I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes kills stuff" is the moment it became unreliable, the moment I had to stop and consider whether their interests really aligned with mine rather than just assuming so. Or maybe I'm just bitter over nothing:)
Edit: Perhaps a better phrasing: Before, if you asked "will this useful Google product be here in a year", I would answer "yes". After, I could only say "maybe". And that made all the difference.
Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits.
It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.
I think it was the first thing they'd killed which had been around for quite a while, still had devoted users, and Google didn't offer a replacement. If you look at the graveyard, the pre-Reader things they killed were things which had flopped (e.g. Buzz), things which were no longer relevant (e.g Gears), acquisitions, and mergers where they had two redundant products (e.g. Google Video).
This always seemed like one of Google's worst decisions to me, and given that I remember the time they tried to spend $6 billion to buy Groupon, that's saying something. It was a plain unforced error.
Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sorts of influencers. If they had viewed Reader as a marketing expense, keeping it online would've been a no-brainer.
But instead, they instead viewed it as a consumer tool that didn't have a path to profitability, and they were 100% right, but then over the next few years, it became clear how many later Google efforts would've benefited from Reader existing. Google+ would've meshed well with it. That little Google "stuff you maybe want to see" panel on Android phones that would frequently make little notices like "hey, we think you like this site, there's a new article," and that was probably really involved to build, and also it absolutely sucked compared to just having Reader.
Ultimately I have to assume that it's a business org problem. No engineer was going to get a promotion keeping Reader alive. No manager was going to be able to grow Reader's audience 10x. No director would want to give up a half dozen of their engineers to keep Reader running just because it would significantly hurt Google to turn it off. And no executive cared about a product that small. The org structure didn't lead to someone incentivized to want to keep Reader going, despite its popularity inside and outside the company.
> Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it),
It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.
I imagine there's a small but significant overlap between the people who are still annoyed about the Google Reader Shutdown a full decade later and the people who are today making large scale cloud computing purchasing decisions.
I doubt Google took into account how damaging for their reputation is would be to shut down a product that had an audience that was small but extremely online and influential, both at the time and into the future.
So much this. I was lied to and strung along for weeks by Huawei support about a missing feature that should have been in their personal 4G dongles. Guess who blacklisted all Huawei gear in the last company I worked at. Guess who's now working in government IT procurement.
Not everything is numbers and loss centers. Don't lie and do the right thing. Treat people with honesty and respect. It's not that difficult.
I am not in charge of the biggest buys in the world, but that describes me. I have chosen AWS or Azure everytime over Google Cloud mostly because Google Reader shutdown.
But, that was the first Google product where it really hit home, to me, how even if a product is fantastic and useful, Google will kill it without a second thought.
It fundamentally changed my attitude toward Google and made me far more deliberate about what services I choose to rely on, especially from the big G.
This is probably the inflection point in history where I lost all trust I had in Google. I don't know how much they saved by shutting it down (probably nearly nothing) but I know that for me and people around me it was a such terrible signal that I never trusted again Google for anything serious/business. Well done guys
Ironically, for me it was probably when they shut down Google+ that I finally changed my views on Google.
For me Google+ was a lot like HN:
Peaceful, quiet and beautiful and lots Open Source content and smart people.
I still look once or twice a year but it seems everyone who are into building social media wants to copy not only the very limited functionality of Twitter, down to its dumb limitations, but also its UX and aestheti.
The exceptions I am aware of are Hubzilla (which lools seriously interesting but just confuses me and has no obvious way to enter - and yes, I can create my own instance but I cannot find anyone else), Diaspora (which I think copies Facebook and which is also confusing) and MeWe (which superficially look like Google+ but insist on repeating Googles mistake WRT real name policy).
Google Reader's shutdown made it realize that google didn't understand communities and platforms.
OK, you want to push Google+? Isn't google+ supposed to be a platform (and not simply an application). Let google reader be an application on top of the Google+ platform.
i.e. facebook is valuable because people share things on it. Why would you kill an app that is causing people to share things with each other. Leverage that user base.
Reader should have simply been one app built on top of the Google+ platform. Yes, this would involve rewriting it to some extent, but better to do things that maintain your user base, than do things that give people reason to leave.
Google has repeated this error over and over again since then, especially with their chat/messaging strategies. Don't give people reasons to jump ship. If you force them to migrate to something new, they can just as easily migrate away from you.
> OK, you want to push Google+? Isn't google+ supposed to be a platform (and not simply an application). Let google reader be an application on top of the Google+ platform.
