed by ships as collateral. I suppose it's also possible that at some point we entered into bespoke repurchase agreements involving ships. (To avoid various risks in bankruptcy courts, sometimes financing is arranged by selling some asset below market value with an agreement to buy it back at a fixed date at a fixed higher price. There might also be a rental agreement involved. The cash flows look like a secured loan, but in case the loan can't be repaid, a court order isn't necessary to seize assets... the collateral assets have already legally changed hands.)
It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the social media giants.
I realized later that it's Geocities v2; essentially. Still a fun thought that sort of service is still a thing. I think Medium.com is probably the best offspring that I can think of.
And it's not just the web. It's everything. Every company in our capitalist utopia just keeps growing and growing.
Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their offerings.
But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same. Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it.
And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former management's objectives for the site to run more closely to my interests than Microsoft's.
Not that many people who use Linux are clamoring for it, but it's interesting that GitHub does not provide an official desktop app for Linux -- even though it's a frickin Electron all. And that's totally GitHub's doing.
Meanwhile, at the parent company, Microsoft offets VS Code for Linux. And it's nice.
What I dislike about Linux in general is how often the mentality for an app is “you’re using Linux, just find the repository and figure out how to get the release to your system or build it yourself”.
Why would I need an "official desktop app" for anything, if I got a perfectly good git, and with git being perfectly integrated in modern IDEs (should I need a more GUI approach?)
I found active bookmarks in Firefox to meet my needs before they removed that feature. I don't remember Google Reader all that well and I'm wondering how it was different than other RSS readers. For example, Akregator is commonly available today. (I remember that Google Reader could aggregate more than just RSS feeds, but I don't remember exactly what.)
It wasn't the fastest, but I think that now browser (and CPU) tech has moved on since then, it'd probably be a lot smoother. I remember using it once to coordinate specs on a small contract job and it worked pretty well for that.
But they didn't even try very hard.
G+ didn't event have a way to create events.
Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar.
But no, you could only post stories and pictures.
That made for a rather bare-bones social network.
This is a great illustration of the problem G+ had; events in g+ were amazing but nobody (apparently) knew. Setting them up was easy, inviting people was easy, privacy for events made sense from the UI, etc. If you set things up correctly, everyone who was invited would have a shared photo album that they would be able to share pictures to with one click.
I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album created this way; to this day they swear that if it had been marketed better g+ events would have put wedding photographers out of business...
Did people have to have G+ accounts to receive invites? I know Facebook requires it, but if they just used standard calendaring events (maybe with an info link to g+?) that would seem a winner
Maybe they added it later?
When it launched there was no such feature, I think they added events after a year or so, but by then all the hype had already died down.
First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with that material design, and it all was very confusing
G+ had events, I used to use them all the time. And then they removed them from communities, which was a large portion of how people (in my circles at least) used them. So that made it a lot less useful.
Yeah, I noticed this too: I think Google Reader was heavily used by the right sort of people (devs, bloggers and media types) that, when Google killed it, it created a lot of bad will with the people who shape opinions.
Interesting perspective. I had long tended towards the viewpoint of, "Jeez guys, it's just an RSS reader, there's 50 better ones now, why do we have to whine about Reader getting cancelled every 5 minutes?". This is the first good explanation I've found for why it could be considered a bigger deal.
Yes, for me that's when I started to develop a negative opinion if Google. I still use Android but aside from that my life has drastically been de-googled since then.
Though very disappointed, it is not surprising in retrospect. Google doesn't want to make a niche application for a handful (relatively) of nerds. They want to make unduplicatable AI/big-data services for billion+ users. Anyone can make a feed reader. No one else has been able to create a search engine, translation service, or email service (spam filtering, auto-complete) nearly as good.
Your information is a few years out of date, there is a new translation engine on the market that seems to be objectively better (deepl.com) as well as more GDPR-friendly ;)
The search engine I can't disagree with.
The email service... email is email to me, Google doesn't offer any features that Thunderbird doesn't already have && that I want. If you mean the search function inside of gmail, then yes, but that's kinda also just search. Or if you mean deliverability, that's not a function of skill but a function of being huge and if my mail server does something wrong then nobody is going to believe me if I say it's google's fault and google definitely isn't going to fix it. Or if you mean spam filtering, that's again because they just throw you out (into the spambox, but because google users rarely look there, that's out) and force you to use some (other) bigcorp for delivering just to them. The power that comes with being super huge.
