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:
"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."
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.
I hope the death of Reader serves as a wake up call on several fronts.
But Twitter doesn't make any money, and Facebook not that much. The bulk of Google's revenue comes from leveraging the openness of the Web; were there only Facebooks and Twitters there would be no Google Search because there would be nothing to index.
This may be completely off, but the killing of Reader looks like a desperate move to help Google+: since Google can't kill Facebook, they're willing to hurt themselves instead -- to cut their left arm so that their right arm can grow stronger.
If this is indeed the case, it's very shortsighted.
I saw this situation coming a long while ago. These companies are now turning against those who made them what thu are. Worst is that they turned against us, the hackers. No or limited API access, real name policies, lack of gener privacy, no way to get your data back, etc. All of this as a result of these companies being run by the traditional corporate drone. This is why Nuuton is being developed, by me, a hacker with business experience. I know how the value Of a company depends by the hacker community that forms around it. When I say value I don't mean money. I mean how well the company is poised to do some re innovation and provide a good dependable service to the community at large.
Nuuton features a strict privacy policy with no re names, no tracking, no bubbles, and private data as a default. It will also allow for easy access to your data. All of it. To the hacker community, it has and will have a robust collection of APIs for you to use without draconian limitations. Best of all, Nuuton is not being developed as a one way lottery ticket. I don't need or want the money. I'm building it because I have had it up to here with dealing with these abusive companies.
Except Twitter used to offer "extremely deep API support...allow[ing] folks to build applications that leverage [their] platform in unique ways." And then they couldn't make any money that way.
I'm really not sure you have a good example of a loss of an open ecosystem here. NewsGator's plans were to pretty much create the equivalent of the (unofficial) Google Reader API, which, while not replacing RSS (the actual open format), does notably reduce its role. Moreover, for those who apparently don't remember, NewsGator actually did release their API. The API and their free reader software is what they shut down in 2009.
You can blame that on Google, who did indeed retain the lion's share of users, or you could blame the self defeating business plan of providing a completely open API for free even while it costs money to run. A NewsGator API is not a loss in terms of a loss of an open ecosystem (and Bloglines was definitely not a loss).
If you want open, you need a real federated protocol. Like RSS.
Meanwhile, this article says "RSS industry" in the headline, but it's about nothing like that. The author says it himself: "No, Google Reader’s real competition back in its early days was not client software but services that aggregated RSS feeds and synchronized them across multiple devices."
You can't embrace, extend, and extinguish services that have no standard format. RSS is doing just fine. What was lost here was a UI and a service, which leaves us with user migration pain and a loss of continuity of history (due to indefinite feed history).
We'll likely always need some services. Yes, I can run a feed aggregator on my home machine, but it's kind of a waste, and not everyone has stable IP addresses they can use to sync across devices. Instead of giving up on services, what we need to learn from this is to make sure the next services we allow ourselves to depend on don't have control of our history, both individually and collectively. Notably Facebook, Twitter, and G+ don't fit this bill, or fit it only partially.
(Unfortunately, our collective history on those services is complicated by visibility/access by person controls, so maybe there isn't a perfect solution. I know I can use takeout to download my posts on G+, for instance, but what about my comments on others' posts, and what about those posts themselves as context for my comments? And what about the major news of the day, even if I didn't comment?
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?
Okay, so even with Reader being this 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.
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.
As a side note, I'm someone who consumes a lot 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.
> 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.
If you ask me, it's the combination of browsers and websites not properly exposing the existence of RSS that has stunted its growth.
Firefox used to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in a webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it (EDIT: that I was aware of - others have pointed out Safari also had this feature for a while), and it was a fairy obscure button too. Then they removed that.
So now you actually have to hunt for the RSS feeds - and since many webpages use a gif saying "RSS" (meaning text search is useless) that isn't always easy.
It's not difficult to use at all, but it is certainly a very obscure feature of the internet. That halts adoption.
> the RSS protocol was still dying because most people have moved on to other ways of consuming news
Any evidence to validate this claim? Popularity of Twitter or Facebook doesn't have to be at the cost of RSS. Even if it was, it doesn't make one more relevant or irrelevant. TV did not kill Radio (at least for everyone).
New applications like Pulse depend on RSS. Many users depended on Google Reader. Now they have to learn a new application. Some of them use mobile apps which are pointing to Google Reader. It is not going to be an easy change.
