The whole article makes for some pretty depressing reading, and touches upon some important points. For me, the most crucial and eye opening is the stark contrast of the relatively open ecosystem we had back in 2005 to what we have today. You can't help but feel uncomfortable about the whole direction we're taking with tightly controlled silos of information (Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc.) using extremely limited, or highly monetized, API access, when you read something like this:<p>"One thing that’s definitely coming (and some of these already exist, although haven’t yet been made public) is extremely deep API support. Our general plan here is to expose nearly everything in NewsGator Online via API, and allow folks to build applications that leverage our platform in unique ways."<p>Google is just as guilty as several other parties of bringing about the situation we have now. I get the fact that everyone is looking for ways of increasing revenue, but they're doing it at the expense of openness, instead of leveraging that openness (see RSS for example) and building services and added value on top of it.<p>I hope the death of Reader serves as a wake up call on several fronts.
Here's another viewpoint. If Google Reader was so good that it made people so mad about it being shut down, and it was so important in people's lives - then it must've been a pretty good app, right?<p>Okay, so even with Reader being <i>this</i> good, the RSS protocol was still dying because most people have moved on to other ways of consuming news. So then if RSS didn't have a reader that was this good, then it would've probably died a lot sooner, and Google Reader actually prolonged its life. Without Google Reader, RSS might have died 2 years ago.<p>So I don't know what's with all this "Google killed RSS". Google didn't kill RSS. Twitter, Facebook and RSS' "geekiness" that made sure it never crossed that "chasm" into mainstream usage (and what doesn't grow will probably die, as nothing is constant) are what killed RSS.<p>As a side note, I'm someone who consumes a <i>lot</i> of news every day, yet I still found a service like Reader to quickly become overwhelming, and I've barely used it occasionally. As we've seen, many of these journalists actually had thousands if not tens of thousands of unread news stories in their Reader, which I think is also why not that many people were using it. It felt overwhelming.
One of the things I always wanted to get around to while working for Google was to borrow some ideas from Gnus, Lars Ingebrigtsen's brilliant news reader for Emacs. (A rewrite of Masanobu Umeda's Gnus)<p>Gnus has a brilliant system for assigning a score to postings in all sorts of clever ways. You have the simple stuff, like assigning a negative score to a given person, but you can also do more subtle stuff like scoring up postings that are responses to your own postings. It also has various forms of adaptive scoring.<p>The score then influenced the ordering of threads, highlighting threads that need your attention and hiding threads and postings that you do not want to see. (Most news readers had a bozo-filter that could do the latter, but which didn't really do any of the former well).<p>What made Gnus such a great newsreader was that, with the use of scoring, I could spend 10-15 minutes per day getting an overview of dozens of active discussions I was having across a bunch of newsgroups. At one point the total number of postings in the groups I was following was around 6000 postings per day, and it took me mere minutes to get an overview of what had happened that was of interest to me.<p>The idea of scoring applied to RSS feeds would have been brilliant. It would have made following a massive number of RSS feeds a far more attractive proposition.<p>I still think that there is an opportunity to revive RSS and make it relevant again, but I would recommend that people interested in RSS readers have a closer look at Gnus first. RSS readers need to do a lot more than just aggregate and display feeds. There are some great opportunities in figuring out how to add scoring in a way users can understand. Also I think that harnessing social to provide additional signals that can be used for scoring would be neat.<p>Is there an RSS reader today that does any of this?
RSS is not very good for social networks, they want you to visit and stay on their web page, so that they can control and monetise properly.<p>Nobody is interested in ways to leak content and users outside their empire, at the contrary.<p>One day, when the Internet will have transformed in the Amazon-Facebook-Google-Microsoft walled garden we begin to see today, I shall tell tales of how people used to build and run their own web sites and email servers and visit each other's blogs and so on. And how they all let that go, because it was "too hard" and they "didn't have time" to deal with it all.<p>Ultimately it's us who are at fault. We had it, but gave it all up.<p>We are giving up our privacy and freedom for illusory convenience and safety, to paraphrase a famous saying.
It might be naive, but my own little protest is avoiding Google+ whenever possible, as a user and in projects I build.<p>RSS isn't dying of natural causes. Plenty of small-medium sites are getting orders of magnitude more traffic from Reader than from G+. Google and other major companies are trying to deprecate it in order to replace with their own, tightly controlled, solutions.
