Google Reader is dead

[georgebashi]

Google Reader kept the content of RSS feeds cached forever, meaning it was the last surviving record of a huge number of dead and deleted blogs. The Archive Team have spent the last month or so fetching those blogs out of Reader to serve as a permanent archive. They posted a few days ago on HN asking for some last minute help, and managed to archive 46.23M feeds.

Check out their efforts here: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader

[martinkallstrom]

My former startup Twingly http://twingly.com has hundreds of millions of blog posts stored (everything collected since 2006) in 128 MySql shards with a unified query interface. The last few months of data are indexed and searchable for free from their website, but the entire archive is kept forever.

[bdz]

"... we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience."

Yeah, Reader held back the development of the robot car, glasses, floating balloon internet and the brazilian social site...

[batiudrami]

I'm pretty sick of this argument. Google is a company, they are not compelled to continue to support a product which is (presumably) not making money, or even if the resources they devote to it could be making more money elsewhere.

Honestly I think Google went above and beyond by giving advance notice, having an API which allows feed exporting and allowing subscriptions to continue to be exported after they close it down for those who ignored the advance notice as well as linking to alternative products.

Sure it sucks for those who used it, but can you imagine a company like Apple or Facebook doing all that for a product they're killing?

[maximilianburke]

Yet another unfortunate reminder that if you're not paying, you're not the customer.

[Pxtl]

Presumably they're working on getting Currents onto the Web, instead of having one product for the Web and one product for mobile.

[frio]

While Orkut's fair game, the rest is Google X, which I'd consider a reasonably different ball-game.

[jvdh]

Yes, keeping a webservice running takes time. Especially one that's being hit millions of times a day.

[mtowle]

BREAKING: In a surprise belated April Fool's joke, Google revives Reader, according to former CEO Eric Schmidt, "just to fuck with everyone who spent money developing a shitty alternative."

[personlurking]

V2: Google Reader reads you.

[steve19]

Right up till the 11th hour I held out hope that Google would give Reader a last minute stay of execution. A sad day indeed.

[tempestn]

What they should have done is announced that they were killing it, then when the entirely predictable public outcry hit, 'listen to the community', and make it a paid service instead. From the numbers Feedly and Newsblur and such are picking up, it doesn't seem like a stretch that a paid version of Google Reader could have brought in at least $10M/year, even given the resulting loss of users. The only difficulty would be converting from free to paid without massive backlash. The bait and switch would accomplish that.

Hire a few full-time engineers to maintain it, and you've still got many millions of dollars in annual revenue for something that already exists. Surely even a company Google's size would be better off not throwing that away in the interest of 'focus'. But hey, Larry is clearly smarter than I am, so presumably he knows what he's doing.

Heck, maybe he even realized that Reader had become an impediment to progress and removing it would be a net good (pun intended). The progress that's been made in just the past few months is certainly exciting.

[davidjohnstone]

As much as my life would have been easier this year without the decision to close Google Reader (I think this is what they call #firstworldproblems), it's a good thing that they didn't change their mind and decide to not shut it down at the last minute.

Too many people have invested too much time in creating viable alternatives to Google Reader, and un-discontinuing it would have thrown a massive spanner in the works. I probably would have stayed with an alternative out of spite.

[egeozcan]

Exactly my feelings. I actually kept the tab open to see if their API kept working but the feeds stopped loading and I hit F5. Oh, the horror...

[WildUtah]

And they actually, truly pulled the plug, with almost no warning. Now I have no idea what I'll do.

[unicornporn]

For me, this was a good move.

It inspired me to finally look past Google for the web based services I use daily (search, mail, rss, analytics, calendar, video hosting etc). Google's wants to know as much about me as possible. Putting all of my eggs in their basket seems like horrible idea. I've now come quite far in my exodus. Yesterday I found https://www.startpage.com/ (uses Google) which gives good results (roughly same as Swedish Google but not filter bubbled). DDG (uses different sources, but seems to weight Bing) is downright terrible when not using English as search language.

[BenoitEssiambre]

Google lost a lot of trust and goodwill from a lot of its power users with this move. I hope for them they had a good reason.

[debt]

Why do they need the trust and goodwill of a lot of power users?

[pohl]

Of course it's a good reason: they needed create company-wide, laser-like focus on making it possible for rich pervs to shoot amateur POV hands-free.

[ivank]

Organizing the World's Information... and setting it on fire 8 years later.

[petercooper]

It'll be less important now than it was 3-6 years ago, but get ready for all those FeedBurner subscriber count widgets to show huge subscriber # crashes as Reader no longer checks in.

Back in the day, they were a sort of informal auditing system and definitely helped me land advertisers for my blog (simply because I could "prove" I had 20,000 readers or whatever).

Thankfully I ditched the Web and moved to e-mail and know exactly how many subscribers I had, but this was certainly more luck and not any great piece of foresight on my part ;-)

[pavel_lishin]

This is going to sound antagonistic, but I'm genuinely curious: How many subscribers did you lose when you switched from RSS to email, and how do you know that all of them are receiving and reading your dispatches?

Personally, getting an e-mail instead of an RSS feed is sub-optimal - I can't easily add things to pocket from e-mail. I'm also wondering how many people trained their clients to re-route to spam.

[Narretz]

I use The Old Reade, which I can use exactly like Google Reader, with the exception that k does not always skip to the next article; if you're reading an article it skips to the top of that. Same strange behavior as Google Reader is that while the number of unread posts is correct, the content of your feed is not up-to-date, so you first have to click on the result number, then it is updated.

