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+.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur" rel="nofollow">https://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-s...</a>
All these years later, I still use the Google Reader frontend (with newsblur as the backend).<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead</a>
As someone who was born too late for Google Reader, I genuinely don't understand why people bring it up every 5 minutes.<p>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?
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.<p>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 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.<p>What I <i>do</i> 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.<p>[1] <a href="https://miniflux.app/" rel="nofollow">https://miniflux.app/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent loss of trust and sales.
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.<p>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.
The real missed opportunity for Google was expanding reader's social/collaboration features into a more robust social network.It would have saved them from trying to ham fist Google+ for everyone. It could have been a home for Wave and Buzz type of tech. Instead they threw out the baby, be damn the bathwater.<p>That being said, I have a found NewsBlur a great replacement.
While I share the lament, I happily pay for <a href="https://www.inoreader.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.inoreader.com/</a> which innovated beyond what Google would have been willing to do. Highly recommended.
I recently started to consume content via RSS again.
It turns out, most of the blogs I care about have a working RSS feed.<p>I'm using newsblur (no affiliation) and it's working quite well, I no longer need to poll the websites, or wait for posts to appear here or on Twitter.<p>The nicest side effect is that checking newsblur before HN/Twitter limited my mindless scrolling, although this comment proves it didn't eliminate it.
"when there were more than five websites and we could log off without missing anything."<p>In my experience, when you get fed up and quit things like Facebook and Twitter (also, pruning other things like YouTube channels that try too hard for 'engagement'), you magically return to a time when you can log off without missing anything.<p>It's nice.<p>I get that it's scary, but it seems worth mentioning that it is possible. I'm not at all sure that I'm suffering for the decision. If I was, that would imply that there's a give-and-take and that being wired to that addictive armature had a chance of giving you meaningful attention. I no longer believe there's significance in attaining the attention of folks who are there because they're glued to the machine. It's the activity of twitter-scrolling or what have you, that they're pursuing, not you. If they're deeply enough sunk into it, they've got nothing left for any real connection with anybody.<p>Seems like Google Reader was a bit like 'real connections with people', at a manageable pace.
I still miss it terribly. And it’s a constant reminder that no matter how useful or popular it is, any Google product/service/API/platform that you use or depend on could be shut down at any time.
Complaining about Google killing Reader and Google's monopoly power in the same page is strange. Actually killing reader made Reader competitors the chance to develop, didn't it?<p>I think there was a trend for content providers to share content on multiple platforms directly instead of with RSS, that's what people may not like.
I never really used google reader, and there are plenty of other RSS clients out there. What I mourn isn't Google Reader specifically, but the decline of RSS generally, which to be fair may have been accelerated by the end of Google Reader.
Shout out to <a href="https://bazqux.com" rel="nofollow">https://bazqux.com</a>, a modern Google Reader replacement and the only SaaS I pay for. I'm not affiliated, just really love it. It's been solid and awesome for me for over 7 years now.
Fraidycat [0] is a very good substitute,
plus, it's more streamlined.<p>[0]: <a href="https://fraidyc.at" rel="nofollow">https://fraidyc.at</a>
I was first dissapointed when they close. Then I started using Feedly. It turns out quite well: I they are as powerfull, but I have one less entangelment with google ecosystem.
Will you stop crying about Google Reader already and move on please.<p>RSS is alive and well if you want it to be. I've switched to theoldreader.com when Google pulled the plug, imported my feeds and have been there ever since.<p>I'm subscribed to 125 feeds, 72% of which had new posts in the last year (following super low volume things is one of the many advantages of RSS). Most of the inactive ones have simply atrophied or ceased to exist entirely rather than turn off their RSS feeds.<p>I never log into YouTube but follow many channels via RSS instead. There's also Twitter gateways, although the one I've used stopped working and most everyone I care about has moved on to Mastodon anyways, so I haven't bothered with finding another.<p>I still regularly subscribe to new blogs, Youtube channels and other stuff via RSS and don't really know any other sane way to follow such things. I'll certainly not go and bookmark a bunch of sites and then click on them to see if they have posted something new or not - that would be insanity.<p>So yes, Google took a big dump on RSS, but then that's what Bigcorp does. Get on with it - RSS is fine. Build more feeds into your webthings because if it doesn't have RSS the grumpy old nerds like me will probably not look at it twice! :-P
I believe this was just a money decision. You really can't run all those fancy tracking ads and other engagement/conversion tricks within RSS readers, or if you did, people would just switch to readers that didn't support ads and tracking. RSS was, mostly, just content that you could format and read as you like and that's a pretty big threat to operations like Google who rely so much on ads and tracking. Reading mode in browsers is the middle ground that sorta works. We still get presented with ads and tracking but get the option to view things in a sane format. Of course, we don't get the neat all-in-one aspect we had with RSS. We still, somehow, are using the bookmark system for visiting and consuming the web.
