

Here's Why Google Reader Really Got the Axe - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/06/why-google-reader-got-the-ax/

======
davidgerard
MONOLITH VIEW, Silicone Valley, Thursday (NTN) — We’re in a new world of
computing. You need “personal”, “social” and “on the go”. So “search” will
“join the social” on Google Plus.

We know Search has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go.
We’re sad too. There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google
Plus^W^WSearch has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy
into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better — and
more sociable — user experience.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had this rate of change — it probably hasn’t
happened since the birth of social media in July 2011, with our superior
social media platform, Google Plus. So today we’re officially folding a number
of other products into Google Plus:

* YouTube will become Google Plus Video. Your YouTube will be just the same, you’ll just need a username you have government ID for. Don’t worry — you can trust us with it.

* Google Maps API will become Google Plus Maps. You’ll need to add your house, your workplace, your favourite retail experiences and your credit card number to your “circles”, then you can look up any place you want. You can opt out to Apple Maps any time you like.

* Google Docs got absorbed by Google Drive, which will become Google SUM(). Imagine the “social” of your spreadsheets being rated by all your friends! Once again, users who opt out are free to revel in the joys of Office 365.

* Google Voice App for BlackBerry will be discontinued once we’ve found both remaining BlackBerry users and notified them.

* Orkut, of course, is being kept.

We know you’ll be delighted with the Google Plus experience, with hundreds of
millions of people every month delighted to be using Google Plus! Or products
that require a profile on it. It’s like Facebook without all the annoying
people on it. Or any people. But the people on it love it with huge
enthusiasm, just like the ones who loved Google Buzz before we shot that
through the head too. Come onto Plus, or Vic will cry. You don’t want to see
Vic crying, do you? Asshole. You probably hurt puppies, too.

To ensure a smooth transition, we’re providing a three-month sunset period so
you have sufficient time to find an alternate web-searching solution. Good
luck on that one. Because, and you know it in your heart, Google Plus as a
search engine still sucks less than Bing.

[http://newstechnica.com/2013/03/14/spring-clean-google-
searc...](http://newstechnica.com/2013/03/14/spring-clean-google-search-now-
part-of-google-plus/)

~~~
rasterizer
It's funny how some people can produce walls of text attacking Google at the
drop of a hat.

If you've actually read that post you'd have noticed that the author is
misrepresenting her assumptions as facts by repurposing out of context
comments.

The person she was quoting wasn't even speaking about Reader nor was he
granting her an interview (the author doesn't specify in what context did she
hear all that) it was just another serving of the generic "news in the mobile
era" spiel.

~~~
davidgerard
Obviously I'm a Facebook shill.

------
ProblemFactory
> “Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites
> throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of
> news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of
> the day.”

This is precisely why Google Reader is a valuable tool. I subscribe to the
belief that if an article is not worth reading 2 weeks later, it's not worth
reading at all.

Facebook, Twitter, HN and Reddit require checking multiple times per day to
make sure you don't miss good posts. Google Reader lets me review blog posts
once a week, and prioritise reading by the source, not freshness of the
content.

~~~
jmduke
> _I subscribe to the belief that if an article is not worth reading 2 weeks
> later, it's not worth reading at all._

I realized that I had been spending upwards of two hours a day reading non-
programming articles (the liked of Wired, TechCrunch, ATD, etc.) and then also
spending the evening wondering where all my time had gone.

I started shunning all those articles (I keep reading HN and programming
articles in general because I think they're much more valuable to my future)
and started spending two hours in the evening reading books (currently
trudging through _The Brothers Karamazov_ ) instead. After two weeks, it feels
like I'm giving my brain a nice chicken caesar salad instead of a Big Mac.

~~~
davidgerard
I concur. I've had no broadband at home for nearly a month (as a friend
pointed out, OpenReach is, after 40 years, several renamings and a
privatization, still basically the good old GPO, except a line takes a few
weeks now instead of six months). Finally dredging through the unread mountain
of books, and that's ebooks.

------
joosters
What utter trash. Who says that Google Reader was about news, anyway? I use
RSS to follow websites so that I don't miss content from them, and don't have
to keep checking them manually. The updates aren't all 'news' and don't have
to be instant or even timely. It just lets me gather everything in one place
so that I can read it when I want to.

~~~
rasterizer
The author seems to be attributing some general and unrelated comments to
Google Reader - very irresponsible on her part.

------
Aqueous
"Google Now‘s approach is to leverage artificial intelligence techniques to
learn your tastes and habits so it can deliver headline news you’ll want to
read, when you want to read it. "

Google, Facebook et. al spend so much energy using artificial intelligence to
infer what we want, and yet when they have a service that actually allows us
to tell them what we want, they shut it down.

We know what we want better than you, so just allow us to tell you what we
want!

------
jinushaun
How is Reader passive versus Twitter and G+? It's completely active because
you have to sift through hundreds of items and you have to decide what's
important and interesting enough to share. That's a lot of work by the user.
Passive news consumption is not Reader, but Twitter-like services where
"interesting" articles are pushed to you. Twitter also doesn't have an unread
count, so you only see what's shared recently. You completelt miss out on
articles shared a few tweets ago because who scrolls back that far?