Apart from that, it's really nice. I never used any social features of the Reader, just the aggregation. That's why I couldn't care less if they implement RSS support or a recommendation engine in G+.

[greyman]

We'll see how it takes off when more users will come. It works fine feature-wise for me, it's just noticeably slower than Google Reader was... they probably don't have a large enough infrastructure yet.

[chii]

google reader had this feature where you could subscribe to an rss feeds filtered by label (or folders). I wish the old reader had it (i tried inoreader, and old reader, and neither has this feature unfortunately).

[beaker52]

I wish there was a decent alternative out there. They all seem to be a bit unpolished.

The most polished alternative I've seen is Feedly. I wrote to the founder about this many moons ago explaining that in trying to be 'innovative' with the UI, for me the whole user experience detracts so badly from the functionality I want from the app that I don't want to use it.

Where is the alternative, with the polish, without the 'innovation'. Perhaps I should build one...

I'll get my coat.

[greetings]

There are a few I have come to like:

These ones are all simple and much like google reader. Digg, BazQux and The Old reader all have pocket and/or similar services integrated and are all nice. I have decided that I will be using BazQux for my reader needs, it is fastest and seems to be nicely designed and is robust. It will also not be going away because it is currently profitable.

The Old Reader http://theoldreader.com/

Digg Reader(yes that digg) https://digg.com/reader

and BazQux reader https://bazqux.com/

Comma feed http://theoldreader.com/

[tr4656]

What's wrong with Feedbin or Fever?

[habosa]

RIP Reader. For those looking for a replacement, especially those with an Android phone, check out Newsblur. It's all open source, the developer is accessible, and most importantly it works insanely well. I honestly like it better than Reader.

[davidw]

I'm trying it, but it has a few things that bug me.

They messed with the arrow keys - they no longer scroll the page. I'm always accidentally going to the next or previous article. ARGH!

I miss the smart sorting order that Reader had - it was really good about bubbling stuff I cared about up to the top and letting me whip through the rest.

[voltagex_]

I'd love to use NewsBlur, except when I signed up my screen is filled with French feeds, with no way to get rid of them and no indication of why.

[mikejarema]

I've been using Google Alerts via RSS for years now, primarily consuming the alerts by way of Reader, but more recently Feedly.

One thing I didn't expect was to have Alerts drop RSS support coinciding with Reader's death. However, today in Feedly I'm staring at a wall of "Google Alerts no longer supports RSS delivery" items.

This suggests to me that RSS was an output for Google products insofar as it served as a way of feeding content (and eyeballs) into Reader. Now that Reader is gone, why would Google output RSS?

Anyone seeing any other Google RSS feeds failing in a similar fashion?

[csense]

I have no gmail account, no Youtube account, and no Google Reader...Google's always been a little too big for me to want to trust more than I have to, so I've gotten by without accounts on their services...

And that means I get to feel smugly superior to everyone else in this discussion.

[piyush_soni]

And that also means that in other than a few of these instances, you constantly feel inferior to everyone else in the society, because of the things you are missing :).

[smackfu]

The RSS area was pretty damns sparse outside of Reader. Were you just not using one?

[syzo]

Do you use Youtube to watch videos? Google to search?

Also, what do you do for email, roll your own? Got any tutorials if so (I sorta want to start dropping Google myself - search and Youtube will be tough though)? Anything I found was a bit too complicated or I just didn't want to spend that much time on it.

[pdevr]

You can, at least about Gmail. Especially since there is no way to export your Gmail data using Google Takeout.

[d2ncal]

Nobody mentioned tinytinyrss - I found it to be the best rss reader as a google reader alternative.

Its open source and also has an android app that rocks.

[nakedrobot2]

Sad, sad. I love seeing all the stealth replacements pop up in the last week or so.

Still, it is a sad day for RSS in general.

Google, this will not help me use G+.

Sad.

[pingbear]

If they'd integrated it into G+ I would have been less hesitant to use it.

[gmantastic]

I liked Google Reader, but all those great posts queued up with no time to read them properly felt like neglected homework. It's a shame to lose it, but maybe for the best. I won't be rushing to recreate it.

Links posted on Hacker News and Twitter allow me to find something interesting to read when I need it, without making any kind of commitment. For the very rare thing that I don't want to miss, I subscribe by email.

[iliaznk]

RIP By the way, I quite like the Digg Reader but it doesn't display the unread count regardless of the settings. Is it only me?

[snogglethorpe]

I don't see any unread counts either, despite turning them on in settings (the FAQ mentions that there's such a setting, although it implies it's turned on by default, whereas it was turned off for me...).

In fact, I also don't get any icons—or text, they're just blank space—for buttons... to even open the settings dialog I had to click randomly in likely-looking blank spaces on the main page. ><

I get the feeling they really rushed this out, and maybe didn't do a whole lot of testing...

[lake99]

Not just you. I don't see unread counts either, no matter how many times I toggle the odd-looking button in settings.

[Achshar]

It was showing the count a few days ago. Most probably a bug. They'll fix it soon enough I guess.

[stevewillows]

I've found a decent experience using Feedly in Chrome for the desktop and GReader for Android using the Feedly API. Still not as good as EasyRSS, but it will suffice until the dust settles.

In other news: EasyRSS has been open sourced: https://github.com/davidsun/EasyRSS

[ciniglio]

If you're looking for a new reader to try, check out www.readuction.com .

It's a different take on RSS, that intelligently gives you fewer articles to read. A friend and I built it over a few months, and we'd love any feedback you have.

You can import and export your feeds, so no need to worry about having data locked in.

[finnw]

Looks good. But how do you resync?

[pgambling]

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."