
Goodbye Google Reader - cwebbdesign
http://blog.mediumequalsmessage.com/goodbye-ubiquitous-digital-service
======
mwexler
Wow. I use Google Reader every day, and I still can't quite figure out what
I'm missing by not using all these other services. Somehow, I'm able to share,
read what others are posting, and keep up with threads.

Most importantly, Google Reader keeps continuity. It has a history, a context
that I find missing from the jumble of posted links and "in medias res"
comments I get on my social share streams.

I don't see myself giving it up anytime soon. (Like others have posted, I do
miss Bloglines...)

------
knowtheory
I used Google Reader for years and years as a central repository for all of
the webcomics i read.

I switched to Newsblur this year and haven't looked back. It definitely has a
better take on sharing.

~~~
conesus
Glad somebody mentioned NewsBlur. I run NewsBlur and have been aggressive in
developing it into a world-class feed reader. Native iOS and Android apps, a
nice shared stories feature, and it's actively developed.

See for yourself, since it's open-source: <http://github.com/samuelclay>.

And because I run my own feed fetchers, you don't have to worry about the
inevitable sunsetting and neglect of Reader. Also means I can do far more
interesting things to feeds and stories that other Google Reader API-based
clients can't.

Try it out: <http://www.newsblur.com>

~~~
smsm42
Interesting interface. With my almost 500 feeds, not sure yet if I'd like to
use paid version, since Google one is free, but I'll take it for a test drive.

Some feedback: \- "Original" button definitely didn't do what I expected. It
just closed everything and took me to the target site. Maybe it's just for
some "unframeable" sites but that's how it worked.

\- "Keep unread" and "Mark as unread" definitely missing. Sometimes after I
start reading it turns out the item needs more time than I have now and I want
to get back to it later. Not the same as "Save" which means I definitely want
to keep it - here I just don't know yet.

\- Clicking on triangle and gear in the feed display seems to do the same
thing? Why there are two of them then?

\- In feed stats for some sites, it says: "IF YOU WENT PREMIUM, THIS SITE
WOULD UPDATE EVERY". That's it, nothing after that.

\- Something weird going on with stories display - folder with no unread
content shows yellow "27" and clicking on folder that shows no content at all
opens set of stories that seem to be unread stories from elsewhere.

~~~
conesus
Just to note that you can mark as unread by either right clicking in the story
title or by hitting 'u' (get a list of all keyboard shortcuts by hitting '?').

------
smcnally
I continue to use gReader more frequently than any other news app. It's
lightweight, on all the devices I use, and addresses my reading needs at least
sufficiently.

My take on advertising likely differs from most here; I don't mind others
paying the bills with my attention -- GOOG does a decent job of it, even. I
understand and appreciate it goes deeper than text ads displayed contextually
to the feeds' stories. Retargeting, psychographics and inference are OK by me,
too.

I completely appreciate the wish to pay for a service in place of having one's
contrail sold. Believing your attention and behaviors don't get sold -- or
wont get sold -- because you pay should not be a presupposition (c.f. cable tv
and [your ISP here]).

From the post -- "and I certainly don’t buy products that aren’t in some way
designed to be functional" -- I don't understand how this would be otherwise:
would you buy something without intended function?

There also seems to be no attention paid to Chrome Sync (yes, they're likely
selling our contrails), Delicious, and other services that've come and gone.

I will provide my attention in return for services I find of value. gReader's
been such for several years. Until there's a clearly compelling alternative,
I'll stick with it.

------
akent
In case there's any confusion, the article's actual title is "Goodbye
ubiquitous digital service" and uses the phrase "most ubiquitous RSS service
of our time" as a euphemism for "Google Reader", hence the headline here.

~~~
reedlaw
I was wondering about that. Why would the author want to mask the name of the
service in question?

~~~
justinschuh
I think it's just an oddly passive-aggressive writing style. He also keeps
talking about services not selling his personal information, implying (I
think) that Google does. However, that's of course not true, as it would
violate Google's privacy policy and be a moronic business move in general.

Honestly, I think it's great if the author wants to sing the praises of some
new products or services he found to replace his old ones, but that's not
really how this read. It had this awkward tone of thinly veiled innuendo,
without really saying anything. If the author found new services he thinks are
better, I'd find it much more helpful as a reader if he actually expound on
what makes the new choices so good.

