Not many people seem that interested in my approach to solving the feed reading problem. I run my own backend and frontend and just let it fetch things for me. Then I periodically check in and flip through to see what's new. If I wind up on some new platform on which the web frontend doesn't make sense, I'll write a native one which speaks the same simple "POST in, AJAX out" language. No big thing.
I set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've written and then some, but it seems the momentum just isn't there yet.
You'll have to let me know how getting ignored in two different mediums feels.
Protip? Getting people to talk to you is another form of sales.
Also, don't ask questions in public for which the answers that could cause them to get blacklisted in their field of choice. That's a pretty good way not to get an answer.
Rachel tends to be a drive-by participant in this community. Look at the comment/post history and the profile which is exceedingly well tuned.
Lastly, why do you care what IT people that used to work for Google think of the Triumvirate?
I saw Newsblur quite some time back, maybe in 2011 when I decided to move myself off Reader. It didn't look like anything I wanted: so many frames!
Reader itself had a whole bunch of stuff which got in the way. One time I tried mocking it up with most of that stuff gone and I liked what I found. That's the sort of ideal I went for with my own thing: enough of a bar so people know it's a feed reader and not some scuzzy content thievery site (since they arrive when they see it in their referrer logs), and a way to flip through the posts.
The Kickstarter was an attempt to try something really "out there" for me and see if it would work. It looks like it will not.
The nice thing about NewsBlur is that it exposes the API so that, if you want, you can make a completely new front end for it. This is what I did: http://www.altfeedreader.com/
NewsBlur is also YC S12. I can't say I've tried them all to compare fairly, but I'm quite pleased with NewsBlur for my feed-reading needs. Samuel Clay has been quite responsive to the few GitHub issues I've filed, too.
Yep - I have the same approach. My subscriptions generate 5-10 posts a day, I look at them once in the afternoon, mark all as read and move on.
Open sourced mine here: https://github.com/swanson/stringer - it's <10 minutes to deploy an instance to Heroku and be on your way. All the data is in your own database - do whatever the hell you want with it.
I can't imagine there'd be much interest in so such a thing just to read blogs.
It probably goes without saying that, perhaps despite appearances, Kickstarter projects require a massive amount of marketing to have any hope of success.
Who knows, the demise of Google Reader seems to be spawning a lot of cool projects and Show HN's. I don't think it's the end of the world...seems to be driving forward innovation.
Let me emphasise your point with a bit of shameless self-promotion. It may not be what the OP is calling for but some of you might like it. It's a web based feed reader that I've been working on since before Google announced the imminent shut down of Reader.
Folders, drag and drop feeds between them, the caching of entries Google did, and the Android app was ok, and it didn't install some browser crushing plugin to work, it was a website.
One thing the google reader apocalypse seems to have taught us is that everybody's sense of entitlement is way too damn high.
Feedly is documented. Type "feedly keyboard shortcuts" or "feedly tutorial" into google and you'll get all kinds of good (and concise) information. The fact that you didn't try to find any documentation doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I installed the feedly extension and it proceeded to trash every page I viewed by inserting itself at the bottom. Even in plain Javascript files I was viewing
Unfortunately, if you get disconnected from feedly (like you do not use it for two weeks or you are in incognito mode), it no longer respects your preference. So the default should definitely be the other way around
When Google makes the decision that I'm not worth much, I'm tempted to reciprocate.
DuckDuckGo is already becoming habit, and I'm pretty close to convincing others in my company that we need to switch off of Google Apps, because Google hides important messages from me and doesn't provide support [1]. What else does Google do? Drive? Dropbox is better. Plus? Haha. Google is putting all their effort behind things they're only mediocre at, chasing after the fashionable new kids on the block, and dropping the ball on their core competencies. Maps will keep me around for a while though. However, a maps app that cared about my privacy would win me over...
Every giant sees their peak and gradual decline. Google's just came very quickly. I hope they see a renaissance.
Of course I can, particularly if they are best-in-class in a class that is not relevant to me. I'm not going to use web apps for email or for office documents, except for edge cases. And that is the case for most people in the world, web apps are a nicety, but not the primary use case.
I think you're extrapolating your opinion to "most" people. Gmail is extremely popular, and while Docs is no Gmail, it has no serious competition for cloud-based editing.
Even if you're not using Gmail's webapp, it's an entire email infrastructure serving as the backend for Mail.app or Mailbox or whatever you use. At this point, if someone doesn't have their own mail server, they're probably using Gmail.
I'm fine with Reeder switching to Feedbin, but why couldn't the author update the desktop all at the same time as the iOS client? This means there is a gap where Reeder on the desktop just won't work correctly.
