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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was in the summer of 2008, three years after Google launched Reader and had at least 5 million users, when I decided to write my own RSS reader. There were just so many features I wanted that I knew Google would never build and for some strange reason I thought I could make money with my own opinionated take on a news reader.
Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I'd heard the news. That was a difficult month as I scaled (and wrote about scaling[0]), since by then Google Reader had 10 million active users. After Reader was sunset, about 5 million found their homes on the news readers that remained.
It's strange to think that naively competing with one of the big platforms paid off, but there's plenty of companies that did well in the wake of a giant choosing to ignore the ecosystem near their feet.
At some point a year or two ago I googled around for "best rss reader app" or "best rss news app" looking for android specifically, and I don't remember seeing newsblur talked about anywhere. All of the ones I did try (aggregator, feedly, inoreader, etc) were unsatisfactory in various ways.
I just downloaded and tried newsblur and it's pretty much perfect for my taste and needs. Going to try it for a few days then will likely become a paid user. This comment is coming from a place of relative ignorance, but have you considered investing in a bit of marketing, or a bit more if you have? For how good this app is among rss readers, it doesn't seem as discoverable as it deserves to be.
Marketing is hard for me because I've hired a few folks to do targeted ads and it ended up being a big cost sink. Beyond that, I try to blog regularly and use big screenshots for new features, which helps a bit with SEO and discoverability. But getting NB onto lists? I'm not sure what that requires.
FWIW, I've repeatedly come across Newsblur, when searching for RSS readers; it's quite possibly the most common name I see, even from back when Google Reader died, to a few months ago (when I last searched).
It's possible that you were adding the "for android" context in your searches, and it might not do well in that case (because of people seeing it as primarily web-based or cross-platform, and not emphasising the Android part).
Thank you for Newsblur, it's one of my essential apps and I use it for almost everything; RSS feeds, reddit, youtube, twitter, newsletters, even gemini:// via proxy.
It's a solid product, and the amount of work you've put into it shows and I plan to remain a customer for years to come.
Then you'll be excited to see the upcoming redesign that I have yet to publicly launch (but want a few users on to test the waters early): https://beta.newsblur.com
I've been with you since! Newsblur is still the way I keep up with the things I find important. I actually discovered HN on the suggested feeds thing on Newsblur!
I’ve been a paying (happily) user since Reader died, and I am a big fan of Newsblur. It’s one of my “multiple visits a day” sites / app.
You’re also super responsive on Twitter / support channels too whenever I’ve needed, thanks for putting together a great service and being such a strong face of it.
This is in no way meant to be disrespectful about your work, but I would argue that if one great engineer can whip up something that provides as much if not more than Google Reader, then maybe Reader wasn't really a good use of Google's time after all and it was right to let smaller developers handle RSS readers.
It just isn't a Google-scale problem that requires the kind of resources Google has to offer, it makes no sense for them to maintain something than small independent developers like you can handle just fine.
oh man I love the last item on the table comparing Free Newsblur to Paid Newsblur. Free version: My dog goes hungry! Paid version: Tiny photo of happy dog and a note about what a nice meal you'll cook for her.
All these years later, I still use the Google Reader frontend (with newsblur as the backend).
It turns out that Reader's UI assets were stand alone enough that you could just implement the backend API and it all would work.
I saw this originally in a project for viewing your Reader Takeout data[1], and just built on that idea to make my own personal Google Reader experience.
Wait, can I actually put feeds inside of it? I mean does it actually work? The question being does it support today's feed formats, like Youtube feeds?
There was also a browser extension [1] that locally reimplemented parts of the Google Reader interface. It has since been removed from the Chrome Web Store.
I guess you had to be there? "it's just like Google Reader" means it's NOT as good, but close enough. GR was solid and we LOVED it, especially the search. I think RSS readers are one of those things that some of us LOVE and we're still bitter that Google took it away. Maybe it was the first big thing Google cancelled? I know for me it was, and I've not trusted anything new from Google since. Maybe that's it... before they broke my heart with killing Reader I really believed they were different, that they really tried to "not be evil" and then POOF one day my favorite thing on the web was gone.
I guess you had to be there, I know it sounds ridiculous.
