16
votes
What did Google Reader offer back in the day?
From time to time I see people on the internet who remember Google Reader fondly, and miss it. At the time, I didn't have much use for something like it, so I never used it.
But a common theme in these conversations about Google Reader is that no other feed reader ever offered everything Google Reader could, but I can't seem to find details.
So what was it? Does anyone here remember Google Reader, or even still wishes it was available? Why did nothing come from the Open Source community that could replace it?
I didn't use Google Reader all that heavily, but for me, the cool part about it was that it was a single feed you could access on multiple devices and all your data was the same on them. There are services today that replicate that, but I don't think any of them have quite the same dead simple functionality.
I think part of it's also just frustration that Google killed off a perfectly working product that had a rather loyal fanbase for no particular reason other than that Google felt RSS was becoming outdated, which I have to admit didn't go over very well with me either. They did the same thing with iGoogle, a service I used far more heavily, for the reason that they felt it was outdated, but it really ruined my homepage and I've never found something I've liked as much as a replacement. I used to really like Google+ because of its small close knit communities, but you know where that went too. It makes it easy for me to put it on a pedestal, because I've grown to take a very dim view on Google's knack for building great products and then yanking them unpredictably for no good reason.
This is spot on, but it goes even further than just the value of a social RSS feed. Google Reader encouraged the popular appeal and adoption of RSS. It's a little bit technical and wonky, so few laymen were willing to learn what it was and the value it added. But the social component of Reader encouraged people to participate since their friends could plug them into it.
Google eventually tried to replace it with a feature called "Buzz" which was basically a Twitter knock-off. The reason Buzz failed clarifies what people loved about Reader. It was content without opinion. It centered the thing being shared over your opinion about the thing in a way none of the big social networks today do. Functionally it was a centralized way to say "You might find this interesting" rather than "Here's what you ought to think about this." It was a much healthier paradigm for how to share content online.
And because it was RSS based, it encouraged engagement with independent content creators in a platform agnostic way. Anyone on the open web could syndicate through RSS and your feed could aggregate ALL of it. This means you don't need to be a YouTube star or a Vimeo star to go viral, you can host on whatever video host suits your needs and virality through a social RSS feed could not only happen but create a platform agnostic way to subscribe to you. A big part of the ecosystem of independent blogs and websites depended on this model and it's been on life support ever since the capacity to share and subscribe to pages got hamstrung.
I was heavily invested in Google Reader. I basically lived out of it with regards to my news, etc.
Other sites like The Old Reader etc have come around providing similar features and a near-identical experience, but as Google Reader was going away, the internet was changing.
Back then, most feeds would offer up the full article in the feed, there weren't a lot of ads or sponsored content, and so on.
It was all a perfect storm:
The great thing about Google Reader is that it just worked. Adding and organizing feeds was a breeze and the UI was fairly basic. There wasn't any 'GO PRO FOR $5/m!' or any limits around importing or exporting feeds. Everything was there and tried into the Google ecosystem most of us were in love with at the time.
I don't think the magic of Google Reader could be recaptured, at least for me. It was launched at the perfect time and was murdered/sunsetted at a major junction in news media advertising.
Try Feedbin or BazQux reader, they can fetch full articles right from the reader.
So my takeaway from your comment and most others is that the features it offered have been replaced, but it was sort of "too little, too late" and everyone had moved onto other things (like Reddit)?
No. Google killed Reader to try and cannibalize its audience for a Twitter knock-off they were trying to sell called Buzz. It was a dismal failure because people who liked Twitter would obviously prefer to be on Twitter just as people who wanted a Facebook function were going to stick to Facebook instead of Google+.
Then once Reader died a lot of the scale incentives that encouraged people to somewhat prioritize RSS died with it. RSS was never that popular in the mainstream, but it was VERY popular among people who share articles a lot (sort of thought influencers) and get other people to read them.
This included journalists as well as influential Internet personalities like Will Wheaton or Felicia Day. If you were on THEIR feed your content had a better chance of going viral and percolating out to the internet at large. Once that small audience got balkanized among a bunch of other readers with no social feeds, the value proposition for a publisher to provide an RSS feed was gone. So now it's more like a courtesy to media junkies and "power users" of online publishing rather than a tool they had to drive traffic.