They actually did start to integrate them. Google Reader had native sharing functionality for several years. Then in 2011 they suddenly removed it and replaced[1] it with sharing through Google+. My small network of Reader-using friends were split over wanting to join Google+, so that mostly killed our practice of regularly sharing links with each other.
> While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.
Back when Google was an underdog company in the market, they were desperately capturing the market share, and their strategy was basically throwing a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks (in a calculated way). I'd say Google Reader was one if the lucky coincidence they hit.
Sadly, after Google stabilized at it's market position, they no longer need these loss leader products, so they just removed it. A completely normal business decision, if you give it a look today.
I often use this as a reminder when I found myself developed a fan-altitude towards a company, so I can convert my altitude to "Nice product, I hope it make money" then proceed to use their product with an understanding that maybe one day I'll jump to another ship.
No the real reason Google Reader was shut down was because it was competing with Google Plus, their failed social network/Facebook compete. Vic Gundotra was the head of Google Plus product and was not shy or hiding that Google Reader had to go--at the time Reader had its own social features like the ability to subscribe to your friend's starred RSS feeds/stories and share them, comment on them, etc. It was purely a calculated move to kill Reader so people had to use Google Plus for sharing stories and commenting on them. This would goose the number of active Google Plus users and ensure Vic hit his targets for getting fat bonus payments.
This absolutely was not a case of "the product was finished and did all it needed to do"... people were pissed at what was happening and didn't want to move over to Google Plus (which completely lacked the core feature of reading RSS feeds, despite Gundotra claiming they would eventually implement it (shocker! they never did)).
The story of Google Reader's demise is purely a power grab by a mad exec/product leader that ran his product to failure and eventually was forced out of the company under allegations of being a sex pest to employees. Google Reader died for no good reason other than getting that piece of garbage some bonuses.
To echo many others, killing reader is when Google jumped the shark for its technical fans.
The love was so high, and the cost of maintaining it so (presumably) low, that it was nothing but a slap in the face. I've been de-googling myself ever since.
It was the social graph that made Google Reader great not the basic RSS functionality. That was really the game changer. It tapped into your friends feeds, what they liked and read.
You could follow other peoples recommendations, and the user belonged to a network of other users. It also made finding widely shared news items stand out and interesting blogs to follow easier and strengthened the network by doing so.
All the replacements afterwards didn't have this social aspect (or if they did they lacked the network needed for it) so they were like a graveyard socially.
I finally managed to create a habit out of RSS after years of trying. What worked was,I know this may sound obvious, using a phone based reader instead of a desktop. It's like a categorizable, algorithmless social media feed now, full of content that people spent more than a few minutes writing, and it's great. Aside from regular feeds I feed in HN through hnrss.org, YouTube directly, and the odd twitter account through nitter.net.
Well it's comfortable, newspaper- or magazine-style reading, right? For me, RSS is now inextricable from my iPad, I can't imagine reading news any other way.
A bit funny how Apple tried so hard with their Newsstand thing, and then later Apple News+ or whatever. The solution was RSS all along.
How did you procure a list of feeds worth following? I really enjoy RSS, but I have had trouble finding enough content to fill a feed I can regularly check.
RSS is only dead to those who don't know how to use it or lack imagination, what a weird thing to say really.
Personally I've been using it for a myriad of things ever since 2007, just recently I discovered you can add .atom to GitHub releases e.g. https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy/releases.atom for a nice list of updates.
I like how neatly I can keep track of everything in one place without having to run around the web and deal with all the madness. If the feed is full of crap I can filter it out with www.feedrinse.com
RSS brings order to chaos, it keeps the signal-to-noise ratio under my control in a world bent on exploiting my web usage
I literally stopped reading literature the same way after that. With GReader I used to consume the ToC of 15-30 journals without missing a single abstract. I just gave up on reading that way after that, no other tool came close.
I used to use it to avoid the internet ads and the clean interface. I stopped reading RSS after that too, I currently have NetNewsWire, but don't use it as much.
What angers me even more is that this was done in a push to get more people to use Google Plus to share news. Even though people shifted to other readers the network effect was killed. We are seeing this happen all over again with Twitter.
Reading that post you can really see how little Google cares about the end users. They are closing products and removing features without providing a replacement and providing ridiculously short timelines for changing.
I remember when they shut it down and I haven't found one that I've loved like Reader. Reader was beloved to the level of apps like Notion and Figma and nothing has come along to replace it in a way that works for today's content content landscape. A lot has changed in ten years, content has exploded in volume and decreased in average quality and every app started to feel as noisy as my social feeds.