As others have said, it marked a turning point for how Google is perceived. It's not as though GR had 100k beta users like Stadia, it had nearly 5 million active users when it shut down. The closing marked the end of Google doing cool things because they're cool, and showed their true colors as a major corporation looking after profits first. Something that is pretty much a given opinion of them today.
I agree that HN goes overboard with Google Reader but I can also share the sentiment.
You are right when you say that there are many alternatives to Google Reader, even better ones you could say. I am fond not just of Google Reader but also I am fond of the times of better news consumption of back then.
When Google Reader disappeared, it left some sort of hole in news consumption that got filled up with Google+, Twitter and Facebook. The media outlets became obsessed about sharing news articles in social media, fighting for "likes", "+1s" and "retweets".
Google Reader provided a simple of way of having your news centralized on a snappy service, with good UI, without any ads or "smart suggestions" and without all of your social graph embedded in there. It was the way of consuming news for people that actually wanted to be informed.
And the best part, you could actually subscribe to other's people favorite feeds. It was kind of hidden, there was no dedicated "find friends" button or anything like that, you had to go out of your way and ask to someone "Can I have the link to you RSS feed for your saved items?" in order to "add them" to Google Read. And you could actually comment on their saved items.
I miss these times, I was actually a news junky back then because of Google Reader. I was shown what I wanted to be shown with no social crap or "hot articles" thrown to my face. I slowly lost interest in consuming news after that.
I think it's the ripple effect of ending that service. It meants RSS was dead. It probably was dying a slow death but that was the final straw.
Websites stop supporting RSS feeds more and more so we are left with nothing else than following them through facebook or twitter or whatever new thing comes on.
That's my take on it.
Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
A lot of the attempts to replace Reader aren’t clean enough - they try to present the feed like a magazine layout or do other BS to dress up information, where Google reader was “just the facts”. It feels a lot like this old game that kicked ass for the time, but you realize the magic will never be back again. Google killed it almost certainly because it distracted from other money making opportunities, so a lot of us associate it with a further corruption of the internet in a broad sense - like intentionally making things worse to make money off the bad process. They win, we all lose a little bit.
I think one thing that you're missing that hasn't been mentioned is content caching.
If your favorite website went away, you could still read and search all of the articles in the cached feed. I don't think there was an expiry time on it (other long-term users, feel free to correct me).
These days there is no equivalent. If someone you follow decides to take down their website, you have to hope that someone archived some of their content on the popular archive sites.
Well in this case it's fully deserved. I was in shock when G started nudging me to share my photo albums. They came pretty close to scamming me into sharing random crap I would never imagine sharing (reminiscent of Linkedin scraping and blasting your entire address book), all for the sake of promoting stupid, closed-off G+. And Google Reader, which I used on a daily basis until its death, probably fell victim to the G+ effort.
I use Newsblur as a replacement (thanks conesus!) but Google could have used their influence to promote RSS and make the web much more consumer-friendly, now without that everyone crawled off into their own walled garden like Facebook, etc. A number of people I read ended up only on Facebook unfortunately. RSS, while still around, never really took off to its full potential, and the G+ fiasco contributed to that.
It's kind of like your favorite coffee shop closing. Sure, I can get coffee anywhere but it was part of my daily routine. And a part of my daily routine that I enjoyed. When it gets yanked away it still leaves a gap that can't quite be filled by the next-best substitute.
Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything. Now they get rid of things left and right. It was basically the beginning of the end.
That is not quite accurate. They’ve always killed stuff randomly. My personal issues at the time were Sparrow (an amazing email app on iPhone, killed when they bought the developer), Google Wave, Google Talk (they were already a headless chicken as far as IM was concerned; Google Talk was interoperable with other servers and we used it quite a lot), Google Video.
Other notable cancellations before Google Reader were Google Buzz, Google Code search, Google Desktop, and Google Labs. There were dozens of others.
They have always been as focused as a squirrel on drugs.
It was just a very good, no-bs type of service. With good-looking performant UI (it was before "material" UI conquered almost all other google services). Not that I'm against Material, I do my websites on it, but I have to admit previous google design was more intuitive.
Exactly. It was basically a share-ier Twitter long before Twitter, built on an open standard (RSS.) You could subscribe to every news website's RSS feed and at the time, most would offer their full content in your feed. You had incredible power to curate and refine your feed based on your interests and social circle.