I wish Pocket would adopt Feedly's UED and discovery engine, or that Feedly would pick up on Pocket's browser extension and archiving ability. That would be almost perfect.
I never thought of that. I really like Pocket's simplicity and ubiquity. If they could somehow pull it off I would be so pleased. That would be quite the pivot for them though.
People who used/use Reader digest information. A lot of information and quickly (at least if you are using it correctly).
They are often the hubs in social/meme networks. I find cool stories all the time and propagate those stories out. It is hard to value that, if there is value there at all.
When the demise of Reader had been announced, bluntly feedly sucked. It looked like Pintrest (is that bad?) It was missing the key feature in a reader... the reading part. Pictures are nice and layout is ok, but seriously I just want to read really quick.
Feedly has gotten better or maybe I just have figured out the correct way to use it? Hard to say.
What I have really learned from google closing reader is that you cannot trust someone you are not paying with your data. And maybe you cannot even trust someone you are paying... how depressing.
No maybe about it. You can't trust someone you're paying either. See:
- Sparrow and all the other companies who were acquired and saw products killed
- the countless other companies that just went out of business
- the problems you run into when hiring people to develop custom software
- and so on
There is no substitute for individually (and regularly) assessing the risks and benefits associated with all the software and services you use. And even then, you will make mistakes.
I'm a Reeder user myself, though 99% of my reading is done on the Mac version. So far, ReadKit ($4.99, MAS) is the closest thing I've found to a replacement. I'd still prefer Reeder, but I can comfortably live with ReadKit if need be.
Feedly is an example of an app that is extremely over-designed in a counterintuitive way. It is a remarkable case of form over function.
"There's a list of articles, one per line, stacked vertically on the screen. After you've scanned your eyes to the bottom of the screen, how do you see more? You scroll it up, right? Ha ha ha. No. You swipe right. Madness."
Oh. THAT'S how you do it. I thought it was impossible to scroll down a list of articles. When you swipe down on an article list, feedly alternates between showing you a single article and a portion of the article list. I have no idea what the intended function is.
And do the different width bars on the homescreen mean anything?
I switched to newsblur which looks like it's from 2003 and has a terrible home page. But at least it doesn't surprise me.
Once made to show full items by default, Feedly became acceptable for how I use a feed reader. However, this option only appears to be available on the desktop site, and not on the Android app, and all the other options feel too weird; the cards and magazine layouts look pretty, but are completely unusable ("I just want to read my feeds!).
Yoleo almost does it for me, except I sorely miss the ability to scroll through a list of unread items (it forces us to hit J or click on the next entry in the third column to make the next item visible).
I find the NewsBlur UI awfully clunky, and I will admit that I can't bring myself to actually using it as the replacement. However, it exposes an API, and I built a much simpler UI for it: http://www.altfeedreader.com/ — it doesn't do everything that NewsBlur can, but it does 99% of what I want in a feed reader.
In the end, I haven't settled on what I will use, and there's still Digg Reader (to be released tomorrow) and AOL Reader (released, but buggy enough to prevent me from adding anything when I tried it).
And more over it requries a browser plugin (at least for firefox) to even function, why? And most of the time it just doesn't work - keep displaying that it is updating (maybe it doesn't take proxy into account?)
Well, the good news for jwz is that these all seem pretty fixable. It's come a long way since the version I first saw after the Reader announcement. It took me a long time to warm up to Google Reader, and for it to have enough features for me. I was a Bloglines user for quite some time. Change is hard.
Many startups are trying to consolidate news and social media posts — to become, basically, a one-stop shop for users.
I understand that this offers greater convenience, but it also overlooks something people enjoy about the Internet. People like having different websites and services to check, with notifications unique to each one.
It's kind of like spreading out your Christmas presents instead of tearing them open all at once.
I agree. This is my approach for http://mnmlrdr.com/ — no social integration because a lot of people are only interested in reading their feeds, not talking about it in their reader app.
I appreciate his position but I have trouble taking advice on UI from somebody whose blog is eye-burning neon green text on a black background and has been since 1995. We know you're l33t, Jamie, you are a living legend. Can I get a readable color scheme already?
Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that someone's complaining about UI of the source when the stuff under discussion already cleans up things for you and makes it readable?
I have never watched much TV, skip most movies, and am unable to play any first shooter from Doom onwards without getting motion sick. Plus I think that I should respect copyrights.
Let me turn it around. What true nerd would consider consumption of mass market media a defining characteristic of nerdom? As opposed to, say, burying your nose in a math text for fun?
I'd say that is a fairly mainstream geek kind of thing, I associate it with the kind of video game playing, reddit frequenting geek. (Yes overly broad stereotypes).