~~~
slaven
When people imply that Google will "sell" your personal information, they
don't mean that they will pass on your email address and your phone number to
a third party but rather engage in "selling" to third parties by using your
personal information.

~~~
justinschuh
Google sells advertising, including targeted advertising, not access to
personal information. Claiming that Google sells your information is like
claiming that Medicare rate setting boards are "death panels." It's grossly
inaccurate and purposefully inflammatory.

------
jcurbo
I miss Bloglines, honestly. I switched to greader after bloglines started
having DB problems several years ago, but never really liked the UI - seemed
too bloated and slow. I switched to using Reeder as a frontend, but in an
effort to switch to local services I started using Fever + Sunstroke (iOS
app). My main beef with Fever is that if you're reading an article and it does
a feed refresh it will refresh the view and take away the article you were
reading (since it was marked as read).

~~~
djloche
My main problem with Fever is that Inman is now a indie game developer. While
his previous projects (like Mint or Fever) don't necessarily call for constant
attention, and they're probably not providing a large enough cashflow to
justify it, and I'm glad that he chose to keep them running rather than shut
them down and focus on game development completely, it does suck knowing that
they're basically in maintenance mode and won't be seeing anything other than
security updates going forward.

------
mhd
Does scoring (i.e. "designed to surface interesting content") really work out
for you guys? I tried this back in the jurassic age with GNUS etc., and even
then I always felt like I might miss something…

So right now, my prime metric for any RSS reader is how easy it is to get
through my items and filter them out. Right now I'm using Google Reader for
that again, and between vi-like keyboard shortcuts, "v" to open a tab in the
background (w/ simple FF hack) and using either "starring", instapaper or
pinboard for "read later" functionality, I'm pretty happy. Sure, if I'm away
from my computer for quite a while, things pile up. But as I've said, just
reading those scored "important" while just marking the rest as read would
worry me a a bit. Never mind that syncing + webapp really makes it easy to
keep up with things, even if I'm away from my computer.

I guess you need more support if your subscriptions are that huge or if you're
aggregating aggregators.

Still, just like with gmail, I wouldn't mind seeing a good self-hosted
replacement. Preferably one that doesn't have more requirements than a Van
Halen tour rider.

~~~
jcurbo
Fever's scoring doesn't really work for me. I think my requirement is much
like yours - I just need to be able to skim quickly through content. I can
read quickly and skip over items of no interest. It helps to keep my list of
feeds culled to the best so I don't get a lot of dupes. Having a responsive UI
is important too; greader's web UI was not that great for me in that regard.

------
stock_toaster
I still use Google Reader, but only vicariously through the apps that utilize
it as a backend, after having switched away from using GR directly quite a
while ago. In all honestly, if both apps[1] I use swapped backends to
something else, I likely wouldn't notice.

[1]: apps: Reeder (mac, iphone); Mr. Reader (ipad)

------
jcastro
I've recently found The Old Reader: <http://theoldreader.com/>

Feels like greader would be if they kept driving it forward. They also do an
import of all your greader feeds in one step, so I was able to just drop-in
replace greader.

~~~
bobcattr
looks nice but without google or facebook accounts how can I use?

------
shmerl
* Bookmarking: Mozilla Sync. It works perfectly for all my web bookmarks. It's free software, free service (as free of charge), it's encrypted so no one else can peek there for advertisement or what not. And it obviously works right in the browser syncing between all your instances.

* RSS: There are many different FOSS RSS aggregators. What do you need to pay for there? Akregator for example.

* Social network: Diaspora. Ad free, privacy oriented, free software as well. Free service too (no fees).

In essence, not every free service is built on breaching privacy of users to
sustain itself.

------
wyclif
It's a real shame that Google Reader has been neglected for years now.

~~~
zanny
It is a shame RSS has been neglected for years as well. I blame Twitter
basically doing the exact same thing, worse, and entirely in JS and with a
platform lock to their service.

~~~
mistercheese
I would argue RSS was neglected by Twitter doing certain things better, things
that the average user cares about

~~~
rdl
RSS + IM/IRC were a lot better than Twitter today, even for how most current
Twitter users use the service.

~~~
mistercheese
For HackerNews readers, and also for me that's probably true. However, the
popularity of Twitter would indicate to me otherwise.

~~~
zanny
Twitter became popular because Firefox / Chrome got rid of their in-navbar
subscribe button and Google didn't advertise Reader. They had incentives to
monetize doing things their own way, and every average joe who would go to
twitter would have the easy path to just using what is in front of them or
having to discover feeds in the page info, install an addon to return the
subscribe button, and find an RSS application.

~~~
rdl
Yeah, I think one could have built IRC and RSS into good enough products to
essentially reach out to everyone currently using Twitter who never used
IRC/RSS.

I still think there's an opportunity for something better-than-Twitter, IRC,
RSS in the mobile space. Twitter is SMS mobile, but has what is honestly a
shitty client experience on (everything, but especially) mobile.