Our users at Upnext (https://www.getupnext.com) are saying the same, so we're moving into the space with our next major release. Upnext 2.0 will allow you to follow anything on the web (Newsletters, sites, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc). If you're interested in trying out the beta you can sign up here: https://upnexthq.typeform.com/to/MYfd4pcK
In the meantime, I'd love to hear what folks are using today and why they miss Google Reader.
I can recommend https://feedbin.com/ as a great replacement. It's $50 a year, but in return you get a service that is rock solid with an owner who is luckily very good in >> not << implementing features: no feature creep, no breaking changes, dead simple interface, no BS.
Still mad about this too, like so many others here. I’ve been using Feedly since then, and it works for the RSS part. But I really miss the small community of people I discussed things articles with in Google Reader. Most of those people I no longer talk to. It was a unique form of sharing and commenting that just worked for us in a way no other products did.
After 10 years im still puzzled how they could kill this product.
Absolutely minimal costs to run, free data for their search business and even the possibility to monetize their tool with ads.
They could have incorporated news and build a whole platform on it.
And what did Google do ... they replaced it with NOTHING.
While this was a pretty monumental moment in how most of us viewed Google, and was probably bad for things like RSS adoption (it's fallen a lot since), I can't but help think that Google moving out of this field opened it up for some actual improvements
I use inoreader, and it's got features Reader never had, and probably never would have grown. If Google was still king of the castle, it probably wouldn't exist today
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|3 years ago|reply
Edit: Perhaps a better phrasing: Before, if you asked "will this useful Google product be here in a year", I would answer "yes". After, I could only say "maybe". And that made all the difference.
[+] [-] rhaway84773|3 years ago|reply
Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits.
It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.
[+] [-] plorkyeran|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CobrastanJorji|3 years ago|reply
Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sorts of influencers. If they had viewed Reader as a marketing expense, keeping it online would've been a no-brainer.
But instead, they instead viewed it as a consumer tool that didn't have a path to profitability, and they were 100% right, but then over the next few years, it became clear how many later Google efforts would've benefited from Reader existing. Google+ would've meshed well with it. That little Google "stuff you maybe want to see" panel on Android phones that would frequently make little notices like "hey, we think you like this site, there's a new article," and that was probably really involved to build, and also it absolutely sucked compared to just having Reader.
Ultimately I have to assume that it's a business org problem. No engineer was going to get a promotion keeping Reader alive. No manager was going to be able to grow Reader's audience 10x. No director would want to give up a half dozen of their engineers to keep Reader running just because it would significantly hurt Google to turn it off. And no executive cared about a product that small. The org structure didn't lead to someone incentivized to want to keep Reader going, despite its popularity inside and outside the company.
[+] [-] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.
[+] [-] simonw|3 years ago|reply
I doubt Google took into account how damaging for their reputation is would be to shut down a product that had an audience that was small but extremely online and influential, both at the time and into the future.
[+] [-] 7to2|3 years ago|reply
Not everything is numbers and loss centers. Don't lie and do the right thing. Treat people with honesty and respect. It's not that difficult.
[+] [-] megaman821|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chunkyks|3 years ago|reply
But, that was the first Google product where it really hit home, to me, how even if a product is fantastic and useful, Google will kill it without a second thought.
It fundamentally changed my attitude toward Google and made me far more deliberate about what services I choose to rely on, especially from the big G.
Obligatory link to https://killedbygoogle.com/
[+] [-] js4ever|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thr717272|3 years ago|reply
For me Google+ was a lot like HN:
Peaceful, quiet and beautiful and lots Open Source content and smart people.
I still look once or twice a year but it seems everyone who are into building social media wants to copy not only the very limited functionality of Twitter, down to its dumb limitations, but also its UX and aestheti.
The exceptions I am aware of are Hubzilla (which lools seriously interesting but just confuses me and has no obvious way to enter - and yes, I can create my own instance but I cannot find anyone else), Diaspora (which I think copies Facebook and which is also confusing) and MeWe (which superficially look like Google+ but insist on repeating Googles mistake WRT real name policy).
[+] [-] pirsquare|3 years ago|reply
Any decent human being would at least try to rectify things ASAP, except for Google. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution.
They're the most dysfunctional organization I've seen in my life. It's like communications between teams goes with a "none of my business" attitude.
Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...
[+] [-] compsciphd|3 years ago|reply
OK, you want to push Google+? Isn't google+ supposed to be a platform (and not simply an application). Let google reader be an application on top of the Google+ platform.
i.e. facebook is valuable because people share things on it. Why would you kill an app that is causing people to share things with each other. Leverage that user base.
Reader should have simply been one app built on top of the Google+ platform. Yes, this would involve rewriting it to some extent, but better to do things that maintain your user base, than do things that give people reason to leave.