One can make the argument that Reader's dominance in the market helped push the decline of RSS usage. To try and compete in the same space you have to hide the fact that you are an RSS reader; whether that be with gimmicky layouts or by integrating with social networks, or whatever else. You can't be seen as redundant with Reader.
I think we're going to see a lot of advances with RSS due to the closure of Reader and I'm excited to see those.
This gets said a lot 'RSS is dead'. It's very much not, in terms of people consuming news through it? Maybe. But it also powers podcasts, for example, and they're going from strength to strength. Plus a lot of sites showed they still get a large amount of traffic via RSS after the announcement.
A million users isn't a lot at Google scale, but it's by no means dead.
I use RSS for low-traffic sporadic blogs and a handful of higher-traffic news magazines. I don't get too many items a day and it's quite easy to quickly remove the ones I'm not interested in. Then I'm left with about 1-10 interesting articles every day, which is pretty much what I want.
Not providing an RSS feed is like not providing an API; you're giving up control of how scrapers access your website, but I'm sure that readers will find a way to get automate content aggregation either way. It's just annoying to lose standards.
I use Google Reader a lot but I don't care about RSS. I think RSS is unnecessary for news aggregation and the death of Google Reader has little to do with RSS.
If the death of Google Reader was about RSS, Google could have declared RSS legacy and told people to start using the HTML5 article tag plus a few specific metadata attributes.
But how would that have helpled G+ compete against Facebook? It would have taken some creativity to figure that out, but since many Reader users were keen on sharing it shouldn't have been an impossible problem to solve compared to self driving cars.
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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Is there an RSS reader today that does any of this?
Gnus wasn't the only Usenet news reader that had advanced features like that. Other news readers, like Pan[1] did too. Many mail clients, like mutt[2] and claws[3], were also pretty advanced in the ways they let the user score, filter, and consume content.
Web forums, web mail, blogs, and web news sites were definitely a huge step backwards in terms of interface and features.
Well there was a service named Aiderss that did ranking based on internet popularity which was renamed PostRank[1]. Google bought the company behind it in 2011 and discontinued the service instead of integrating it in Google Reader.
That sounds really interesting. I deliberately avoid high volume RSS feeds due to the difficulty of finding the things I actually want to read.
I get the feeling though that the issue with RSS was not altogether an issue of uptake or ux.. but more an issue of sites wanting to track their users. If RSS could allow for some sort of phone home (opt out / anonymisable of course) then maybe there might be more of a push from content creators.
+1... I've said here repeatedly that Usenet and Usenet readers were, 15 years ago, way more advanced than things people are using now. Questions about, say, Java in comp.lang.java.^ were leading to more interesting answers than what is available today in SO.
And, more importantly, it was so easy to follow a gigantic amount of threads and find the information that would likely be of interest to you.
Sure this required good readers and users willing to learn to use these but as a result it was incredibly more useful than what we have today. There were some people who simply geniuses and who were explaining things in great way: it was very easy to assign them good scores so that their interventions would stand out.
What do we have today? Inferior crap like StackOverflow because, supposedly, users would be too lazy to learn to use powerful functionalities.
I'm pretty sure one day we'll get some "Gnus meet StackOverflow" webapp which is going to rock our world. I can't wait for the next big thing because honestly we've made a gigantic step backward.
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.
Nobody is interested in ways to leak content and users outside their empire, at the contrary.
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.
Ultimately it's us who are at fault. We had it, but gave it all up.
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.
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.
G+ can't be avoided for too long. Google is using it to tie together Author Rank, which helps for SEO. If you want your content to rank higher post-Panda update you'll leverage G+.
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.
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.
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.
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 years 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.
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.
What do you like better about Feedly? I've switched over as well, but the less compact interface (even after switching views as recommended by the bog post for migrating Reader users) and general sluggishness compared to Reader have annoyed me. I'd like to appreciate some of the differences instead.
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.
You can limit the potential damage by publishing a hash precommitment of the archive; then later if you need it, you can provide the archive itself, let others verify that the hash matches the archive, and then any 'edits' could only have been made before the hash was made (which might have been many years ago, whenever an issue or scandal pops up which motivates a look into the archive).
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.
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.)
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.
Well the article is about the synchronisation, not the RSS client.
I can read the same set of feeds in Flipboard on my phone, Reeder on my ipad and NNW on my mac.
The people who were building alternative synchronisation systems gave up when Google moved in with Reader; hopefully someone will step in with an alternative now, but there are a LOT of apps that will need to be updated to take advantage of the new system.
