Google is Killing Google Reader!
Zanthian
Mitey Worrier Icrontian
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html
We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.
Some may not use google reader, but i use this 20x a day. This is fairly disruptive to my way of using the internet. Anyone have a good suggestion for a replace rss feed reader that i can keep synced between my home computer, work computer, and mobile devices? I also use the email and share functionality from google reader. Come to think of it i also use it as my read it later source with their star system. The more I think about it the more this stinks.
We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.
Some may not use google reader, but i use this 20x a day. This is fairly disruptive to my way of using the internet. Anyone have a good suggestion for a replace rss feed reader that i can keep synced between my home computer, work computer, and mobile devices? I also use the email and share functionality from google reader. Come to think of it i also use it as my read it later source with their star system. The more I think about it the more this stinks.
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Comments
What does everyone else who uses RSS use to read them?
Dave Winer: "Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on."
macdrifter: "Bigger revelation: Google built a service that you configure with all your interests and biases. They couldn’t make it profitable."
Pinboard: "We need to focus. Keep the self-driving cars, magic glasses, laptop, handheld OS, and Brazilian social network. Ditch the feed reader."
Google Reader was what made RSS feeds usable for me. Feedly is really pretty, but the lack of ability to sort oldest unread to newest unread makes it a nonstarter for me. The search for a new Reader begins...
Not that it will change google's mind.
I don't know that I think it's not a money issue; isn't that what everything eventually boils down to? If Google Reader was making them more money, they wouldn't retire it.
Let's say a million users agreed to pony up $25 a year (which I think is very generous both in number and price point). That's $25 million a year. That's great if that's your business. But, their revenue was $46 billion in 2012. So their bottom line could, rosy-number best-case scenario, go up less than 0.1%. Summary: They don't care.
But I don't see any evidence anywhere that I'll be able to do what I was doing with Reader on any other Google service.
I really feel like one day we're going to look back at the aughts as this crazy era where web companies were just giving shit away like crazy to try and figure out where they could get more money from. The answer, on all fronts, is selling their users. Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all figured it out, and the free ride is ending everywhere. Facebook started pay-to-share, Twitter closed its API, and Google turned off the free Apps tap and continues shuttering free services one at a time (unless they're social media where they can eventually pull a Facebook).
If you don't know what the service you're using is selling, it's you. And if it can't sell you well enough, it's shutting down.
Really think about what they did in the RSS market.
They came in with guns blazing and cornered the whole market. They gave their product away for free, used their existing user base (Gmail) to spread it everywhere and financed it with money made in other areas (Adsense). It completely marginalized every other product in the category, and they never had an intention to actually monetize it.
Sounds an awful lot like what Microsoft did to the browser market, doesn't it?
And then one day Microsoft stopped caring about the market and stopped at IE6. And one day Google stopped caring about Reader and now it's dead.
What happened next in browsers? A Renaissance. Firefox! Opera! Webkit! Web standards came roaring to life.
What's happening right now to RSS? Suddenly every RSS feed product is courting people on Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else. We're talking about RSS readers right here. When's the last time that happened?
Google voluntarily ending its ill-gotten monopoly is possibly the best thing that could happen to RSS.
I really do hope that there is a product that can be a good replacement for Reader.
I really like the look of feedly, I also love that they're attempting to do a seamless transition from Google Reader to their service. If they would just make their app allow more control about how feeds are displayed (in my case, showing unread only and sorting oldest to newest) I would move to them immediately.
Also, this whole thing makes me wonder what the guy behind NewsRob is going to do. He built a decent RSS reader, but it's main attraction was the tight integration with Google Reader. I hope he moves it to another service for syncing. That would probably be ideal in my case.