I wish someone would do something with the same initial goals as Diaspora
(self-control, etc.), but focused on mobile, with ease of use on mobile as the
goal. Snap Chat is kind of a step in that direction, but I'd rather have
something where users got to explore the continuum of ephemeral stuff (like
Snap Chat) to semi-permanent (like Twitter) to more permanent (like a blog,
designed to be referenced in the future) to really permanent (publishing).

~~~
zanny
Why are you just targeting "mobile"? If you were making a new global chat
system, it would almost certainly be cloud hosted and baked into a web app.
The main reason that xmpp / jabber don't catch on is that you can't treat it
with delayed delivery like you can twitter, and you can't broadcast messages.

------
smackfu
Too bad most of the RSS readers on iOS just plug in to Google Reader for feed
management. Somehow they went from manual RSS to manual + Google Reader to
Google Reader exclusive.

------
benguild
I wrote this tool a while back to migrate my Google Reader to Twitter
followings … since most of my RSS was pre-Twitter: <http://tmnt.benguild.com>

Then, I put only the 4 or 5 websites I check religiously into Google Reader,
so that I can always get every update from those versus skimming the latest
posts in my Twitter stream.

I find this a better/ideal solution, since that way it's 140 character
summaries instead of entire articles that are unclear.

~~~
cwebbdesign
Interesting idea. I feel like I would get overloaded following every author on
twitter as then you get more than just their latest blog post...

------
sankalpshere
I tweaked my Google Reader to get back the functions that were dropped out.
You can read more here: [http://tek-that.blogspot.com/2012/10/getting-good-
old-note-i...](http://tek-that.blogspot.com/2012/10/getting-good-old-note-in-
reader-back.html)

Note sure if it helps, but thought I would share it..

------
DanielBMarkham
This was good. Thanks Chris.

There's a lot of thought-less consumption of (supposedly) free technology
going on. I keep waiting to see more backlash about it. Instead I see a person
here or there figure it out, share with others, everybody nods their heads
sagely, then we go on as always.

What with YouTube purging a bunch of fake video watches this week, it
certainly looks to me from the business side that we're scaling the freemium
model way past where it would naturally take us. We're creating empty houses
full of sock puppets. Meanwhile somebody has to pay the electric bill.

Keep up the good writing!

------
FilterJoe
Google has stopped doing anything with its interface but that hasn't stopped
dozens of others who sync with Google Reader. I personally find that Newisfy
(iOS) does everything I need for a Google Reader client. Don't like Newsify?
Then choose from among many other apps on many platforms that sync with Google
Reader.

I personally far prefer this arrangement to Twitter. I don't really like the
Twitter concept to begin with but I can't even make it more palatable with a
better client because they keep pulling the rug out from those who create
better Twitter clients.

------
jeffcutsinger
Fever looks interesting. However, the video that walks through installing
recommends changing the permissions on a folder and its contents (complete
with executable code) to 777.

O_O

Not sure I trust you with my feeds.

------
icebraining
I use Tiny Tiny RSS[1] self-hosted and it's been running great. In many ways
(design, key bindings, etc) it's a Reader clone, but it's fast, open
source[2], has a good JSON API and it runs fine on nginx + Postgresql.

[1]: <http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki>

[2]: <http://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS>

------
aragot
Hi Chris Webb, Thank you very much for sharing alternative apps.

I'm searching for a service which wouldn't be hosted or have a dns name in
U.S., especially for mails, because subponeas are not controlled enough there.
Is there any chance some YC start-up works on something similar?

------
6d65
"As a front-end developer and modern first-world citizen" -> This sounded
douchey.

------
agarwal113
Feedspot.com anyone? New startup in the town. Looks promising.

Try it out <http://feedspot.com>

~~~
businessleads
Interesting! Basically giving people who've been introduced to RSS by Twitter
an overt "subscribe to what you read" interface part Twitter part Facebook.
Clever.

------
kmfrk
I use Fever. Quite excellent, and very relevant in the context of what
Instagram have been doing.

------
bobcattr
pinboard is great

What i'd like now is a better version of instapaper or the alternatives.

~~~
rkudeshi
What don't you like about Instapaper? There are many good alternatives,
including Pocket and Readability.

~~~
bobcattr
Instapaper lately has been having many messed up conversions. I use instapaper
because they have a pretty clear business model. They make money from
subscriptions and app sales. Pocket and Read It Later both don't have paid
apps nor subscriptions. So the only other option is that you are being sold.

I'd much prefer an app I run myself with user maintained site defined scraping
definitions.

I like instapaper though, it's good for what it does. Could be better though.

------
jeffehobbs
Bad link in the link to Fever.

~~~
cwebbdesign
Sorry about that - thanks for letting me know! I fixed it in the post. Here it
is as well: <http://feedafever.com/>

------
marknutter
Twitter is my RSS reader. Frankly, I'm surprised RSS is even still around.
Twitter won that war.