I'm very put off by thus attitude that Google owes us all a free RSS reader, as if they are the tech equivalent of the social safety net. Google has and always will be a company focused on profits. They would be supremely unprofitable if they sunk time and resources into dying technology just because it had a few fans.<p>It's not hard to make an RSS reader and if you miss Google Reader so much, sign off of HN and make your own, better version. But you won't, because you know that Google is right in their decision to axe the whole thing.
I don't get why RSS is "dying". Many people who create online content that is worth following provide a feed which you can subscribe through so many ways it is not funny.<p>Maybe social network addicted people may not recognize but there is a whole world who use email, instant messaging and other stuff like feeds to communicate, which are very established and not beholden to whims of any single moneymaking scheme.<p>Feeds are a very simple and open idea. Inability to put a toll booth between the communicating parties doesn't mean feeds are useless or dying. It just means you are unimaginative. Browsers may chose to hide the functionality out of a desire to idiot proof their software but it doesn't mean people who have an attention span more than a goldfish have no other ways to subscribe.
I see the "embrace" part. But I don't see any "extend" or "extinguish". Seems to be just FUD. Lots of cynical people wish Google was as "evil" as 90s MS, but that false equivalence just doesn't hold. It would only hold in some outlandish scenario where Google added proprietary extensions to RSS to make everything that operated with Reader incompatible with anything else, thus eliminating the main advantage of RSS as a common standard (like MS did with Java).
RSS is a technology, not an industry and Google's killing Reader may not necessarily kill RSS. I've switched to Feedly and love it. I wished I'd been using Feedly <i>years</i> ago. Reader is quite pathetic in comparison to Feedly actually. But I didn't know that. I used Reader because it was from Google and all my colleagues were using it.<p>As a result I'm checking out alternatives to other Google services. I've been in a Google rut for many years now and it's time to get out of it. It's all good.
To me, the permanent archive of all RSS feeds is far more important than the Google Reader front end. Critical comments that blog owners deleted on their site are still found in the Google RSS archive. In some cases it exposes true malfeasance, when blog admins change the comments of others. I can download whole RSS histories myself, but without a link to an independent archive my own copy is worthless as evidence, since I could have edited it myself.
This has got to be a joke. Just because one company decided to shut their RSS client, the 'RSS industry' is now abandoned ? Tell that to feedly who just welcomed 500k users [1]. These were users that relied on google reader. RSS as a standard / service is not on square 1. It is inadequate in some ways and ATOM was supposed to fix that and was never really adopted as well as RSS. There are tons of aggregators out there that use RSS (and ATOM) to get all your news in one place. Use another client and move on.<p>1 - <a href="http://mashable.com/2013/03/18/500000-google-reader-users-migrate-feedly/" rel="nofollow">http://mashable.com/2013/03/18/500000-google-reader-users-mi...</a>
I offered to give Google my first born to keep Reader alive but they didn't even respond. First iGoogle was given a death sentence. Then Reader. If they shut down Currents or Google Print I am going to move to Canada.
And it's not just Reader: Google Talk is following the exact same strategy as well. It supposedly is the world's largest xmpp network, but with a few extra changes that makes compliant xmpp clients practically useless (e.g., not able to add anyone inside gtalk from the outside: _they_ have to initiate the request, supposedly for spam reasons.)<p>But then again, Facebook does the same thing...
>>It’s not unlike the widely criticized model that Microsoft pursued in its pre-Millennium days as a monopolist: Embrace, extend, extinguish.<p>Ridiculous. Microsoft works to eliminate the competition, whereas Google is just not supporting it. RSS will not be eliminated due to this decision.
I love using Google Reader but I don't see what the big deal is. It seems like an RSS reader is something anyone can build in a month maybe. There are alternatives that seem to be less than optimal but I assume they'll get their act in gear. I would be in their place.
One big innovation new rss sync engines can provide is linking of posts. For example, showing you blog responses from across the web to a post you are reading. I think Google didn't show it because they have an aversion to exposing the incoming links graph for whatever reason, but this would be a killer feature for users.<p>Reader did have an excellent "recommended" feature that used some kind of social metrics algorithm. That feature stopped being useful after the G+ debacle, but it could also be a killer feature. I'm sure there are many others.
There's a really easy solution here.<p>Google should just donate the Google Reader application to the Apache Foundation or another open source initiative so that others can host their own.<p>In fact, it was a mistake to shut down the service without also announcing that they were open sourcing it simultaneously. Look at all the bad PR that's floating to the top of HN right now.<p>They open sourced Google Wave around the same time they shut it down, and that was a far less popular and useful service. It avoided a lot of the bad PR that the Reader shutdown is causing, however.