The problem with “email is email” is that people can’t easily change email addresses, so once in gmail they can’t leave, no matter how egregiously google abuses the data.
We might be better off with an email address portability law similar to what exists for mobile phone numbers, but even without that GMail offers POP and IMAP access as well as forwarding to external addresses.
I mean they could've easily sprinkled in some AI to decide which specific unread items to prioritise, and turned the homepage into a social media feed with sharing and commenting, while presenting RSS feeds similarly to Facebook's pages.
It had all the potential to become the basis of Google+, but Google just prioritises building products from scratch instead of improving existing ones (hence 50 or so IM / video call apps).
That would've been a good way to go. It's a shame they haven't gotten social to catch in any of their many attempts (Buzz, Plus, YouTube, Reader, etc.) because I'd prefer anything from Google over Facebook.
I'm cautiously optimistic that Google is slowly recognizing the error prioritizing hot new projects over continuous maintenance and improvement of existing ones. Google Chat seems like it might finally be a proper successor to Google Talk after dozens of half-baked services: Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Duo, Messages, etc. etc. etc.
Sites will not let you crawl unless you are Google or maybe Microsoft. They might have, if it looked like you were likely going to become much better than Google and would be competitive. But you will never look like that because they will not let you crawl. Is this true? I don't know, but it is one story. And gets to why there's a more fundamental economic mechanism to Google's monopoly, over Amazon's or Microsoft's.
Is it really? Gmail is pretty good at spam blocking and searching through your email. I haven't found a better alternative, although I'm open to other options
Is there evidence that Google+ caused the demise of Google Reader? Couldn't a simpler explanation be that the VP in charge of this product wanted to put headcount toward something more profitable? One problem with talking about a large company is that decisions, even major ones, are often made without other functions having much of a say, and yet every decision is attributed to the company as a whole. And just because Google+ was happening at the same time as the Reader shutdown doesn't mean you can create a causal link between the two.
The social features were actually killed off before the product itself: a few years earlier they did a redesign which removed all of the social features. The social features were cool, I remember following a couple of journalists i really like who commented on the articles and discussed it with each other, it was a really nice thing.
The reason people are so bitter is that Google Reader was the kind of thing that if you liked it, it became part of your daily routine. It became the thing you checked in the morning over coffee, the thing you checked when you were procrastinating at work. Today that is social media, but Google Reader really felt like your own little curated space in a way (say) Twitter does not: with Twitter, you always feel at the mercy of The Algorithm. It also was essentially totally free of the toxic stuff you see on social media today.
They took this cool and personal service, ripped all social features out, did zero development on it for years, and then unceremoniously killed it in some insane attempt to make Google+ into the next Facebook. I'm still pissed about it, and it was the last time I've ever made myself rely on a Google Service like this.
The basic fact that it was a "reader" presumed that people would read the article before commenting, which made it so different from Twitter (and hacker news for that matter) where it seems the majority of people repost and comment based solely on the headline. Twitter was testing a feature recently that popped up a confirmation dialog asking if you had read the link you hadn't clicked on before you were able to retweet it.
Newsblur has support for twitter feeds alongside RSS. You need to setup an API key for it and it's a bit hidden in the settings, but once setup it works really well for consuming (not participating in) feeds.
Combined with the training features of Newsblur you can curate twitter feeds even more. Don't want to see re-tweets by a specific user, thumbs down. Don't want to see replies by another user, thumbs down. Want to percolate a specific keyword to the top, thumbs up.
I don't think I've looked at my native twitter feed in months.
As someone who prefers both chronological river (https://techmeme.com/river) AND a metric of popularity (upvotes) nothing beats https://hckrnews.com. I wish that design was more common.
Instead of having higher ranking posts climb to the top, a hotness bar and a popular bar to the left of links is ideal. The bigger the bars, the more activity an article is generating.
Are there any feedreaders that I can use to 1) score but not rank articles, and 2) set a threshold to hide everything below a score 3) deduplicate stories from multiple sources, and aggregate+/average their scores together?
I remember this happening on Facebook but it hasn't happened to me on Twitter that I can remember. I've had the setting on for at least a couple years without issues.
Because Google Reader was the social network for people who don't like talking about themselves but about things on the web that they find interesting, and nothing since has ever come close to it.
Also because killing Google Reader single handedly killed a bustling and fast growing RSS based ecosystem.
