Google Reader: One Year Later

Nate the greatest (2261802) writes "Just over a year has passed since Google closed Google Reader; have your reading habits changed? When Google announced in March 2013 that Google Reader would close, a number of pundits saw it as a sign of the imminent death of RSS feeds as redundant tech. But 15 months has gone by and I can't see that very much has changed. Former Google Reader users fled to any number of smaller competitors, including Feedly, which as a result quadrupled its userbase from around 4 million users to around 15 million users and 24,000 paying customers in February 2014. I can't speak for you but I am still getting my news from RSS feeds, just like I did before the Readerpocalypse. Zite might be gone and Pulse might belong to LinkedIn but RSS feeds are still around."

Comments

It was nice

[cascadingstylesheet]

I still miss it. Surely the data harvesting would have been worth it, for a behemoth like Google to just keep it running.

I use Feedly, but it's not the same.

Re:It was nice

[Cico71]

Surely the data harvesting would have been worth it, for a behemoth like Google to just keep it running.

I'm still convinced they want to kill RSS and that was part of the plan.
They did a good job accelerating the death of Usenet when they bought Dejanews and left the Newsgroups search unusable.

Re:It was nice

[tlambert]

I still miss it. Surely the data harvesting would have been worth it, for a behemoth like Google to just keep it running.

I use Feedly, but it's not the same.

The problem was the API let people write clients that removed the value to Google of running the service (i.e. the advertisements).

Google was willing to give the code over to any third party who wanted to commit to supporting it, and even host it on Google's infrastructure, if they were paid to do so, but there wasn't any way to monetize it, given the API split and the ad stripping by the clients of the API. Apparently stream bookmarking and privacy weren't worth sitting through the ads to anyone, as no one was able to come up with a viable business model that kept the good stuff, but was still able to be monetized enough to at least break even.

But hey, I'll happily join you to complain about stuff I no longer get free, too, if that will make you feel better, like those game cards you could get at Chick-fil-a in the mall, go down to the Walden Books, look up the answers in the almanac, and then go back to Chick-fil-a for the free food item because you got the right answer, and get the next game card.

Feedly

[beamin]

Still using RSS.

Feedly: Google Reader Reloaded

[bigdady92]

The death of GReader led me to Feedly which has nearly all of the features that GReader had backed by a company whom RSS isn't an experiment and truly GOT RSS. Feedly saw a need in the market place and filled that void that Google abandoned.

I am more than happy with Feedly and their feature set. I threw them some money to support them and tell everyone I know to use them as their apps work just as well if not better than what Google was trying to do.

Re:Feedly: Google Reader Reloaded

[Threni]

Now if there could just be some change to "how shit works on the internet" so they stop getting taken down by DDOS's, apparently at the whim of script kiddies demanding ransoms.

But yeah, nothing beats RSS. Google can come up with all funky magazine viewers, along with Flipboard and god knows what else, but only 0.00001% of the internet ever gets on board with that (and those overdone interfaces with shitty functionality - give me a break), and other people can suggest "social...uh..stuff, you know, like twitter, facebook..." as somehow doing what RSS does (still waiting for someone to explain exactly how that's supposed to work, but thanks for suggesting it anyway)
whereas RSS is trivially added to any website and is platform/ui agnostic.

Google killing Reader really woke me up to what can happen if you use a non-core part of a company; I don't start using anything now from any company unless it appears to me that the company wouldn't survive withdrawing the service.

Re: simply put:

[Anonymous Coward]

no, and i am a bit more hesitant to jump onto any Google bandwagon that come along.

I don't miss Google Reader. I use InoReader now.

[guidryp]

InoReader lets me do all the same things I did with Reader, with the added bonus of not providing Google more user data.

iGoogle, anyone?

[demon driver]

Never used Google Reader in the first place. At home, I've always been using a combination of other options to read feeds, mainly a self-written feed gatherer, and at work, where I used the now equally deceased iGoogle, I've simply switched to ighome.com.

'Social Media' and APIs more likely to kill feeds

[QuasiSteve]

Google Reader was merely the most popular 'client' app - its disappearance wouldn't spell the doom of feeds (RSS/atom/whatever), and here's why: practically all the major publishing apps have RSS functionality built-in.
Do you use Wordpress? You probably have an RSS feed whether you're aware of it or not.
Using phpBB? You probably have an RSS feed.
Started a subreddit? It comes with a bunch of feeds.

Now try to get an RSS feed for, say, https://twitter.com/slashdot .
Or how about an RSS feed for https://www.facebook.com/slash... ?

facebook still offers an RSS for timelines, but you'll have to get it first as it's keyed.
twitter doesn't offer an RSS at all, you'll just have to use the APIs (and you'll need to authenticate even if you only want public read access, so you'll have to register, too). And don't think about trying to offer an API-to-RSS bridge, Twitter doesn't take kindly to such awesomeness; http://tweet-2-rss.appspot.com...