2. It was, by far, the dominant reader. Nobody other big corporation† decided to make a top-level project that surfaced feed reading like this. So people remember it fondly, because it was the heyday of RSS, before Twitter and Facebook took over news delivery.
†OK, fine, I think Apple did a thing where you could read RSS feeds in Mail.
I am old enough to have used Google Reader, and I don't get it either.
My guess is that the death of Google Reader was one of the last domino pieces to fall in the change from the multi-website internet to the Reddit aggregator internet. The replacement apps don't work because the internet model where RSS was useful died a decade ago.
This whole thing might be like the death of a popular BBS client for someone born in the 1980s. But then again... it's been 8 years. It's time to let go.
You're missing the pain that we had to go through to find something comparable.
I'm sure you know the meme that any new Google product that's launched is basically on borrowed time, because it'll get cancelled soon enough. Well, Reader was the first one to get that treatment.
I remember when Reader was shut down, very rapidly alternatives were coming up. Lots of people switched to Feedly within a few weeks, and The Old Reader came up, etc. The transition really wasn't that bad.
Those of you who don’t understand why people were attached to Reader: Please keep in mind that it’s generally not the death of the tool that we lament after all these years. It is the destruction of our communities there that we’re still sad about.
Imagine your favorite coffee shop, bar, church or social club ceased to be. You’d still see some of the previous members at other places, but the community as it existed is gone.
It really did create a community atmosphere that I've only seen at cocktail/dinner parties, where everyone knows someone but you meet new friends-of-friends and maybe become friends yourselves.
I was a heavy Google Reader user and mourned it for years. At some point, though, I discovered Miniflux [1], and haven't really missed Reader since.
What I do miss from the Reader days, though, is widespread RSS support. I wonder if the death of such a prominent RSS reader gave sites "permission" to stop supporting RSS, and pushed RSS into further obscurity. Anecdotally, it feels like RSS is a feature often not carried over after a site redesign.
Something I find really interesting about the closure of Google Reader is that it affected a relatively tiny proportion of people - the vast majority of humans have never heard of RSS and would have no idea what the product was even for.
But... those ten million users are incredibly influential. Today they are in positions where they make cloud computing purchasing decisions on behalf of huge organizations. And they haven't forgotten.
I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent loss of trust and sales.
Reader wasn't the breaking point for my company, but there's a clear trend in Google products
- They will break your API contracts, and break them often.
- They will likely be end-of-lifed, usually 2 to 5 years after implementation (perfect timing for the devs at your company that did the original implementation to have mostly moved on to a different company, so lots of domain knowledge loss right before a major product shift)
- They often look shiny but run like absolute fucking dogshit. I don't know if you've loaded GCP console (or hell, even just gmail)_recently, but prepare to spend 30+ seconds waiting for the initial pageload to finish.
----
I have influence on which products we purchase and use. We do not use Google for anything in production (with the exception of our Android app, for fairly obvious reasons).
Again, reader didn't break the camel's back, but it sure added some weight.
Same. I'll never put GCM on my backend options list when building products after Reader. I can't operate with that level of EOL risk exposure. Will be migrating off Gmail now too with so much risk of account cancellation in the Android Dev community but that's going to be a longer project.
Such thought processes has already saved me from wasting my time on AMP.
A few folks here are asking why old timers still mourn Google Reader when there are so many good alternatives available now. I agree, there are. It even opened the door for many more tools in the space. I love using Feedly, Reeder, and NetNewsWire.
But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue to fray. At the time Google felt like an important part of the open web, and RSS was part of the glue that held it together. Discontinuing Google Reader felt like an admission that Google did not stand for those values anymore.
>But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue to fray.
That's really the thing. People lash out at Google because it's a concrete target. And probably one of the worse examples of Google killing something that seemed clearly in the purview of an early mission to organize information. I'm often a bit surprised that Blogger has survived.
But it's also emblematic of the fact that a fairly niche open web activity was becoming even more niche.
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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.
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.
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.
Yep. That was the point for me wehere Google went from startup I would like to work for sometime in the future to the ranks of IBM and Oracle
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I would check it in the morning, while in washroom, in bus, waiting & any time.
I wasn't a Google Reader user, but I'd be interesting in understanding what I was missing.