Google Reader was the first RSS client to incorporate social features with RSS. To that it added an extremely fast web client (I can't think of any web client that even existed before), and syncing across devices.
A LOT of software in the RSS ecosystem relied on Google Reader for their syncing capabilities. It had basically become the defacto backend for the majority of RSS readers. As an example, I used NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and while I rarely (never?) used the Google Reader interface, NNN relied on my Google Reader account to backup and sync my feeds.
Google Reader had basically become essential infrastructure in the RSS ecosystem.
While it can't have helped, I can't "single handedly" blame Google for the death of RSS. By 2013 RSS was already arguably dying all by itself.
RSS was awesome in late 2000s during the Web 2.0 mania and it was common to see entire site's contents reproduced in their feed. By 2013 I'd argue many sites had realized giving their full text content away with no ads in the RSS feed wasn't exactly helping their bottom lines and started delivering ads and content snippets instead. The intent of course was to drive you back to the site where ads can be served more reliably. When these practices became widespread RSS quickly lost its shine for me and others I'm sure.
This is very contrary to my experience: it was thriving up until the day Google pulled the switch. I knew a number of people who were expecting them not to go through with it because Reader was so important to their daily routine. The catastrophic failure Google made was not recognizing how disproportionately the Reader community were influencers — in particular, tons of journalists used it so they were pushing out an un-QAed Google+ and telling everyone that it was great right after taking away the service they liked. Even if Google+ had been well-designed or implemented that would have been a tough sell. Since it took something like 6 months for them to think about problems like privacy, spam, or notification overload the coverage of Google+ was overwhelmingly negative.
All of the RSS readers I used at the time other than the Reader web app also had the option of fetching full text or loading the feed in a browser frame to avoid the fragment problem. Some of that was simply performance: a busy site publishing full text could generate some massive XML files which take time to transfer and parse.
Also, why is it a problem to show ads in feeds? Annoying ones, sure, but I'd be happy to have ads (or pay for a subscription) if that meant that places could pay journalists.
The social aspect is the part I missed most. It was a good rss reader, to be sure, but plenty others exist. But the surrounding conversation was strictly with people who I followed. I may be misremembering it a bit, but I recall that most of the comments I saw under any article were by people I knew, which was ideal.
I like reddit and this site enough to visit almost daily, and it's important to get opinions from strangers which is why I value these sites, but the signal / noise ratio is awful. Being able to see a list of news I've explicitly catered to myself _and_ commentary from people I explicitly care to hear from was excellent.
Then again the internet "crowd" was much different back then. It may just be an artifact of its own time by this point.
This. The gReader feed was manually curated & annotated by sources we trusted and their friends. Less ramblings, no pushy algorithm suggestions. The UI was snappy but it was essentially about the community.
After Google Reader got plugged off, I haven't stuck with any of the alternatives, as the community wasn't there.
Wishfully thinking, if enough VIPs would turn to a similarly structured platform, we could have our feed back.
Maybe for you, in terms of linked articles. Other than that I'd hardly find the two comparable.
Google Reader had reshares, not upvotes. The only indication you had for "is this an article worth reading?" beyond the actual headline was the number of friends who reshared the same article. However, unlike any other social network, Google Reader wouldn't show me who reshared an article first, nor would you get any imaginary points for sharing something interesting. As such, there was no gamified hunt for "karma" or "upvotes" or whatever. There was no incentive for resharing other than "I read/watched this and think it's interesting", and the result was a much more sincere curation of topics that interested your friends.
Similarly, there were no downvotes or upvotes on the discussions.
NewsBlur copied that set-up, but out of roughly 40 close friends from college who intensely used Google Reader, only five made the switch to NewsBlur. The rest ended up scattered among chat apps and other social networks.
True. My first internet enabled phone was Nokia 7210 (or 6210 i think). A tiny one, with half screen & lower half keyboard. Sharp crispy colors. Opera mini & Google Reader had all of my feeds lined up. Some philosophical posts, some technical, some funny, a bit of everything I liked. Pure Author Contents. No comments on the feed atleast. I miss it.
I would check it in the morning, while in washroom, in bus, waiting & any time.
In retrospect, Google Reader could have evolved into a service like tiktok that keeps pushing interesting contents to its subscribers. Of course, it's easier to say that in hindsight.
For me, Google Reader was about high volume headline digestion, reading articles without having to follow links, read articles without having to switch between a multitude of publishers’ crappy and varied web UIs. It was about fast and efficient information hoovering from around the world. Reddit is a different animal altogether. Great for what it does but not like a clean RSS tree.
