What utter trash. Who says that Google Reader was about news, anyway? I use RSS to follow websites so that I don't miss content from them, and don't have to keep checking them manually. The updates aren't all 'news' and don't have to be instant or even timely. It just lets me gather everything in one place so that I can read it when I want to.
How is Reader passive versus Twitter and G+? It's completely active because you have to sift through hundreds of items and you have to decide what's important and interesting enough to share. That's a lot of work by the user. Passive news consumption is not Reader, but Twitter-like services where "interesting" articles are pushed to you. Twitter also doesn't have an unread count, so you only see what's shared recently. You completelt miss out on articles shared a few tweets ago because who scrolls back that far?
Welcome to the mid 1990s, when the sexy new "Push technology" was going to kill the fusty old "Pull technology". Pointcast was an Internet darling and people thought HTTP was due to be taken to the knacker's any day.
That being said, bad ideas from the 1990s internet have a bad habit of being reinvented as multi-zillion dollar startups. I guess I need to start reading old copies of Wired for inspiration.
That being said, bad ideas from the 1990s internet have a bad habit of being reinvented as multi-zillion dollar startups. I guess I need to start reading old copies of Wired for inspiration.
Funny you would say that. I (among a lot of other people) have certainly noticed how cyclical this industry is; and I also think that it's very easy for a technology to fail, not because there's anything wrong with it, but just because it's "too early".
And as it happens, I have this bad habit of saving old magazines - so I actually do have a rather large collection of old issues of things like Wired, Red Herring, Business 2.0, Infoworld, ComputerWorld, Information Week, etc. packed away in a closet somewhere. I actually am thinking about digging a box of those out one day, and spending a few hours just poring over old issues, trawling for ideas and inspiration.
In fact, now that you mentioned this and reminded me of thread of thought, I think I might just do that this weekend.
Let me know if you need to hire people who remember the 90s. I am ready to wear pastel coloured t-shirts, too-loose trousers and wander around the office saying "GBQ" instead of "traction".
Oh, right... of course. And let's not forget it's closely related cousin, "Who Cares If We Lose Money On Every Transaction, We'll Make Up For It In Volume". Not as nice an acronym though: WCIWLMOETWMUFIIV.
It is 'passive' from google's point of view. You are neither producing marketing signals, nor frequent marketing opportunities. It is all utility to the user and lost opportunity to G+.
Maybe one day machine learning will be able to better source me content better than I can curate for myself - but it sure as shinola doesn't even come close now.
In the meantime I'll spend my time with those tools that allow me to more effectively entertain and inform myself. And right now I do that with feedly... following blogs and news sources and gradually adding new ones over time as I discover them.
No one has solved content discovery - and won't for a while yet. So I'll do it the old fashioned way. Read stuff I like, follow the links that people I trust post, and occasionally find some gold through google search myself.
It really boils down to that the costs outweighed the benefits so they are shutting it down. I'm sure it's also about political power structure within the organization. Google+ is the current favorite group so if they feel like reader is competing with them they can successfully advocate to get it shutdown. I think the same thing is going on with chrome vs android. That's why there's no chrome store or extensions available in chrome for android.
It's just lame when corporate political decisions are presented in the guise of " people's usage habits are changing" or "it's technically difficult..."
> “Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.”
This is precisely why Google Reader is a valuable tool. I subscribe to the belief that if an article is not worth reading 2 weeks later, it's not worth reading at all.
Facebook, Twitter, HN and Reddit require checking multiple times per day to make sure you don't miss good posts. Google Reader lets me review blog posts once a week, and prioritise reading by the source, not freshness of the content.
> I subscribe to the belief that if an article is not worth reading 2 weeks later, it's not worth reading at all.
I realized that I had been spending upwards of two hours a day reading non-programming articles (the liked of Wired, TechCrunch, ATD, etc.) and then also spending the evening wondering where all my time had gone.
I started shunning all those articles (I keep reading HN and programming articles in general because I think they're much more valuable to my future) and started spending two hours in the evening reading books (currently trudging through The Brothers Karamazov) instead. After two weeks, it feels like I'm giving my brain a nice chicken caesar salad instead of a Big Mac.
I concur. I've had no broadband at home for nearly a month (as a friend pointed out, OpenReach is, after 40 years, several renamings and a privatization, still basically the good old GPO, except a line takes a few weeks now instead of six months). Finally dredging through the unread mountain of books, and that's ebooks.
RSS peaked in 2006 and has been dying since. I suspect it was from the rise of social networks. Though not a replacement feature-wise, social networks have been competing for time and attention from users since day 1, and RSS readers lost. Google Reader was too late to a declining trend, and it was just a matter of time before it was going to get killed off anyway.
