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Who killed Google Reader - a ten year anniversary retrospective discussion
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- Title
- Who killed Google Reader?
- Authors
- David Pierce
- Published
- Jun 30 2023
- Word count
- 4013 words
I really liked Google Reader and since they killed it, I view Google as an unreliable company. Sure, stories about someone being screwed by some Google product and not being able to get to any human help do not make it better. But it started with Google Reader for me. I never invest any time in learning any of their products if there is an alternative. Sometimes I am tempted - for example, right now I am trying to build an app and Firebase would make it a lot easier. I even look at their pricing from time to time but then the alarm bell in my mind goes off: "never depend on Google!"
I loved Google Reader. I'm not a dev or anything, but I imagine that simply keeping it alive would cost very little for a company like Google. Doesn't seem like a resource drain. They could keep it just for the sake of the users and to maintain some goodwill. They didn't, and it felt personal.
My illusions with Google ended right there.
Google Reader, News, Inbox and Music.
Paraphrasing the article, Google Reader never became "Google" big.
Thing is, how can one possibly expect for lighting to strike twice? They only got lucky with YouTube because they acquired it. Different people flock to different services for different needs, and to try and apply the same set of measures of success to such wildly different services against the success of juggernauts like Google's Search engine and YouTube? It's absurd.
It's absolutely a "judging a fish by its ability to climb trees" moment.
Kagi search is pretty good but you do have to pay for it, but this does mean that aren't trying to monetise you as you are now the customer, so no search results promoted higher because they may be of commercial interest or any adverts at all.
Brave Search is also pretty good but it's a pain to use as a default search engine on iOS mobile browsers unless you use their web browser as well.
Yes it is indeed trust unfortunately... the guy running it posts pretty regularly on HackerNews but I can't remember his username... maybe keep an eye for a post and then ask him directly?
I meant more to ask why he should be trusted, what guarantees there are in place etc... if he can't satisfy you, then as you say you should stay well away from it.
I'm still looking for a decent search engine and have not yet found one but this indexing search engine compilation by @seirdy might help you out.
For email I've switched to Fastmail and am very happy so far. I'm slowly switching over my accounts in various places, still keeping a catchall 'spam' service email on Gmail. I'm making a lot of use of their alias options (to help prevent spam when a service I sign up for inevitably gets hacked).
I've tried to switch to Firefox since it was called Firebird (went with Opera for years, then Chrome) and it has finally stuck. No complaints now.
For a search engine I’ve been using Kagi for a few months and I’m pretty happy with it.
Same here. I've been using Kagi for one year, and Fastmail for twelve.
I recommend both. No ads. No gimmicks. You pay for the service you get.
Unfortunately I'm in deep with Gmail and I'm afraid what'll happen if they ever scrap that. I know I can migrate to another service over time, but the sheer pain of having to update hundreds of accounts with a new email address is too catastrophic to think about.
When I moved from Google to a Zoho email, I updated a few of the most important accounts, then simply updated emails when I logged into something new. A bit less overwhelming that way!
I'm in the process of migrating to Proton Mail. And... For me its ok, I just have two emails - one for business and serious staff - Proton and one for throw-out emails subscriptions - GMail. I simply changing registration from GMail to Proton one by one without hustle and urgency. For me its ok to have few separate emails, I have separate working email anyway, so +1 is not major change.
Do all the hundreds of them really matter though? It might turn out to be a nice reset button.
It's very tempting for people to think of online services as products. They think of Netflix, Facebook, et. al. as if they were appliances because they are reliably available for the most part. And so in that very specific respect Google's unreliability isn't necessarily an evil thing; they're just doing regular service things that demonstrate that the service provider has nearly all of the leverage in your relationship to them. One should keep that in mind when engaging with any service provider.
Please note that this is not a defense of Google insofar as it is a knock on everyone else. Google is still evil.
I didn't realize until you said it, but have never tried a new Google "app" since they closed reader. I still have Gmail and drive but I used to always be in line for what ever new thing they were putting out.
Now I don't bother. I loved reader.
tl;dr:
You can always rely on Google to shutter a cool and useful product as soon as they get bored of it. Google drive and Google maps are the only reliable applications, everything else under their umbrella was either cancelled or is about to be cancelled as far as I can tell. Even YouTube, I don't trust them to keep the lights on.
Which sucks because I like all of their products, they're extremely well made for the most part, just always at risk of getting shut down.
Are you telling me their office suite is dying? Google Home? All of that?
Is that the charitable interpretation of what they said?
Great article, lot of background I had no awareness of at the time. It's interesting to read about the internal battles that ended up killing Reader. It never made sense why they'd axed it - it doesn't quite make sense now but it becomes clear that it was just too unglamorous to execs to continue. A real pity. I was a big Reader user and its death pretty much cut me off from a lot of the indie web, as some call it now, blogs and sites that I used to read at the time. Feedly and the like just weren't the same. I ended up in a boring soup of Facebook and Instagram and nearly forgot that the rest of the web existed for several years after.
Google kills Google things and that's why I stopped using anything besides Gmail. It's funny that such huge corporation can be that unreliable. Inbox, Wave, Music, Reader were are great services that now rest in https://gcemetery.co/
I can't imagine wanting to stay at a company for long that promotes behaviour like this, even if its freaking Google.
Great article, reminds me a bit of the Ars Technica one about all the Google chat apps!
Can you link the ars technica article?
Sure, its right here! There also seems to be a Tildes discussion from 2021 already, see here (posted by @Deimos of course haha)
This was a great read, thank you for posting this. What a lost opportunity Reader was.
I never forgot, and I will never forgive.
I've held a grudge for that since.