Google has repeated this error over and over again since then, especially with their chat/messaging strategies. Don't give people reasons to jump ship. If you force them to migrate to something new, they can just as easily migrate away from you.
[+] [-] ilikepi|3 years ago|reply
They actually did start to integrate them. Google Reader had native sharing functionality for several years. Then in 2011 they suddenly removed it and replaced[1] it with sharing through Google+. My small network of Reader-using friends were split over wanting to join Google+, so that mostly killed our practice of regularly sharing links with each other.
[1]: https://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-in-reader-fres...
[+] [-] nirui|3 years ago|reply
Back when Google was an underdog company in the market, they were desperately capturing the market share, and their strategy was basically throwing a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks (in a calculated way). I'd say Google Reader was one if the lucky coincidence they hit.
Sadly, after Google stabilized at it's market position, they no longer need these loss leader products, so they just removed it. A completely normal business decision, if you give it a look today.
I often use this as a reminder when I found myself developed a fan-altitude towards a company, so I can convert my altitude to "Nice product, I hope it make money" then proceed to use their product with an understanding that maybe one day I'll jump to another ship.
[+] [-] qbasic_forever|3 years ago|reply
This absolutely was not a case of "the product was finished and did all it needed to do"... people were pissed at what was happening and didn't want to move over to Google Plus (which completely lacked the core feature of reading RSS feeds, despite Gundotra claiming they would eventually implement it (shocker! they never did)).
The story of Google Reader's demise is purely a power grab by a mad exec/product leader that ran his product to failure and eventually was forced out of the company under allegations of being a sex pest to employees. Google Reader died for no good reason other than getting that piece of garbage some bonuses.
[+] [-] anotherhue|3 years ago|reply
The love was so high, and the cost of maintaining it so (presumably) low, that it was nothing but a slap in the face. I've been de-googling myself ever since.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thinkingemote|3 years ago|reply
You could follow other peoples recommendations, and the user belonged to a network of other users. It also made finding widely shared news items stand out and interesting blogs to follow easier and strengthened the network by doing so.
All the replacements afterwards didn't have this social aspect (or if they did they lacked the network needed for it) so they were like a graveyard socially.
[+] [-] dariusj18|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nanna|3 years ago|reply
For an RSS client i use the excellent Feeder
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|3 years ago|reply
A bit funny how Apple tried so hard with their Newsstand thing, and then later Apple News+ or whatever. The solution was RSS all along.
[+] [-] vort3|3 years ago|reply
https://openrss.org/blog/youtube-feeds
[+] [-] pwpw|3 years ago|reply
An example of the perfect feed for me is https://ciechanow.ski/atom.xml.
[+] [-] nntwozz|3 years ago|reply
Personally I've been using it for a myriad of things ever since 2007, just recently I discovered you can add .atom to GitHub releases e.g. https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy/releases.atom for a nice list of updates.
I like how neatly I can keep track of everything in one place without having to run around the web and deal with all the madness. If the feed is full of crap I can filter it out with www.feedrinse.com
RSS brings order to chaos, it keeps the signal-to-noise ratio under my control in a world bent on exploiting my web usage
[+] [-] ramraj07|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dewey|3 years ago|reply
There's almost as many good and different RSS reader clients as Todo list apps, so this somehow seems like seen through rose-tinted glasses.
[+] [-] tap-snap-or-nap|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chupchap|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|3 years ago|reply
- Almost all sites worth reading where an RSS feed makes sense... has an RSS feed
- The Old Reader is basically Google Reader. No weird design stuff going on. on iOS Reeder is a good app to hook it up to.
If you missed RSS, it's not cuz it went away. It's there waiting for you
[+] [-] puzzlingcaptcha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vander_elst|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamifsud|3 years ago|reply
Our users at Upnext (https://www.getupnext.com) are saying the same, so we're moving into the space with our next major release. Upnext 2.0 will allow you to follow anything on the web (Newsletters, sites, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc). If you're interested in trying out the beta you can sign up here: https://upnexthq.typeform.com/to/MYfd4pcK
In the meantime, I'd love to hear what folks are using today and why they miss Google Reader.
[+] [-] leokennis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lenocinor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BonoboIO|3 years ago|reply
They could have incorporated news and build a whole platform on it.
And what did Google do ... they replaced it with NOTHING.
Google Reader was THE original Newsfeed.
[+] [-] paradox460|3 years ago|reply
I use inoreader, and it's got features Reader never had, and probably never would have grown. If Google was still king of the castle, it probably wouldn't exist today