I would never participate in automatic torrenting; I am pretty discerning about what I watch.
Additionally, RSS feeds just seem pointless to me; I visit web sites when I want to consume information from them. I dislike the idea of turning my computer into a television.
You can still be discerning in your automatic torrenting. For instance, Flexget has an option to download S01E01's of television, and the ability to check Metacritic ratings for Games/Movies before downloading (I have a threshold of 75% or above). While I tend to find a bunch of tripe television (the wife enjoys it, and I built her media center out of love), I happily delete the awful stuff, and don't add it to the list of "automatically download this title" shows I've curated.
"Almost nobody uses feed readers" - prove it. I'll read that as "I stopped using it, therefore how could anyone else possibly want to?"
"which is why Google shut down Reader in the first place" - nope, Google wants to stuff us all into their walled Google+ crap and feed us ads. Notice the lack of RSS feeds for updates.
"You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority" - this is a discussion that involves Google's cack handed behaviour with Reader, what do you expect. If you don't use RSS then why the hell do you care, stay out of the discussion.
Hear, hear. I just spent 5mn reading his post and then a few comments, then switched back to Hacker News and for about 20 seconds, my eyes were popping greed dots on my retina like fireworks.
I think you got just a very bad monitor, if it doesn't have a green / amber switch. Simply go and buy a better one. Btw. Blog is completely missing the lovely slow phosphor trailing effect, it could be added with js. I was great that you were able to read text from monitor about 5 seconds after powering it off. - After quick Googling, I couldn't find pre-existing javascript to do it. It would be nice to make one.
I was thinking the same thing. The text is way too sharp, so it's rather anachronistic to see the right color scheme with modern fonts. There has to be a slightly pixelated font out there, based on the pixel pattern of the green CRTs. Of course, it wouldn't be practical on the blog, but it would look cool on his home page (jwz.org).
Just for the record, all the people complaining about jwz's green text have no idea what they're talking about. It might be old-fashioned and out of style, but it's totally readable. There are way worse websites, even among designers who should know better. What's funny is that it never fails that someone criticizes the green color, and says something about not taking the content seriously, every time jwz's posts get hackernewsed.
Yes. In your OWN blog. This one is retro styling for the intended audience, and we won't have it any other way.
"Eye-burning"? Maybe lower your brightness? I have -3.00 diopters myopia and can read it just fine.
Not to mention people worked for 15+ hours on green on black displays and you didn't see them complaining -- and that was with phosphor displays, with an electron gun blazing, and tons of others issues, from flickering to v-sync.
Complain? We had options to change the intensity or use amber/black or white/black. No one in the day would have used intense green characters for a whole shift, it would have "burned" the CRT.
Er? There were metric-f'tons of green-phosphor terminals in use "back in the day", and I don't recall anybody ever adjusting them to reduce brightess... I'm not even sure if most them were even capable of easy adjustment.
E.g., the green model of the H19/Z19 (super popular), various IBM synchronous terminals (the ones I remember from the system/34 had a particularly saturated green phosphor), the later H29 (a very pleasant bright whitish-green), various cheapo Wyse models from the final days of dedicated terminals (though usually these were pretty adjustable), the original PC monochrome monitor (adjustable, but typically quite bright and saturated green), etc.
[Not that I actually like jwz's blog style, mind you...]
If I recall correctly, you could adjust the brightness on the VT 100 series through one of the setup modes. The VT200 had choices other than green. The TRS-80 Model 4 had white and I used a 4p as a terminal to remote mainframes and minis. The Xerox 820 was white. Most of the early Apple/IBM PC monochromes were green, but there were some really nice amber third party monitors.
"didn't see them complaining"? Here in Europe, laws were passed, in most countries, forcing employers to pay for eyeglasses and regular visits, because people were literally going blind.
While I share the author's frustration that Google Reader is going away, I don't get all the hostility toward Feedly. In just a few months' time, they've replicated by far the most important aspect of Google - serving as a backend for any front end reader that choose to use their API.
I too tried the Feedly iOS app and found it didn't suit my workflow and stylistic preferences. But I didn't need it. My favorite way of consuming news over the past couple years has been with Newsify, with Google Reader as back end. Now my favorite way continues to be Newsify, but with Feedly as back end. The transition was seamless.
My only 2 complaints are:
1) I was only able to import 1000 starred items into Feedly.
2) No search - but that's coming.
So - I wish I hadn't had to spend a dozen or two hours over the past few months evaluating alternatives to Google Reader. But I'm quite happy that Feedly stepped up to take Google Reader's place.
Exactly. Pretty much from the beginning of the Readerpocalypse, I'd decided to go with whatever the developers of my apps did.