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.
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.
Google should just donate the Google Reader application to the Apache Foundation or another open source initiative so that others can host their own.
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.
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.
Anything other than Google search, Android, Google Cars and Google Glass is doomed to extinct, sooner or later.
Search is an easy problem once the hardware/bandwidth is cheap--they'll have more competition soon. The "cars" thing they have to fight everybody--insurance companies, car manufacturers, big oil, the govt. Pipe dream. I don't see Glass going anywhere either, nobody wants to wear a camera on their face--creepy. Adwords is funding the whole circus over there and publishers I talk to aren't happy with how they're treated. Content is king.
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).
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).
Google currents is doing something similar to reader too. The difference is the lock in and the magazine like feel. Then there is Keep.
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.
You seem to forgetting something. Privacy. I want to subscribe to RSS feeds without letting my friends and work colleagues know what they are. And I sure as hell don't want Google tailoring advertising or search results based on them.
[+] [-] onosendai|13 years ago|reply
"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."
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.
I hope the death of Reader serves as a wake up call on several fronts.
[+] [-] bambax|13 years ago|reply
This may be completely off, but the killing of Reader looks like a desperate move to help Google+: since Google can't kill Facebook, they're willing to hurt themselves instead -- to cut their left arm so that their right arm can grow stronger.
If this is indeed the case, it's very shortsighted.
[+] [-] orangethirty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicalist|13 years ago|reply
I'm really not sure you have a good example of a loss of an open ecosystem here. NewsGator's plans were to pretty much create the equivalent of the (unofficial) Google Reader API, which, while not replacing RSS (the actual open format), does notably reduce its role. Moreover, for those who apparently don't remember, NewsGator actually did release their API. The API and their free reader software is what they shut down in 2009.
You can blame that on Google, who did indeed retain the lion's share of users, or you could blame the self defeating business plan of providing a completely open API for free even while it costs money to run. A NewsGator API is not a loss in terms of a loss of an open ecosystem (and Bloglines was definitely not a loss).
If you want open, you need a real federated protocol. Like RSS.
Meanwhile, this article says "RSS industry" in the headline, but it's about nothing like that. The author says it himself: "No, Google Reader’s real competition back in its early days was not client software but services that aggregated RSS feeds and synchronized them across multiple devices."
You can't embrace, extend, and extinguish services that have no standard format. RSS is doing just fine. What was lost here was a UI and a service, which leaves us with user migration pain and a loss of continuity of history (due to indefinite feed history).
We'll likely always need some services. Yes, I can run a feed aggregator on my home machine, but it's kind of a waste, and not everyone has stable IP addresses they can use to sync across devices. Instead of giving up on services, what we need to learn from this is to make sure the next services we allow ourselves to depend on don't have control of our history, both individually and collectively. Notably Facebook, Twitter, and G+ don't fit this bill, or fit it only partially.
(Unfortunately, our collective history on those services is complicated by visibility/access by person controls, so maybe there isn't a perfect solution. I know I can use takeout to download my posts on G+, for instance, but what about my comments on others' posts, and what about those posts themselves as context for my comments? And what about the major news of the day, even if I didn't comment?
Sigh...we need a modern usenet...)
[+] [-] dhimes|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoncow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
Okay, so even with Reader being this 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.
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.
As a side note, I'm someone who consumes a lot 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.
[+] [-] vanderZwan|13 years ago|reply
If you ask me, it's the combination of browsers and websites not properly exposing the existence of RSS that has stunted its growth.
Firefox used to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in a webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it (EDIT: that I was aware of - others have pointed out Safari also had this feature for a while), and it was a fairy obscure button too. Then they removed that.
So now you actually have to hunt for the RSS feeds - and since many webpages use a gif saying "RSS" (meaning text search is useless) that isn't always easy.
It's not difficult to use at all, but it is certainly a very obscure feature of the internet. That halts adoption.
[+] [-] arocks|13 years ago|reply
Any evidence to validate this claim? Popularity of Twitter or Facebook doesn't have to be at the cost of RSS. Even if it was, it doesn't make one more relevant or irrelevant. TV did not kill Radio (at least for everyone).
New applications like Pulse depend on RSS. Many users depended on Google Reader. Now they have to learn a new application. Some of them use mobile apps which are pointing to Google Reader. It is not going to be an easy change.
People are mad for a reason.
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|13 years ago|reply
I think we're going to see a lot of advances with RSS due to the closure of Reader and I'm excited to see those.
