Hacker News Reader

Comment by cocoflunchy | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the only reason we hear so much about Google Reader is because the main users were either journalists or bloggers, which creates an extremely disproportionate noise / (former) user ratio.

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You are 900% correct. Having worked directly in the feed reader space, and trying to make money at it, and I can testify that the segment of online audience who even know what a feed is are a small club of tech news junkies and assorted wonks who all seem to know each other. They are a passionate crowd, but many companies have tried and failed at bringing that passion for feed reading to the mainstream, probably because most people don't read tech blogs all day long.

I feel the problem was more in the lack of curation and innovation of feed-delivery. FlipBoard seems to be successful without appearing to be a feed-reader on the surface. Google just missed the opportunity to make the feed reader more appealing to the average user.

that's exactly what happened. The biggest reason this was a bad mood for Google was because the entire tech journalist brain trust was so dependent on it. They spat on the people who can be the most fervent defenders of the company.

Moral of the story: they should never have built Google Reader in the first place?

The moral of the story is that you should never rely on a service which is given for free.

do you also mean Google Search?

If it doesn't cost money, then you're the product

paying money doesn't mean you aren't the product.

also true

For example, newspapers and magazines.

Yes, I also mean Google Search. As a user I don't rely on it, there are alternatives. If they shut it down tomorrow I'd be sad because it's a stellar product but I will survive without it.

As a business owner I pay them through adwords so I don't expect them to shut it down any time soon.

The problem with GReader is that the industry never bothered to produce a quality alternative until now.

Yes, because services that cost money never disappear.

And with the shutdown of Reader went any chance of me investing any of my time in Google+, or Docs, or Hangout, or any service they offer in the future.

Didn't Reader kill off all the pay services…

Obviously not. If they had left the space alone it would be fine now. Instead they "googled" it: came in and undercut everyone else, got a monopoly or near-monopoly position in the space and just canned the product. It would be like Walmart coming to your 2k-person town, opening a super center and then closing it down a few weeks after the last mom-n-pop owners shut down and moved away.

That's a fair point. That being said, a feed reader seems like a relatively simple product to build and there seems to be a lot of alternatives out there. What made Google Reader so special? (I'm asking genuinely, I have never used it before)

The main thing for me wasn't the simple feed-reader aspect of it; it was the syncing.

I could use my choice of clients on different platforms and as Reader was effectively a monopoly, all the clients would sync with it, allowing me to view the same list of feeds whereever I was - and more importantly, keep those lists up to date with new feeds, and which articles I had read.

First of all, it seemed to be the only choice left apart from two self-hosted services (tt-rss and selfoss/rsslounge). But it was also a good reader, it didn't cost anything, as a google product it seemed future proof, feed update was fast and the design simple and nice enough. Before its last update, it also had nice share-features.

If it were simple, I wouldn't have had such a hard time replacing it. Google Reader did two things for me (1) correctly display the content of the RSS feeds I care about, (2) sync, so I could read from my home and work computers, and from my tablet without loosing my place. I read math blogs that use some WordPress plugin that generates images for formulas from LaTeX source and very few feed readers render the formulas at all (I also read several programming blogs and a small number of feed readers remove code blocks from the posts). In the end I gave up on sync, found an Android app that displays posts correctly and use that now.

The major feature, at least for me, that the replacement services still cannot provide was full text search. It's something you'd expect from Google without thinking, but it involves indexing every article of every feed any user is subscribed to, allowing searching of the text within articles. For anybody who isn't a search engine, that's a huge undertaking and was an awesome feature.

Moral of the story: before you shut down a service, run it by the PR department first.

What is proportionate? I think it is the way the news and the web in general works. Wikipedia has extremely disproportionate pages about notorious things (that are not noise, obviously).

I am happy that journalists can amplify the voice of Google Reader users like me instead of talking about Justin Bieber.

Anecdotal evidence alert, but I am neither, and I never imagined the shuttering of a web app could actually make me feel sadness (as sad as that is). Google Reader was the most important part of the internet for me.

Honestly I didn't even know people were still using RSS readers let alone would get their pitch forks out when Google Reader went down. Between news emails, news aggregates like HN, and my friends sharing links I really don't have any problem filling the gaps and gave up on RSS readers a few years ago. Am I in a small group?

I don't know about your circle of friends, but my link-sharing friends get their material from a RSS reader.

I'm sure some of mine do too..

A lot of startups and product companies would kill to have a product used by countless journalists. I've written apps for a couple designed entirely to get more press. You hear more noise, but those users were more valuable influencers for the company to maintain relationships with as well making them more worth keeping.

That doesn't change the point of the article.

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