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.]
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..
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).
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.
...and whole thing was keyboard-drivable.
That's a feature, not a bug. It was close to perfect, no pointless UI re-designs required. Fast, lightweight, no bs.
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.
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.
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.
Meh, maybe that's inaccurate, but that's how I have felt ever since.
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).
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
Roughly fifty friends and I shared articles and had long comment threads.
Think of it as a private reddit where there's no barrier to joining a conversation with people you know.
Thank you for pouring salt on that wound, too. Good grief.
Google reader was nice because it was simple and it just worked.
When they killed it I switched to NetNewsWire and didn't miss the previous product.
What was so special about Google Reader?
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.
It was free and web-based.
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.
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.
Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I'd heard the news. That was a difficult month as I scaled (and wrote about scaling[0]), since by then Google Reader had 10 million active users. After Reader was sunset, about 5 million found their homes on the news readers that remained.
It's strange to think that naively competing with one of the big platforms paid off, but there's plenty of companies that did well in the wake of a giant choosing to ignore the ecosystem near their feet.
[0]: https://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-s...
I just downloaded and tried newsblur and it's pretty much perfect for my taste and needs. Going to try it for a few days then will likely become a paid user. This comment is coming from a place of relative ignorance, but have you considered investing in a bit of marketing, or a bit more if you have? For how good this app is among rss readers, it doesn't seem as discoverable as it deserves to be.
It's possible that you were adding the "for android" context in your searches, and it might not do well in that case (because of people seeing it as primarily web-based or cross-platform, and not emphasising the Android part).
It's a solid product, and the amount of work you've put into it shows and I plan to remain a customer for years to come.
I recommend NewsBlur to everybody: super uptime, great API, integrated with IFTTT, and supported by a lot of good mobile reader apps
I cried when I read this. Beautiful.
You’re also super responsive on Twitter / support channels too whenever I’ve needed, thanks for putting together a great service and being such a strong face of it.
Despite everyone saying that "RSS is dead", it's very rare for me to find a blog I'm interested in that doesn't have an RSS feed.
If anybody else wants a good cloud RSS service, take a look at newsblur.
It just isn't a Google-scale problem that requires the kind of resources Google has to offer, it makes no sense for them to maintain something than small independent developers like you can handle just fine.
It turns out that Reader's UI assets were stand alone enough that you could just implement the backend API and it all would work.
I saw this originally in a project for viewing your Reader Takeout data[1], and just built on that idea to make my own personal Google Reader experience.
[1]: https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead
[1]: https://crxcavator.io/report/cemddjmmnfebpkpkonmbkdmakilpkci...
There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, some of which have the branding of "it's just like Google Reader", so what am I missing here?
I guess you had to be there, I know it sounds ridiculous.
You are right when you say that there are many alternatives to Google Reader, even better ones you could say. I am fond not just of Google Reader but also I am fond of the times of better news consumption of back then.
When Google Reader disappeared, it left some sort of hole in news consumption that got filled up with Google+, Twitter and Facebook. The media outlets became obsessed about sharing news articles in social media, fighting for "likes", "+1s" and "retweets".
Google Reader provided a simple of way of having your news centralized on a snappy service, with good UI, without any ads or "smart suggestions" and without all of your social graph embedded in there. It was the way of consuming news for people that actually wanted to be informed.
And the best part, you could actually subscribe to other's people favorite feeds. It was kind of hidden, there was no dedicated "find friends" button or anything like that, you had to go out of your way and ask to someone "Can I have the link to you RSS feed for your saved items?" in order to "add them" to Google Read. And you could actually comment on their saved items.
I miss these times, I was actually a news junky back then because of Google Reader. I was shown what I wanted to be shown with no social crap or "hot articles" thrown to my face. I slowly lost interest in consuming news after that.
I think it's the ripple effect of ending that service. It meants RSS was dead. It probably was dying a slow death but that was the final straw.
Websites stop supporting RSS feeds more and more so we are left with nothing else than following them through facebook or twitter or whatever new thing comes on.
That's my take on it.
Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
This has been claimed for years, but it's simply not true:
> Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
If your favorite website went away, you could still read and search all of the articles in the cached feed. I don't think there was an expiry time on it (other long-term users, feel free to correct me).