I still pay for theoldreader, for some reason, though I don't really keep up with my RSS subscriptions anymore.<p>Twitter chews up the time I used to spend on blogs, and I don't even get through the emailed newsletters that I used to check on daily.
I miss Google Reader.<p>Migrated to Feedly & Feedly has been OK but recently, soured on Feedly as they capped the number of feeds. And I've written my own RSS readers, pre-Google-Reader & now in 2021 (though it a work in progress & starting to buckle with a 300MB sqlite DB file on a shared host ;)). Those limits might not rankle many subscribers but I don't view RSS as a "I must consume every item" but as a stream to wade in, and a filtered repository to query.<p>The technology of a RSS reader is banal & simple in the basics. But here is where the value is for me -- the history of all the stuff that scrolls off from the most recent 10, 25, 50 posts that are available on a RSS feed. Having a large collection of subscribed feeds is like having a filtered search window into only those web sources that you assign great relevance. Even in 2021, a even more pronounced chasm to Google (or DDG or $yourFavoriteSearchEngine) searches, given all the botification / content farm hijacking / general cruft / copied content / etc. -- to search in your own set of collected RSS feeds, that go back years, even if disappear off a site's current feed XML. Or even if the site goes poof, or worse, is reappropriated by a domain harvester to siphon ad generated revenue on boiler plate content.<p>Google Reader, if it was championed by Google, could have served this role masterfully. (There still is, oddly, in existence Google Custom Search Engine where you can specify a collection of URLs but it doesn't to seem to work as well as searching RSS history, in my experience at least).
Paraphrasing from a tweet that I saw a while ago: "You don't miss Google Reader. You miss your life as it was when you used Google Reader. You miss being young".
Google Reader was great!<p>Similarl to what I felt when Google Reader shut down, I was saddened when Mozilla removed RSS/Atom support from Firefox. I believe the decision had something to do with maintenance/performance/security concerns.<p>As usual, there are no WebExtensions which match the functionality of the original feature.<p><a href="https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...</a><p><a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667</a><p><a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...</a><p>Luckily, Thunderbird (and, by extension, SeaMonkey) still allow you to subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds for the time being.<p><a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feeds-and-blogs" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...</a>
Seeing that screenshot makes me remember how much I miss the original simple HTML UI used in all Google Apps. So fast,light weight, and it just worked.
Google created a popular free RSS reader, stopped innovating it, and then declared to the whole world that usage of Reader (and by extension, RSS) had decreased so much that it isn't worth it for Google to keep on life support.<p>It didn't have to happen like that. I argue that Google unintentionally did an embrace and extinguish on RSS. That's what people were unhappy about.
I find <a href="https://feedbin.com/" rel="nofollow">https://feedbin.com/</a> almost identical (Feedly feels a bit too different for my liking, but is clearly the most popular) but it also feels like times have moved on and I don't find myself using it in the same way. The blogosphere isn't quite what it was back in the late 00s.
Why isn't there a federated clone? This seems ideal for the fediverse. I think the server would just need to host your feed URLs, save a little read state info, and host your favorites/starred feed that other users can subscribe to. It doesn't seem like much overhead on the server side.<p>Then we get to the client and I don't know what I'm doing.
Google Reader was my favorite web app by a wide margin and I can remember how well informed I was back then. Social networks were not part of my life yet, so free time was spent on Reader. RIP.<p>Now I work the best I can using IFTTT to pull news from the feeds that are still functional and then pushing results into an Evernote notebook I nostalgically named Reader.
On this day, March 25 2021, Google Reader has been dead for longer than it was alive.<p>source: <a href="https://twitter.com/ZackMaril/status/1365834285463257091" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ZackMaril/status/1365834285463257091</a>
Using Google Reader felt like hanging out and having a beer with my favorite friends. It was teeming with conversation threads waiting to be pulled.<p>Seeing a new share was like getting a tiny intellectual present, filled with all the right connotations - "Here's this thing I think you would find interesting," "I care about your opinion, what are your thoughts on this," "It's not important, but it is entertaining," "not trying to share this with the world, just you, my friend."<p>Google Reader was our company's post-lunch ritual. A way to balance a mornings worth of engineering effort and soporific pad thai with a jolt of fresh news and virtual office banter.<p>RIP.