Also, just want to add: Google killed the “discussions” search filter, which let you limit your search results to forums, around the same time, IIRC. Screw Google.
What I forgot to mention in that comment was that Google Reader was tied to your Gmail account. The only people who were in "your" network by default were other people on Gmail where Google had somehow determined that you knew each other (presumably whether you were in each other's address book). This is opposite of HN or Reddit, where everyone can sign up and it's basically all strangers in a public popularity contest.
Collateral damage is an interesting way to put it. I've heard the internal story from people who worked at Google at the time, and it sounds like the rough sequence of events goes like this:
1. Google Reader is launched, built on internal Google technologies (the distributed database and filesystem technologies available at the time, like GFS).
2. Headcount is not allocated to Google Reader to do ongoing engineering work. Headcount is instead allocated to projects like Google+.
3. The technologies underneath Google Reader (like GFS) are shut down. Without the engineering headcount to migrate, Google Reader is shut down.
Google+ was reportedly shut down for the same reasons (but different technologies). The internal tech stack at Google is always changing, and projects without sufficient headcount for ongoing engineering will eventually get shut down. The timing of the Google Reader and Google+ shutdown reflect the timing of changes in Googles tech stack more than it reflects any strategic direction by Google.
[Edit: Just to be clear, this doesn't explain the reason why these projects get shut down. It just explains the timing.]
As someone seeing org level decisions being interpreted very differently by different people, I am not sure how much weight we can give to this insiders representation- this sounds like what an Eng manager (who himself might not know the real reason) would tell their disgruntled engineers.
Also the real question is why google didn’t assign an Eng team for this product used by millions, not why products without engineers die..
Just to be clear... I wasn't explaining the reason these projects get shut down, just the timeline of events and some of the contributing technical factors, since these factors are a little different at Google than at other companies.
The decision to deallocate headcount and stop ongoing engineering effort on a project will eventually cause that project to get shut down, no matter what company you work at. However, at many of the software companies I've worked at, projects that run on "industry-standard" or at least mundane tech stacks can run for a very long time with a relatively low amount of effort. At Google, the timeline is shorter.
For example, if you have a web app that runs on Rails or PHP, or something that runs on the JVM, maybe with a Postgres, MySQL, or MS SQL backend, you might be able to shove it onto different machines or VMs for years, only making occasional / minor changes to the code base. If, in 2008, you had a JVM app which used PostgreSQL and ran in Apache Tomcat, there's a good chance you could still run it today with minor changes.
At Google, the internal tech stack--filesystems, databases, monitoring, etc... has changes that are large enough and frequent enough that the situation is different, and projects are shut down on stricter timelines.
This is a really good story about how not to be a customer-centric organisation and not take user feedback.
What I take away is that just because they’re not paying customers doesn’t mean they won’t remember and judge you. And clearly people hold grudges for a long time (witness the number people who still maintain “Micro$oft is evil” from their 90s experiences).
Because that thing was infinitely useful. I was able to read 100+ articles without burning out, got the only things that I wanted to see, filter what I didn't want and was able to track the most interesting sites.
I've skimmed everything in 15 minutes, mark/star/whatever anything with unprecedented speed.
It was the ultimate user-curated feed, without all the cruft of today's feed. It was mine, tailored for me, by me.
Unpopular retrospective opinion, but given how stagnant Reader was before its death, the boon of Reader Replacements to arrive on the scene after its demise was worth its disappearance. The race to be the replacement made a metric ton of competing products better.
Yes and no. By being the de facto standard and housing most of the people, it somewhat stifled innovation in the space. Sure there were a ton of front ends built over the top of it, and the space was vibrant, but it really shined after they were forced into the spotlight. It was like turning on a flashlight and spiders scattering everywhere. The scatter breathed new sustaining life into many many projects.
I tried a bunch of them (Inoreader, Feedly, Oldreader, ttRSS) before settling on FreshRSS. It has a beautiful interface, don't need to use a dedicated mobile client as the website works perfectly and is self-hosted. Marks all the boxes for me.
Quite simply, Google Reader is antiethical to an Internet brokered by a central conglomerate. It made total sense for Google to kill it. They wanted the shitshow we have now; however on the heels of Gmail they thought they could take over every other market (social, news, announcements, etc.) too. The irony is that killing Google Reader caused enough customer fallout that none of these other products ever made it. However they wouldnt have made it if Google hadn't killed Reader.