Using Google Trends to try to divine how "alive" something is is fruitless, as the graphs you get are displaying the percentage of all internet searches that that use that term. Since the internet is constantly growing and new terms are being added all the time, it is impossible to say whether a declining graph on google trends means that absolute number of searches are going down or up.
Net new search terms aren't being added at the rate you think. Try searching for highly generic terms such as "food" or "blue" and it's pretty much flat. While many new terms are being added, old terms are getting obsoleted almost as fast.
The point still stands: share of web interest in RSS has still been displaced by other ways of spending time. Whether it's social media, Netflix, or cat photos, RSS simply hasn't grown with the rest of the web.
I have 4X the RSS subscribers to my Twitter subscribers, my programming blog handles both. RSS readers make consuming an article much faster than reading links from twitter.
No. Otherwise google would be axed currents too. Google isn't trying to make you abandon feeds, they're just trying to consolidate into fewer platforms, ones that give premium positioning to their own non-standard protocols. Their new notes and messaging apps reflect this. Currents is more of the same.
MONOLITH VIEW, Silicone Valley, Thursday (NTN) — We’re in a new world of computing. You need “personal”, “social” and “on the go”. So “search” will “join the social” on Google Plus.
We know Search has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too. There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Plus^W^WSearch has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better — and more sociable — user experience.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had this rate of change — it probably hasn’t happened since the birth of social media in July 2011, with our superior social media platform, Google Plus. So today we’re officially folding a number of other products into Google Plus:
* YouTube will become Google Plus Video. Your YouTube will be just the same, you’ll just need a username you have government ID for. Don’t worry — you can trust us with it.
* Google Maps API will become Google Plus Maps. You’ll need to add your house, your workplace, your favourite retail experiences and your credit card number to your “circles”, then you can look up any place you want. You can opt out to Apple Maps any time you like.
* Google Docs got absorbed by Google Drive, which will become Google SUM(). Imagine the “social” of your spreadsheets being rated by all your friends! Once again, users who opt out are free to revel in the joys of Office 365.
* Google Voice App for BlackBerry will be discontinued once we’ve found both remaining BlackBerry users and notified them.
* Orkut, of course, is being kept.
We know you’ll be delighted with the Google Plus experience, with hundreds of millions of people every month delighted to be using Google Plus! Or products that require a profile on it. It’s like Facebook without all the annoying people on it. Or any people. But the people on it love it with huge enthusiasm, just like the ones who loved Google Buzz before we shot that through the head too. Come onto Plus, or Vic will cry. You don’t want to see Vic crying, do you? Asshole. You probably hurt puppies, too.
To ensure a smooth transition, we’re providing a three-month sunset period so you have sufficient time to find an alternate web-searching solution. Good luck on that one. Because, and you know it in your heart, Google Plus as a search engine still sucks less than Bing.
It's funny how some people can produce walls of text attacking Google at the drop of a hat.
If you've actually read that post you'd have noticed that the author is misrepresenting her assumptions as facts by repurposing out of context comments.
The person she was quoting wasn't even speaking about Reader nor was he granting her an interview (the author doesn't specify in what context did she hear all that) it was just another serving of the generic "news in the mobile era" spiel.
"Google Now‘s approach is to leverage artificial intelligence techniques to learn your tastes and habits so it can deliver headline news you’ll want to read, when you want to read it. "
Google, Facebook et. al spend so much energy using artificial intelligence to infer what we want, and yet when they have a service that actually allows us to tell them what we want, they shut it down.
We know what we want better than you, so just allow us to tell you what we want!
If google really wants me to move to google+, now, or current, where is the big shiny button that says 'load feeds into x'? Incompetence seems to be playing as big a role as strategy.
I think there are two types of users in this case - "consumers" and "researchers". Social news are good for "consumers" with their usage pattern "Read-Like-Forget". They consume to feed their hunger and nothing more. "Researchers" carefully select trustful sources and follow them, they need a tool that allows to keep track and never miss important info. "Researcher" pattern is impossible in the "social" noisy flood of news.
42 comments
[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 91.8 ms ] threadThat being said, bad ideas from the 1990s internet have a bad habit of being reinvented as multi-zillion dollar startups. I guess I need to start reading old copies of Wired for inspiration.
Funny you would say that. I (among a lot of other people) have certainly noticed how cyclical this industry is; and I also think that it's very easy for a technology to fail, not because there's anything wrong with it, but just because it's "too early".