It's interesting how impactful Google Reader was that not an insignificant number of people bounced off RSS entirely when it died.<p>Most RSS readers/providers have been at least serviceable for me. On newsboat now, trying elfeed occasionally too.
Going to take this opportunity to tell everyone that NetNewsWire has gotten really good – it's free, looks great on Big Sur, syncs via iCloud, I can't recommend it enough.
Not an RSS reader by design, but I'm with <a href="https://upstract.com" rel="nofollow">https://upstract.com</a> — Made by the original Popurls inventor.
I think the reason things like this just don't die is we all long for the days (long past) when Google was a leading force in making the web nicer, and having a very positive reputation, from making search a thousand times better than [Yahoo|Ask Jeeves|etc.], making maps amazing (compared to MapQuest/etc.), building a good, free email service (we've since learned the cost of 'free'), and building products everyone knows and loves like Reader.
I have been building an RSS reader for developers called <a href="https://diff.blog" rel="nofollow">https://diff.blog</a>. It's havily integrated with GitHub. For example, when you sign up, it automatically follows the blog of developers and organizations you are part of. I have been working on it in my spare time during the last 2 years and it has been growing steadily. It has over 1200+ users now. Do give it a try!
I never did use Google Reader, having been used to Firefox Live Bookmarks. Today I'm using the Livemarks extension. Just taking a brief look at alternatives, because Livemarks was a very early response to Mozilla removing Live Bookmarks in 2018, Feedbro looks to be even more popular and more Google Readerish. It's more than I'm looking for but it looks good for the Google Reader crowd. On my phone (iOS) I use Inoreader.
Wasn't it pretty silly to need an online application in order to subscribe to and monitor RSS feeds?<p>It's almost anti-RSS.<p>It's like requiring an online application to browse the web.<p>An RSS reader is just a browsers that has a list of bookmarks. Those bookmarks point to specially formatted XML documents. It automatically refreshes those document and notices new items, which it presents somehow, perhaps an mail-inbox-like interface.
As others have said, I also think that this was a turning point in how Google was generally perceived.<p>But anyway, there is nothing to miss about it, even if it was not clear at that time: having a news aggregator on the cloud owned by google itself, or any other company FWIW, it is not something we should aim for.<p>Why should we give all this information about our preferred readings or favorite news to anyone?
geez, when was this made, recently/now? It's like come on, "dead longer than it was alive"..... there were so many contributing factors to the environment and shifts of the day when it happened -- this endlessly bringing it up shows like so much unawareness of surroundings/history<p>and also, what other options took its place / fill the void / RSS is not dead! etc
I installed FreshRSS on a server and imported my Google Reader feeds. I love having an RSS client that won't go away, and it's at least taught me that I should never rely on Google keeping something available, so it was a valuable lesson as well.
Does anyone have a good RSS reader suggestion?
I'm looking for a desktop application (Linux preferably).
I'd really like one that does download all the feeds, but lets me tag words and topics that I'm interested, and get a notification based on that.<p>Maybe I need to write my own...
I believe it's chrome that killed RSS altogether. Even today, there is not native RSS support in chrome. Before chrome all major browsers had native RSS support. You could just subscribe to any website.<p>The killed RSS, then the reader. It's all on Google for demise of RSS.
Was a huge disappointment when google made a decision to close it. I remember lots of services appeared pick up the audience. I switched to BazQux back then and still using it (bought lifetime license after several years and enjoying it every day).
The cherry on top is the complaint about how users only go to five sites anymore...by the very community of people who started the death-of-RSS myth because Google stopped providing the app they used.
I miss pre-Google+ Google Reader. It's social features(shared feeds and comments) make it the only social network I've really enjoyed using without any serious dislikes.
Remembering a tool that killed useful technology, for what reason? If there's one thing that should be remembered is RSS itself, and shouldn't RIP but come back to life.<p>Google is not your friend, don't praise gigacorps - especially when they kill stuff that works.
I don't understand the hagiography. Any one of us can build a replacement instead of lamenting reader's demise. If you miss reader so much then rebuild it.
So basically, one can begin slapping together a competitor as soon as Google rolls out a service—because the service is likely to go the way of the Reader in a few years.
For me, when I see old screenshots like this, it makes me realize how festooned with garbage UIs used to be. Just sooo much unnecessary shit. Everywhere.<p>I also don't love the state we're in today, when useful things are hidden or just removed altogether. But man, I can appreciate how we got here.