In retrospect Google should have doubled down to monetize Reader. I'm pretty damn sure we'd be consming far less of our news directly from Facebook and Reddit had they done so.
You're right, but it wasn't about competing product... It was about competing cost. Specifically, competition for hardware resources and engineers.
Social imposed upon Google substantial new costs under-the-hood in terms of infrastructure and time to implement. You wouldn't think a Facebook competitor would require a lot of compute and storage resources, or a lot of engineering hours, but Google had high hopes regarding what the platform would become, and they definitely didn't want to get blocked by lack of resources. In addition, a massive internal infrastructure overhaul to the accounts system that was coupled with the social initiative required a re-architecting of every app that had an "account" concept attached to it.
On the grand balance sheet, Reader was a product with a non-growing userbase, didn't align with Google's long-term strategy goals, took resources to maintain, consumed storage and compute resources that could be used for more valuable bets, and was on track for a software re-architecting (which faced Google with the alternative of saving the eng-hour cost by just killing it instead of re-architecting it). Those facets combined put it on the chopping block.
RSS is a bit of a relic of an earlier, more open web, and Google Reader was at the time the best, most popular RSS client.
Killing it was bad for users, and bad for RSS, but it was also a very visible marker of a shift towards a more closed, proprietary web.
So it's not just "having Google Reader was better than not having it, I'm mad", but more about regret for what might have been if we'd all gone down a different path. The Google that, rather than killing Reader, had invested resources in it might have done other things.
Example: Right at the same time they were killing off Reader, they were removing XMPP/Jabber support from Google Talk. Is it plausible Google might have continued backing open standards like XMPP and RSS? And if they had...what would the internet be like now? It's certainly clear that RSS is much less popular than it was; could Google's support for the standard have prevented some of that?
In short: People are upset about Google Reader as such (I use bazqux.com, it's just as good as Google Reader ever was) but what it implied and represented.
RSS is hardly a "relic", it has in fact pioneered web federation technology. Newer Fediverse standards, such as ActivityStreams and ActivityPub build on the same foundation as RSS itself to decentralize more of the web.
Not sure I am/was upset enough to call it the hill I want to die on, but to me this was the decisive moment where social media took over people's consciousness. To me, it was a curated feed of educational, informative, and entertaining content sources; devoid of people constantly throwing their political biases in my face and telling me what a horrible person I am. Logically, it could have been replaced by any number of other feed aggregator tools, but it seemed the war was already lost and social media took over regardless. It wasn't the beginning of the social media onslaught, it was the last hurdle.
Meh, maybe that's inaccurate, but that's how I have felt ever since.
I think it was a more mercenary decision than (just) that: Consuming content in that method left fewer options for monetization through ads. There would be many fewer searches: right now, instead of actually typing the address bar, getting to a website for many people involves a google search as they type it into the address bar, see the results, and click on the site instead of going there directly. I'm sure they would have figured it out, but it probably wasn't a problem they were very interested in solving when they could just kill the product.
> Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.
A world where Google cares about Reader is a world where RSS remains a first class citizen on the web. So it's not Reader the product so much as what abandoning it said about Google's broader ambitions (and their hostility towards the open web).
Reader was a signal that RSS mattered. Google killing Reader sent the opposite signal. If Google cares about something, site owners have to care also (look at AMP) - and by not caring about RSS, they gave site owners permission to abandon their feeds.
In retrospect it's easy to see that the "death of Reader" wasn't some specific inflection point - Google had already stopped caring about RSS or the open web (if they ever even had). But this marked the first time a lot of us really saw and understood that Google had no interest in using its clout to protect us from the walled gardens, and instead it had ambitions to become just another walled garden itself (as became even more evident with the all-in Google+ strategy).
I agree. I used Reader a ton and was upset when Google cancelled it. I signed up for a few different paid readers, one in particular was trying to be a clone for Google Reader. But, in those few months, my behavior changed and I no longer felt like using them.
In other words, in hindsight I'm not sad it's gone. If I really valued it then I should have valued the clone but I didn't
I worked at Google, albeit not in mother ship (MTV) when Google+ was everything, those were some crazy times!! I recall when G+ numbers were so embarrassing that dashboards (built using jigsaw) were scrubbed clean and teams were mandated to report usage numbers in terms of percentages instead of active users. Apparently "25% growth QonQ" sounds better than "we added 2500 users"
I too don't get this. I also used Google Reader back then. When iPhone was novel and WiFi spots were rare, so people had to preload a part of the web to get through the day.