I hate this trend. I wouldn't even mind advertising done in-line in the RSS feed, the source would just have to be content to serve generic ads instead of focusing on analytics and targeting which would have been a way healthier internet. Daring Fireball does this and just sells a weekly or monthly (can't remember which) sponsorship for someone to sponsor the RSS feed.
I don't see anyone commenting on what I thought the killer feature was: group sharing.
I had a group of 5 or 10 friends and with a click of a button, you share a story to a sort of "community feed". It was a long time ago, but I think you could make short comments too. It was a fantastic way to casually keep in touch with friends over the stories of the day.
You can argue we weren't actually close friends, but I've lost touch with some of those people who I used to think about all throughout my day.
The only two sites I've ever really been sad about shutting down are google reader and Rdio - which I actually cried over lol.
Exactly! The application was nice, working across platforms and devices, all synced -- all now expected. It had virtually no monetization or ads built in, which is now no longer accepted.
I agree with many of the posters here, people who lament Reader are lamenting about how the web has changed. RSS itself had started trending toward ad/summary-to-click-through than full article, I don't know that it would've had a great life anyway. I personally think it would have been death by a thousand rss-feed-is-summary website conversions.
And regarding other readers, there a million, they're fine. I chose one. But my Reader network fragmented and that was that.
Plenty came from the open source community to replace it. There's lots of open source feed readers out there. I personally use the albeit closed source bazqux.com with a lifetime subscription to it. It looks and feels a LOT like Google reader.
What did it offer? Well it came out at a time before Reddit. Before the Facebook feed. Before all these crowdsourced curation engines. It allowed you to, through the magic of rss, subscribe to websites you liked and be able to read their articles from one spot.
With Reddit's decline I've started using bazqux more again. I stopped using it for a while as more of my news came from Twitter, Reddit and HN. But now I'm reminded that there's a few sites with very good SNR that I generally want to get nearly all updates from.
I don't follow the activitypub scene but I'm led to believe they are trying to come up with novel ways of adapting to the modern world what rss gave the web back then. I wonder if they'll succeed.
Google Reader was not extremely better than many other alternatives, but it was good, fast and well integrated. It was also stable, and probably required little resources. But, hey, it's Google.
Websites killed RSS readers, not Google. They used to share the entire article via RSS, which you could read with no (or little?) CSS, no (or little) JS and, most importantly, no ads. Now they only share headlines that drive you to their websites.
RSS readers filled an important niche before the internet figure out how to monetize itself.
Today, services like Pocket and Instapaper allow you to "clean" most articles and send them to their apps, but you gotta actively share the pages. It's nowhere near as good as the RSS golden age, but it's something.
Google reader was popular because it was free and just works.
But I personally find that modern rss reader is already better than Google reader used to be.
I used to use Feedbin (still have active subscription until December), bit I'm slowly migrating to BazQux reader. It looks great and can fetch full content right from the reader which is very important for me.
The issue is that newer websites tend to not have rss feeds anymore.
Honestly there are plenty of readers out there that are just as good, some are free and some aren't. I think the "killer feature" was just that so many people used it, which helped push RSS as a standard. Without a ubiquitous reader backed by a big (albeit fickle) company, RSS itself has become less popular, which has made the now fractured reader apps less useful.
I should note that I never really used Reader, but I used NetNewsWire back in the day (and today I use Leaf, much less often), so I benefited from RSS's popularity, which I attribute partially to Reader's popularity.
I don’t think it was the case that nothing replicated Google Reader, it was that nothing else that was free replicated Google Reader, and users felt betrayed by Google shuttering a good service that they came to rely on. Personally I moved to Feedbin, which works just as well as Google Reader did, but it’s SaaS, so I pay for it. I don’t mind paying for it, but the real beef I have with Google killing their free-as-in-beer RSS reader is that it increased the friction of consuming RSS feeds for more people. RSS is such a good idea and it was starting to become mainstream beyond just podcasts, but since it is not a centralized thing that could be controlled by any one entity, the cynical take is that Google killed Google Reader so they could push people toward more proprietary publication services.