Google has a proven record of killing its own and acquired business/startups. Please, next time you have a buyout offer from Google, please think about your users and DO NOT sell! If you are in a position to receive offer from Google, rather than not you have pending offers from others as well. There is NOTHING Google can give you that will benefit your users more than other interested parties can.<p>Anything other than Google search, Android, Google Cars and Google Glass is doomed to extinct, sooner or later.
Perhaps there isn't money to be made providing (free) rss sync services. If there was no google reader it might have been newsgator shutting down(or if it was their main product they might have shut down their free service or severely decreased their free quotas).<p>Either way, RSS "going back to 2006" is not a bad thing for anyone. Companies will roll out products if they think there is a market. Google shuttered Reader but they have products that do similar things. With Google+ you can follow people (equivalent to following personal blog feeds on reader) and blogs/websites with plus accounts(equivalent to following websites with feeds on reader). The bright side is with g+ you get more interactivity. I always wanted to comment on posts in a feed without having to visit the website or blog. The dark side is with g+, content and delivery both will be tied to one single service(with RSS atleast your content will still be available after reader dies in july).<p>Google currents is doing something similar to reader too. The difference is the lock in and the magazine like feel. Then there is Keep.<p>So perhaps RSS or atleast the idea behind it is not dead yet. Perhaps Reader wasn't making any profit or perhaps Reader was eating into the potential success of Google's other offerings and so it was killed.
RSS was a business threat to Google, it allowed people to glance through aricle headers and often read them whole without ads. Google Reader allowed Google to contain this trend, then slowly phase it out as much as they could.<p>People easily forget ads are Google's main product that provides them he bulk of their revenue.
Where does the extend come in? Not that I ever used reader but the article doesn't seem to mention any extensions to RSS other than a thing called "bundles" which I have never heard of. Did reader have a lot of specific extensions that make it hard to build a competing product?
I don't get all the fuss:
"Google Reader was born in October 2005"..."the short life and sad death of Google Reader"?<p>Come one, I think that 8 years is a very long time in the (online) IT world. It was pretty obvious that RSS wouldn't be something for the long-run anyway.
I never understood why Google didn't profit RSS well by doing a product polish as Flipboard or Zite. They could have done something powerful as those and they didn't. Instead of that, they did a crap app wich it doesn't even get close. I would have been a happy customer of Reader wich such nice interface.
In a way, isn't it good that Google has discontinued Google Reader. It gives chance to other small players to grow and focus solely on improving their RSS reader?<p>Yes, it was unfair to their users that they were left out suddenly. But I am sure they will find good alternatives.
I can't see what's the big deal. Those that were using an RSS reader can find another replacement right now. And, as others have said, the replacements are arguably better.<p>If anything, all this buzz may be bringing new people to RSS.
They need to indent their stylesheet, but that's an interesting perspective, and a nice overview for those needing a refresher as to the history of Google's tactic.
"RSS industry"?!<p>I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them.<p>One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor.<p>Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emergence of social networks to the point that it doesn't make economic sense for them to keep maintaining it?! I don't’ think so.
Neither is it a commentary on standards, it’s merely a company that is acting in its own perceived interests, something companies are wont to do.<p>As for the “Industry” part, last I checked those who are actually building a Reader replacement are delighted with opportunity:<p><a href="http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-with-full-width-support/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-...</a><p><a href="http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur" rel="nofollow">http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-sc...</a><p><a href="http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader" rel="nofollow">http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader</a><p>When a writer this associated with Microsoft starts framing this situation as yet another flimsy accusation of anti-competitive behaviour, I tend to be skeptic.
One thing that strikes me about the piece is that it reads like actual Journalism. Yes there is opinion and point-of-view, but it is mixed with historical context, real comparables and quotes from actual industry people.<p>A lot of the so-called journalism I see today is fact-free, thinly-sourced advocacy posing as news. Its nice when writers do a bit of legwork and put some meat on their reporting.<p>Disclosure: not associated with ZDNet or Ed Bott. :-)
zdnet? really? This "thing" has always been the low of the low and they've been constantly defending MS everytime MS did embrace, extend and extinguish.<p>Actually zdnet is a pro-MS propaganda medium.<p>Who does seriously take this junk seriously?<p>There may a lot to criticize about Google's move regarding RSS but posting links to zdnet isn't helping the cause.