When they killed it I switched to NetNewsWire and didn't miss the previous product.
Since you brought up NetNewsWire, Google Reader had a critical feature back in 2005 that most RSS readers today still lack: you could configure feeds to not just store the RSS <item> but also visit the website to save the full article.
I just opened up NetNewsWire and, yup, 99% of my subscriptions are a few sentences and then a "Read more" link which kinda defeats some of the major upsides of an RSS reader. I don't just want a notification service, I want to completely cache the content locally so that I don't need to depend on an internet connection nor the fragility of the web.
I work on a project to transform partial feeds into full-text versions. The idea is you give it the partial feeds URL and subscribe to the feed URL it generates: https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/
This seems expensive to do for the host. Maybe specifically snapshotting pages for "Read it later" purposes but I can't imagine having to load up every web-page from every site you follow whether you're going to read it or not.
When you see just a blurb, you can click the paper/text icon to read the whole article. NetNewsWire downloads the feed and you don’t have to exit the app and load the full page. This works for me on kinja sites which have the read more link.
it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.
It was also one of the first times I heard doublespeak from Google and stopped loving them.
Saying “it’s expensive to maintain” and killing it because it competed with, and was better than Google+ without giving them control, was such BS. That so many smart people built and run clones as one man shows proves that Google could have maintained it for next to nothing.
What you have to remember about Google is that engineers are mostly free to choose what teams and projects they want to work on. And there's also a lot of pressure to go promo.
So in the context of the times (I joined Google roughly around when this all went down, but this is not insider information, I'm just speculating) I can imagine how it happened -- it likely became hard to staff the project. It probably became hard to "demonstrate impact" by doing incremental changes on it, and little desire on the company's part to put a major push on launching new features or migrating it to new tech stack etc. etc. People working on it could have transferred to any number of higher impact projects and done better for themselves in the corporate career success game.
No manager would have the "power" to demand that the people involved stay working on the project.
So if it needed technical work, and no product managers saw a future for it, and few if any engineers wanted to work on it, and Google was in the middle of pushing its energies behind G+... It seems inevitable for a project like that to die. It was likely dying internally long before it was killed externally. That's my educated guess anyways.
> it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.
The costs of storage and bandwidth of something as popular as Google Reader probably weren't negligible.
They probably were negligible. Billions of links, maybe some content cache that they already had since Google indexes and caches most of the web. Bandwidth was born by the user and content server. Checking RSS feeds is mostly a bunch of 304s.
The newsblur dev is in this thread and he runs a good reader and could probably say what the storage and bandwidth was.
Storage and bandwidth are pretty negligible. I'm under Digital Ocean's quota for bandwidth and NewsBlur is pretty aggressive in keeping feeds up to date. I don't keep an archive of every story ever published, but most feeds don't publish all that much and I could probably invest in storing everything with a cheaper archival DB.
Although the 80/20 rule is in effect, and when I query the DB I find that 80% of feeds have only a single active subscriber and 20% of feeds have 2+ active subscribers (activity in the past 30 days). But that's still quite a bit one-to-many fetching savings. And the majority of fetches are 304s.
Just as a curiosity, the parent is now my most downvoted comment ever. Interesting that it's so controversial to ask what's special about Google Reader.
Journalists loved google reader, and they have outsized publicity effects when you kill something they love, that is related to their work.
Therefore it feels like it dying is way more of a deal than it actually is, since what is talked about with journalists feels like is what everyone actually cares about, even if it isn't.
Personally I still miss it, nothing was quite as fast or robust in reading RSS queues. RSS feed updates were fast & reliable, the UI was fast, keyboard shortcuts made it fast to use, it didn't have basic bugs that current alternatives have at times and the few alternatives don't quite approach how good it was.
It's not like there aren't Google Reader alternatives today.
IMO, what really happened was that a lot of the sorts of people who are active on social media really liked having their own curated RSS feeds and when explicitly using RSS--and providing feeds--fell out of fashion (not that it was ever really in fashion for the mainstream) [1], it felt good to blame Google Reader as the case rather than it being an effect.
[1] Sort of. Of course, RSS still gets used behind the scenes in a lot of places, not least of which are podcasts.
Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.