These days there is no equivalent. If someone you follow decides to take down their website, you have to hope that someone archived some of their content on the popular archive sites.
I use Newsblur as a replacement (thanks conesus!) but Google could have used their influence to promote RSS and make the web much more consumer-friendly, now without that everyone crawled off into their own walled garden like Facebook, etc. A number of people I read ended up only on Facebook unfortunately. RSS, while still around, never really took off to its full potential, and the G+ fiasco contributed to that.
Other notable cancellations before Google Reader were Google Buzz, Google Code search, Google Desktop, and Google Labs. There were dozens of others.
They have always been as focused as a squirrel on drugs.
Web Accelerator, Wave, Google Video immediately spring to mind, but there's a few dozen smaller services that were all cancelled before Reader was.
People aren't just mourning Google Reader, they're mourning the Google that used to run products like Google Reader.
I thought it was just an RSS reader.
Were there forums or commenting on posts or something? I don't remember anything at all like that.
> There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now,
Sure, but Reader was basically the first.
If you've never lost something you've loved it's impossible to understand.
Together with reshared count, it implemented a very effective peer review mechanism.
Having high adoption, it provided me very good feeds - nothing comes close now.
2. It was, by far, the dominant reader. Nobody other big corporation† decided to make a top-level project that surfaced feed reading like this. So people remember it fondly, because it was the heyday of RSS, before Twitter and Facebook took over news delivery.
†OK, fine, I think Apple did a thing where you could read RSS feeds in Mail.
My guess is that the death of Google Reader was one of the last domino pieces to fall in the change from the multi-website internet to the Reddit aggregator internet. The replacement apps don't work because the internet model where RSS was useful died a decade ago.
This whole thing might be like the death of a popular BBS client for someone born in the 1980s. But then again... it's been 8 years. It's time to let go.
I'm sure you know the meme that any new Google product that's launched is basically on borrowed time, because it'll get cancelled soon enough. Well, Reader was the first one to get that treatment.
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Imagine your favorite coffee shop, bar, church or social club ceased to be. You’d still see some of the previous members at other places, but the community as it existed is gone.
I thought it was just an RSS reader. This is the first I've ever heard of a Reader "community".
I'm looking it up and it doesn't appear there were forums or anything. What was the community aspect?
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/reader-and-talk-are...
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-control-over-c...
I didn't have a large following, but I would see people liking my shared feed items from time to time, and they could subscribe to your feed (IIRC).
It really did create a community atmosphere that I've only seen at cocktail/dinner parties, where everyone knows someone but you meet new friends-of-friends and maybe become friends yourselves.
What I do miss from the Reader days, though, is widespread RSS support. I wonder if the death of such a prominent RSS reader gave sites "permission" to stop supporting RSS, and pushed RSS into further obscurity. Anecdotally, it feels like RSS is a feature often not carried over after a site redesign.
[1] https://miniflux.app/
But... those ten million users are incredibly influential. Today they are in positions where they make cloud computing purchasing decisions on behalf of huge organizations. And they haven't forgotten.
I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent loss of trust and sales.
- They will break your API contracts, and break them often.
- They will likely be end-of-lifed, usually 2 to 5 years after implementation (perfect timing for the devs at your company that did the original implementation to have mostly moved on to a different company, so lots of domain knowledge loss right before a major product shift)
- They often look shiny but run like absolute fucking dogshit. I don't know if you've loaded GCP console (or hell, even just gmail)_recently, but prepare to spend 30+ seconds waiting for the initial pageload to finish.
----
I have influence on which products we purchase and use. We do not use Google for anything in production (with the exception of our Android app, for fairly obvious reasons).
Again, reader didn't break the camel's back, but it sure added some weight.
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Such thought processes has already saved me from wasting my time on AMP.
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But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue to fray. At the time Google felt like an important part of the open web, and RSS was part of the glue that held it together. Discontinuing Google Reader felt like an admission that Google did not stand for those values anymore.
That's really the thing. People lash out at Google because it's a concrete target. And probably one of the worse examples of Google killing something that seemed clearly in the purview of an early mission to organize information. I'm often a bit surprised that Blogger has survived.
But it's also emblematic of the fact that a fairly niche open web activity was becoming even more niche.