~~~
gridmaths
If I could take rss feeds from the N web sites I like to get new from, and
pipe/merge/filter that into a live twitter stream.

that would be kind of useful.

If I could share that with my cabal, and use the clicks or upvotes to optimize
the stream, that would be nice.

hmm..

~~~
r080
yahoo pipes can provide you with pipe/merge/filter. Twitter part might be more
difficult.

------
Pxtl
No. Otherwise google would be axed currents too. Google isn't trying to make
you abandon feeds, they're just trying to consolidate into fewer platforms,
ones that give premium positioning to their own non-standard protocols. Their
new notes and messaging apps reflect this. Currents is more of the same.

------
jaimebuelta
This "all new all different" way of "actively consuming news" makes me very
nervous. It really sounds like loosing too much control over content.

------
wodenokoto
So it was because they wanted people to move to Google+, like everybody has
been saying since day 1.

------
coldcode
I have 4X the RSS subscribers to my Twitter subscribers, my programming blog
handles both. RSS readers make consuming an article much faster than reading
links from twitter.

------
dmitripopov_com
I think there are two types of users in this case - "consumers" and
"researchers". Social news are good for "consumers" with their usage pattern
"Read-Like-Forget". They consume to feed their hunger and nothing more.
"Researchers" carefully select trustful sources and follow them, they need a
tool that allows to keep track and never miss important info. "Researcher"
pattern is impossible in the "social" noisy flood of news.

------
ruchirablog
I thought there would be some real information there when I saw the title and
the web site. But what the heck is this

------
grovulent
Maybe one day machine learning will be able to better source me content better
than I can curate for myself - but it sure as shinola doesn't even come close
now.

In the meantime I'll spend my time with those tools that allow me to more
effectively entertain and inform myself. And right now I do that with
feedly... following blogs and news sources and gradually adding new ones over
time as I discover them.

No one has solved content discovery - and won't for a while yet. So I'll do it
the old fashioned way. Read stuff I like, follow the links that people I trust
post, and occasionally find some gold through google search myself.

P.S. FEEDLY is AWESOME!

------
nissimk
It really boils down to that the costs outweighed the benefits so they are
shutting it down. I'm sure it's also about political power structure within
the organization. Google+ is the current favorite group so if they feel like
reader is competing with them they can successfully advocate to get it
shutdown. I think the same thing is going on with chrome vs android. That's
why there's no chrome store or extensions available in chrome for android.

It's just lame when corporate political decisions are presented in the guise
of " people's usage habits are changing" or "it's technically difficult..."

------
panzagl
If google really wants me to move to google+, now, or current, where is the
big shiny button that says 'load feeds into x'? Incompetence seems to be
playing as big a role as strategy.

------
xer0x
What a bunch of bullshit. Wired republished that?

------
taoufix
I thought the article would be about ads not showing up on the RSS reader,
that's a better reason to shut it down IMO.

~~~
Kylekramer
Ads did show up in Google Reader, though I suspect the overlap of RSS users
and ad blockers is high.

------
chaz
RSS peaked in 2006 and has been dying since. I suspect it was from the rise of
social networks. Though not a replacement feature-wise, social networks have
been competing for time and attention from users since day 1, and RSS readers
lost. Google Reader was too late to a declining trend, and it was just a
matter of time before it was going to get killed off anyway.

[http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=rss#q=rss&cmpt=q](http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=rss#q=rss&cmpt=q)

~~~
Mithaldu
Using Google Trends to try to divine how "alive" something is is fruitless, as
the graphs you get are displaying the percentage of all internet searches that
that use that term. Since the internet is constantly growing and new terms are
being added all the time, it is impossible to say whether a declining graph on
google trends means that absolute number of searches are going down or up.

~~~
chaz
Net new search terms aren't being added at the rate you think. Try searching
for highly generic terms such as "food" or "blue" and it's pretty much flat.
While many new terms are being added, old terms are getting obsoleted almost
as fast.

The point still stands: share of web interest in RSS has still been displaced
by other ways of spending time. Whether it's social media, Netflix, or cat
photos, RSS simply hasn't grown with the rest of the web.

~~~
Mithaldu
This isn't even about new search terms. Consider:

[http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=food#q=porn&cmpt=q](http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=food#q=porn&cmpt=q)

(Also, who the hell would need to google for RSS?)