And as it happens, I have this bad habit of saving old magazines - so I actually do have a rather large collection of old issues of things like Wired, Red Herring, Business 2.0, Infoworld, ComputerWorld, Information Week, etc. packed away in a closet somewhere. I actually am thinking about digging a box of those out one day, and spending a few hours just poring over old issues, trawling for ideas and inspiration.
In fact, now that you mentioned this and reminded me of thread of thought, I think I might just do that this weekend.
that would be kind of useful.
If I could share that with my cabal, and use the clicks or upvotes to optimize the stream, that would be nice.
hmm..
Follow that twitter account.
In the meantime I'll spend my time with those tools that allow me to more effectively entertain and inform myself. And right now I do that with feedly... following blogs and news sources and gradually adding new ones over time as I discover them.
No one has solved content discovery - and won't for a while yet. So I'll do it the old fashioned way. Read stuff I like, follow the links that people I trust post, and occasionally find some gold through google search myself.
P.S. FEEDLY is AWESOME!
It's just lame when corporate political decisions are presented in the guise of " people's usage habits are changing" or "it's technically difficult..."
This is precisely why Google Reader is a valuable tool. I subscribe to the belief that if an article is not worth reading 2 weeks later, it's not worth reading at all.
Facebook, Twitter, HN and Reddit require checking multiple times per day to make sure you don't miss good posts. Google Reader lets me review blog posts once a week, and prioritise reading by the source, not freshness of the content.
I realized that I had been spending upwards of two hours a day reading non-programming articles (the liked of Wired, TechCrunch, ATD, etc.) and then also spending the evening wondering where all my time had gone.
I started shunning all those articles (I keep reading HN and programming articles in general because I think they're much more valuable to my future) and started spending two hours in the evening reading books (currently trudging through The Brothers Karamazov) instead. After two weeks, it feels like I'm giving my brain a nice chicken caesar salad instead of a Big Mac.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=rss#q=rss&cmpt=q
The point still stands: share of web interest in RSS has still been displaced by other ways of spending time. Whether it's social media, Netflix, or cat photos, RSS simply hasn't grown with the rest of the web.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=food#q=porn&cmpt=q
(Also, who the hell would need to google for RSS?)
Meanwhile, in reality - RSS and XML are part of the internet fabric, invisible but essential to the function of numerous very high profile services.
We know Search has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too. There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Plus^W^WSearch has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better — and more sociable — user experience.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had this rate of change — it probably hasn’t happened since the birth of social media in July 2011, with our superior social media platform, Google Plus. So today we’re officially folding a number of other products into Google Plus:
* YouTube will become Google Plus Video. Your YouTube will be just the same, you’ll just need a username you have government ID for. Don’t worry — you can trust us with it.
* Google Maps API will become Google Plus Maps. You’ll need to add your house, your workplace, your favourite retail experiences and your credit card number to your “circles”, then you can look up any place you want. You can opt out to Apple Maps any time you like.
* Google Docs got absorbed by Google Drive, which will become Google SUM(). Imagine the “social” of your spreadsheets being rated by all your friends! Once again, users who opt out are free to revel in the joys of Office 365.
* Google Voice App for BlackBerry will be discontinued once we’ve found both remaining BlackBerry users and notified them.
* Orkut, of course, is being kept.
We know you’ll be delighted with the Google Plus experience, with hundreds of millions of people every month delighted to be using Google Plus! Or products that require a profile on it. It’s like Facebook without all the annoying people on it. Or any people. But the people on it love it with huge enthusiasm, just like the ones who loved Google Buzz before we shot that through the head too. Come onto Plus, or Vic will cry. You don’t want to see Vic crying, do you? Asshole. You probably hurt puppies, too.
To ensure a smooth transition, we’re providing a three-month sunset period so you have sufficient time to find an alternate web-searching solution. Good luck on that one. Because, and you know it in your heart, Google Plus as a search engine still sucks less than Bing.
http://newstechnica.com/2013/03/14/spring-clean-google-searc...
If you've actually read that post you'd have noticed that the author is misrepresenting her assumptions as facts by repurposing out of context comments.
The person she was quoting wasn't even speaking about Reader nor was he granting her an interview (the author doesn't specify in what context did she hear all that) it was just another serving of the generic "news in the mobile era" spiel.
And 'Google Plus Video' sounds just good enough that it might happen.
Google, Facebook et. al spend so much energy using artificial intelligence to infer what we want, and yet when they have a service that actually allows us to tell them what we want, they shut it down.
We know what we want better than you, so just allow us to tell you what we want!