HN Explorer

Does HN care about/use Google Reader?

10 points by chrmaury ↗ HN
I'm a huge fan of Google reader, so when they announced they were removing the link from Gmail today, I started to get worried that they are going to deprecate the product entirely.

Does anyone on HN use reader or RSS at all?

12 comments

[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] thread
symmet
Yep, I use Google Reader every day. I can't imagine that they're going to remove it. RSS is not as dead as everyone likes to shout.
retroafroman
I'm in the exact same boat.

Funny thing though - even if Google deprecated Reader, it would most likely still be like Google Notebook which has been end-of-lifed, but still completely usable years later.

chrmaury
I hope thats the case. I dont want them to pull a Yahoo and kill a product that people still use/love (delicious)
mindcrime
I use RSS heavily; and I do keep my feed list in Google Reader, as well as in RSSOwl. Which I use at any given time depends... on my personal laptop, when I'm home or working on Fogbeam stuff, I tend to use RSSOwl. When I'm at $DAYJOB, I pull up Google Reader every now and then (if the firehose that is HN gets boring for a bit.)

All this "RSS is dead" talk worries me, as it's an important tool that I use a lot of... I'd hate to see a trend away from it, to the point that people quit publishing useful feeds!

ebiester
I use reader, switching to it after bloglines finally died. (It's been resurrected, but I've been too lazy to go back. I'll wait until they've worked on it a bit.)
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komlenic
I loved Reader for a while, but have since moved away from it in favor of twitter: Reader is like a dam that keeps backing up... every time you log in you see this unread count and the implication is that you need to "catch up" and skim everything. On the other hand, twitter is a flowing river and if I miss a day, it's gone without guilt. Reader is still great for those sources you just never want to miss though.

RSS isn't "dying", though RSS readers are probably "languishing".

cyrus_
View all your unread items and sort by "Magic" -- you'll get better stuff at the top and it will feel just like Twitter/Tumblr.
simplezeal
I have tried experimenting with Twitter and not using reader for a week. When I come back to check, there are tons of articles which I would have missed if I had not checked.

Some of the articles are tweeted, but then most of the time I check Twitter on phone so I have to mark them for Read It Later. Sort of defeats the purpose IMO.

There are times when I fall behind in reading feeds and unread count makes me feel guilty. When it gets too much I take drastic step of marking all as read.

epc
I use Reader daily.

Kind of surprised that people rely on the menu to find it and not the 1990s technology of…a bookmark.

aDemoUzer
Are people happy with their choice of reader? I am sort of disappointed that google reader is so basic and would like a reader with more advanced features like organize post from oldest to newest (not just for the past 30 days) and be able to customize the text.