These 'social media' platforms of course want you to stay inside their boundaries. If you want to know what @Whoever is up to, you'll just have to view twitter or, better yet, 'Follow' that user and make sure you've got yourself logged in on as many devices as possible preferably with the official twitter apps.

So what happens when a company no longer regularly posts their news or blog posts via their regular content delivery, and instead takes to twitter / facebook? The feed dies out. Sure, it's still there, and maybe once in a blue moon some new content does pop up on there.. but for that same content and everything else you'd be interested in, you'll just have to check them out on facebook and/or twitter.

It's only when companies start realizing this shift - and, again, they might not even be fully aware that they're offering a feed in the first place - that they might try shutting it down for fear of not reaching the right viewership (in the way they want, including the possibility of deleting a post that they later regret).

At least feeds will remain as the premiere way to deliver podcasts (hacked on as they are) ... until some sort of social podcasting platform emerges as the de facto standard and requires you to use their website/proprietary apps.

Tiny Tiny RSS

[CastrTroy]

Switched to Tiny Tiny RSS. Hosting it on a shared hosting (Dreamhost) which I was paying for anyway. It works great, and its nice having a solution that won't just disappear one day. Sure my web host could disappear, but I could always switch to another one.

Re:Tiny Tiny RSS

[Mousit]

I did the same, TT-RSS on Dreamhost. I wanted something that could be used from any web browser, rather than needing an app, and didn't require external authentication. Basically, self-contained, the way Reader was. Feedly and the like just didn't meet those needs.

TT-RSS is so simple; most anyone comfortable enough to do self-hosting can set it up I'd think. Only issues I ever had compared to Reader were, at the beginning, it'd sometimes get temporarily banned on certain RSS feeds for excessive queries (probably numerous users all set up on DH so it was seeing that, as I only query once every four hours). Ironically this happened almost exclusively on Feedburner links (which Slashdot uses), which is owned by Google, so it sometimes felt like Google was really trying to kill RSS. :P That went away after a short time though, probably as Feedburner marked Dreamhost IPs as shared hosting and exempted from the query limits.

Also occasionally Dreamhost's database server can be rather slow (making the whole application slow), but that doesn't happen very often. And you sort of expect it with cheap shared hosting, anyway.

It certainly works plenty well enough, and since I already had the DH account for other purposes, adding TT-RSS was effectively free.

Another Feedly user

[Geeky]

I'm happy with the way it works, for the most part. Bit of a shame it has to use external authentication, but I use a secondary account for that anyway. The fact that some features are pay to use is a bit irritating, and I haven't yet decided whether they're worth it. I am willing to pay for services that provide value for me - they're a business, and I understand their need to make money to provide the service - but there isn't much compelling in the pro feature set for me. Possibly Evernote integration, but it's not that much hassle to click through to the website and clip it from there.

Bottom line, though, is that it's better to be a paying customer - at least you know the business has a vested interest in the product. Same with Evernote vs. free options. They make their money from users who get value from their products.

I was also reasonably impressed with Feedly's transparency over the recent DDOS attacks they (and Evernote) suffered.

The Old Reader

[jrq]

The Old Reader (http://theoldreader.com/) works pretty well for me. Not quite as sophisticated or instantly speedy as Google was, and it can take a few more minutes to be up-to-date, but free and you can import your feeds, which you had already exported from Google Reader, right?

Nope

[GameboyRMH]

I went to g2reader and didn't miss a beat.

Re:I don't miss Google Reader. I use InoReader now

[drinkypoo]

InoReader lets me do all the same things I did with Reader, with the added bonus of not providing Google more user data.

If you're not using noscript or at least ghostery, the joke's on you. InoReader uses Google Analytics.

ownCloud

[hgriggs]

I made a smooth and easy transition from Google Reader to Feedly, and that worked well. It's a very efficient way of getting through my news and blogs. Then I discovered that ownCloud (http://owncloud.org) has a built in RSS feeder. I use ownCloud on my Linode to provide a Dropbox like environment, plus my own Calendar and Contacts for my iPhone and iPad, plus bookmarks. I am currently working on replacing Evernote with ownCloud.

I already had a cloud installation with Linode, and I just added ownCloud to it. Then I started discovering all the extra stuff it can do. The RSS Feeder was a wonderful discovery. I lose the economy of scale that Feedly provides, but it works more closely to my mental model, and some of the formatting is nicer than Feedly. I've been using it for several months now, and totally love it. It's not for everyone, given the requirements (you have to set up your own webserver, then set up the ownCloud services), but the benefits are enormous. And I get a little more privacy, just me and Linode and the NSA.

Re:I don't miss Google Reader. I use InoReader now

[zennling]

this. inoreader is a nice no frills replacement. i dont care about social integration - i just want my rss feed in an easily readible format.

Roll your own with TT-RSS

[ppz003]

GReader shutting down is what lead me to try out Tiny Tiny RSS.

If you are already running a webserver for something else, it is pretty easy to set up your own personal RSS reader.

Re:I miss it.

[ThePhilips]

InoReader did the trick for me. Using it for over the year now. So far - no problems whatsoever.