Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsns | Hacker News Reader

I believe most users are currently in a "searching" phase, and have joined more than one alternative, so this sudden growth might be misleadding. That said, for now, Feedly is my favorite alternative, so good luck.

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"Misleading" in the sense that only a fraction of those may become loyal Feedly users, sure.

But it seems like a pretty good estimate of the number of active and aggrieved Google Reader users out there.

A good lower limit. Not everyone has the time or inclination to take immediate action. I'm a heavy user of Google Reader and I haven't yet taken an action. I probably won't for at least a few weeks.

What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

Agreed. I'm a big Google Reader user, and will inevitably be trying out Feedly, but just haven't had the chance yet.

Judging by the amount of people I've spoken too over the last few days, there's a whole lot more than 500,000 of us. I'd love to see how many people Google considers not worth their time. I'd happily pay for Reader.

Yeah, I would have been fine with $5-10/mo for Reader. $20/mo would hurt, and I would have bitched, but paid it.

Hm, anything more than $2-3/mo would be to much just for a reader access.

>What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

Or even just open source it and get some positive PR to offset the negative they've been getting.

This probably won't help. Google projects are typically built to run on their very specific infrastructure. It's unlikely that an open sourced version would be viable outside of Google. It's always possible though.

Maybe they could release a version that would run on AppEngine and customers could just pay for their own or something.

If the product was open sourced I would gladly pay a subscription to use it on Google's infrastructure, so I think your AppEngine idea is a good one.

Google can't open source Google Reader even if it wanted to because, to make connections and recommendations it used Google's Crawler which is part of the rest of Google's infastructure - something which Google definitely won't open source. As well as using Google's Crawler, the Google Reader team created separate recommendations to improve Google Reader and those people don't come cheap either - and giving up that knowledge is valuable to Google's competitors.

So.. give the subscribe/favorite/star portions and take out the recommendations.. most people rarely use that functionality.

Same here... I read all my news through Reeder on the iPad. I won't be taking action until I find out what services they plan to add to replace Google Reader.

Exactly. I'm waiting for word from the Reeder and NetNewsWire developers. Depending on the solutions (and timeframe) they come up with, I'm staying with Reeder or going back to NetNewsWire.

You should also count for the people who switched to an RSS reader that isn't Feedly. I, for one, started using The Old Reader.

I'd love to give The Old Reader a try... but when signing in through google, they seem to want "Manage My Contacts" permission.. there is no legitimate reason for needing to see my contacts to sign up. I'm pretty mindful of Android app permissions as well.

I think they've replicated the social features of the old Greader, so they want your contacts so you can share with them.

If it said that it was asking for it and why, I may have allowed it, in any case it doesn't seem to ask for that anymore... :) Now, if my import would process already.

When I was signing in, I removed the contacts scope from the auth URL and The Old Reader didn't appear to care that it couldn't access my contacts.

I tried that too. Currently there are 10000+ users in front of me in import queue. I hope they will be able to process it till July...

In the last two days only 500 people in front of me have left the queue. Feedly definitely gets point for their speed, but as others have stated the layout just isn't for me.

If you mean the goofy, information-poor magazine view, you can select the familiar-looking Titles view by clicking the gear icon over a feed.

>What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

Shockingly, nerds that consume media via RSS don't tend to click on ads.

Bundles are where the money is at, not ads. Advertising is dead.

Google Reader didn't have ads. I've seen guesses that Google didn't want to risk upsetting media producers by displaying ads with their content.

There used to be adsense for RSS. Google discontinued it sometime last year I think.

It was completely voluntary and managed by the producer through their AdSense account.

Yeah, But adsense publishers share the money with google. Same way blogger (blogspot) does.

I would've thought the readership data would be worth something as well, but perhaps they have that already via Google Analytics web-bugs?

Gathering a specific demographic, such as Greader's is the dream of many startups. Specific demographics may require specific monetization strategies, but that hardly makes the business a flop.

Sometimes, to score a goal you need to move the goal post. In this case, use a different monetization strategy.

I used reader more than most sites, and would have paid for it.

Or it's people who have been thinking about using an RSS client and got caught up in the deluge of alternatives suddenly being offered much more loudly. /shrug

It's interesting to see how different people's opinions can be. Feedly, for me, was a headache wrapped in CSS. The whole thing actually made me ridiculously angry (yes, really, and I'm normally a veeery calm guy)... so for me the search continues. I'm glad it's not quite as difficult for other people to find a suitable replacement. :)

I've tried both feedly and news blur at this point and don't see myself using either going forward. While both can count me as a user right now feedly doesn't provide a method to delete your profile without emailing them and I haven't bothered to see if newsblur does. I doubt their active user count will be nearly as large.

Try http://rssident.com

i am surprised. rssident looks really simple and promising on my smartphone as a mobile page! can you give any background!? when did you start!?

i like the one big feed directly on the start page. i like the the simple layout in my mobile browser.

i don't need fancy sharing features. all i need is a simple webapp that shows me a condensed view of my subscriptions and opml import.

if these things work there is also no need for a specialized android or mobile app, i think.

(oh, mobile sign up didn't work somehow for me, maybe you check the code...)

Glad you like it. I started working on it about four years ago. It's been online for about a year.

I am working on opml import and making it easier / more intuitive to add feeds.

I have had trouble with the signup form for the last few days which was the worst time for it to fail. I thought I had the bug fixed yesterday but I will double check.

Thanks for the feedback. It's a work in progress but I am going to keep improving it.

If you have anymore suggestions I am open to all feedback.

I think I figured out the issue. Did you try to register with username toki.net?

Apparently the validator on the username field doesn't like periods. I will fix that.

yeah and nope, toki.net was not my first but my third try.

i am somehow not able to login with two different browsers (opera mobile and chrome) to log in. only firefox worked.

my new account there is "toki1". but i havent been able to add feeds somehow. the input box does not to react when i click submit.

feel free to use me as test user. contact me via the mail i gave with my account data. i am rather busy today, but from tomorrow on i will have more time.... :)

You are right about most user being in the searching mode. The fact is, Google Reader kept many people hooked. So none of the searching will yield any good result for many people (because they are so heavily used to of GR).

I am not getting good vibes out of Feedly even though it is getting unusually large number of mentions.

What about the old reader?

It seems the most direct route and they removed the 'manage your contacts' requirement (unless you use it to find friends, which seems reasonable).

Since I like the searching, reading and organizing experience I have in the email clients I use, I decided to give Blogtrottr a shot: it sends you the contents of your RSS feeds by email, you can decided whether to get an email for each post or a daily digest (there are optiones, too). Looks pretty good so far.

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