[+] [-] nicholassmith|13 years ago|reply
A million users isn't a lot at Google scale, but it's by no means dead.
[+] [-] lucian1900|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pseut|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|13 years ago|reply
If the death of Google Reader was about RSS, Google could have declared RSS legacy and told people to start using the HTML5 article tag plus a few specific metadata attributes.
But how would that have helpled G+ compete against Facebook? It would have taken some creativity to figure that out, but since many Reader users were keen on sharing it shouldn't have been an impossible problem to solve compared to self driving cars.
[+] [-] bborud|13 years ago|reply
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Is there an RSS reader today that does any of this?
[+] [-] gnosis|13 years ago|reply
Web forums, web mail, blogs, and web news sites were definitely a huge step backwards in terms of interface and features.
[1] - http://pan.rebelbase.com/
[2] - http://www.mutt.org/
[3] - http://www.claws-mail.org/
[+] [-] mun2mun|13 years ago|reply
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostRank
[+] [-] milfot|13 years ago|reply
I get the feeling though that the issue with RSS was not altogether an issue of uptake or ux.. but more an issue of sites wanting to track their users. If RSS could allow for some sort of phone home (opt out / anonymisable of course) then maybe there might be more of a push from content creators.
[+] [-] pseut|13 years ago|reply
edit: [1] http://gwene.org/about.php
[+] [-] matthewn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinced|13 years ago|reply
And, more importantly, it was so easy to follow a gigantic amount of threads and find the information that would likely be of interest to you.
Sure this required good readers and users willing to learn to use these but as a result it was incredibly more useful than what we have today. There were some people who simply geniuses and who were explaining things in great way: it was very easy to assign them good scores so that their interventions would stand out.
What do we have today? Inferior crap like StackOverflow because, supposedly, users would be too lazy to learn to use powerful functionalities.
I'm pretty sure one day we'll get some "Gnus meet StackOverflow" webapp which is going to rock our world. I can't wait for the next big thing because honestly we've made a gigantic step backward.
[+] [-] martinced|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Nux|13 years ago|reply
Nobody is interested in ways to leak content and users outside their empire, at the contrary.
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.
Ultimately it's us who are at fault. We had it, but gave it all up.
We are giving up our privacy and freedom for illusory convenience and safety, to paraphrase a famous saying.
[+] [-] nir|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Supermighty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intopieces|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skymt|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artificialidiot|13 years ago|reply
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.
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.
[+] [-] streptomycin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taligent|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taylodl|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] codingthebeach|13 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5425713
Om Malik:
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to...
James Whittaker:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-...
Many others.
[+] [-] jokermatt999|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chirop|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|13 years ago|reply
You can limit the potential damage by publishing a hash precommitment of the archive; then later if you need it, you can provide the archive itself, let others verify that the hash matches the archive, and then any 'edits' could only have been made before the hash was made (which might have been many years ago, whenever an issue or scandal pops up which motivates a look into the archive).
[+] [-] cinbun8|13 years ago|reply
1 - http://mashable.com/2013/03/18/500000-google-reader-users-mi...
[+] [-] taligent|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregjor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magic_haze|13 years ago|reply
But then again, Facebook does the same thing...
[+] [-] don_draper|13 years ago|reply
Ridiculous. Microsoft works to eliminate the competition, whereas Google is just not supporting it. RSS will not be eliminated due to this decision.
[+] [-] jswinghammer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahoulb|13 years ago|reply
I can read the same set of feeds in Flipboard on my phone, Reeder on my ipad and NNW on my mac.
The people who were building alternative synchronisation systems gave up when Google moved in with Reader; hopefully someone will step in with an alternative now, but there are a LOT of apps that will need to be updated to take advantage of the new system.
[+] [-] guelo|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aqueous|13 years ago|reply
Google should just donate the Google Reader application to the Apache Foundation or another open source initiative so that others can host their own.
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.
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.
[+] [-] joering2|13 years ago|reply
Anything other than Google search, Android, Google Cars and Google Glass is doomed to extinct, sooner or later.
[+] [-] pjbrunet|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoncow|13 years ago|reply
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).
Google currents is doing something similar to reader too. The difference is the lock in and the magazine like feel. Then there is Keep.
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.
[+] [-] brownbat|13 years ago|reply
Just imagine if instead of killing them, they somehow entertwined Reader and Sidewiki...
[+] [-] taligent|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ommunist|13 years ago|reply