Both Press and gReader decided to support Feedly, so that was simple enough. There were a few hiccups in the transition (initial bugs, creating my Feedly account in-app was confusing), but now everything is working as smoothing as it did with Google Reader. I can even directly compare that, since I've switched to Feedly on my phone but not on my tablet (yet).
gReader Pro on android has worked pretty darn well now that the bugs have been shaken out. I'd definitely recommend it over the pretty but useless feedly interface.
After waiting and waiting for Reeder to update their Mac version, I decided to go back to an old friend, NetNewsWire. It does not sync between devices, but that's ok for me. In fact, I kind of feel good about the fact that now there is no online entity keeping track of what feeds I subscribe to and what articles I read. ... well, if not none, at least one less entity keeping track.
This will presumably be sorted out soon. Perhaps the combination of Feedly's late deployment and Apple's approval process have complicated things for some developers. I did notice that both Press and gReader had to bugfix their initial Feedly support. I can certainly imagine an iOS developer having a harder time dealing with a late-breaking issue like that.
It might not work for all scenarios, but it can work.
At some point I used RSSBandit (Open source desktop RSS reader for Windows), and I set up its %appdata% directory to be a subdirectory in the Dropbox folder. This can be done by modifying one of the config.xml files in the program's files. It worked. The whole state of the application was shared between computers.
Desktop app, synchronization between home and work, that was all I needed.
Thank you for that link. It's very interesting. I'm working on a protocol for brass reader that is similar to what he describes. It uses a shared filesystem like dropbox as the communication medium but it is a change set based protocol. I'm still not sure if it's going to work, but I'm going to give it a shot.
I don't really share most of jwz's specific complaints, but I've been trying to use feedly, and boy .... it's really hard to believe so many people are recommending this as a general Google reader replacement.
Besides its somewhat quirky UI, the main problem I have with feedly is that it seems predicated on the assumption that you will more or less read through all articles, one by one, in order, and finish them.
That's not how I use reader at all. I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category. Yadayada.
Feedly basically flattens and linearizes everything, and doesn't give any summary information, so I constantly feel unsure what's available without looking, and once I look, I quickly get lost in the undifferentiated flow of articles.
Of course Google reader also allows a more "feedly-style" one-big-stream mode of operation via its summary feeds. Except that it does a better job of it by allowing multiple different views, and provides summary information for all of them too.
And despite all that flexibility and power, Google reader's interface seems far simpler than feedly's... it's really just a tree-list-view thingy like we're all used to from a zillion apps, and everything just sort of works like you expect it.
It does all that, and because it's web-based, everything's always in sync no matter where you read. It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps, but it works pretty well on smartphone browsers (and even on dumbphone browsers, although it started to flake out during authentication a few months ago, presumably because Google wasn't keeping it updated).
So basically reader's about a zillion times better, with one glaring exception: it's going away... TT
[The closest free replacement I've found so far is "yoleoreader", which kinda gets the vibe right, although it's a bit rough in places...]
> I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category.
I was seriously starting to think I am only one who wants this from web-based rss-reader. Most of the native rss clients are built around this behaviour and I really cannot understand why web readers don't. Maybe A/B testing with bad test cases (or without enough diverse user population) or maybe we are just crazy.
> It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps
Android at least has. It was/is really nicely hidden under all unofficial, privacy violating rip-offs in the Google store.
If Google were smart, they'd open-source Reader and let the people who love it maintain and run it (It's probably much too dependent on their architecture for this to actually be a viable option).
If Google were smart, they'd open-source Reader and let the people who love it maintain and run it (It's probably much too dependent on their architecture for this to actually be a viable option).
So.. if they were smart they'd do something that's impossible, you're saying.
This is almost certainly impossible. Systems at large Web companies have tons of dependencies on internal systems, libraries and build tools. It would probably be easier to rewrite Reader from scratch rather than open-source it.
It seems that Feedly's Cloud API may be the best replacement for the Reader backend (really an ATOM PUB feed source). It may not however turn out to be the best frontend for our use case. I would like to see if it is possible to rebuild the Reader UI/UX on top of the Feedly Cloud API, using an ATOM feedreader core implemented in javascript.
Personally, I want a centralized solution, not a standalone daemon running on a private server. I switched to reader from a Gnome feed reader after losing all of my subscriptions due to losing access to a home directory. From there (in 2004 I think) I've built a massive collection of diverse sources covering every position, philosophy, point of view, etc. I can. I have so many feeds that I cannot possible read all of them, and so many that the Feedly mobile UI on Android won't even display the entire list.
Feedly appears to have imported everything I want from Reader, including the tags that I have created over the years, and the folder structure. None of this appears to be in a simple OPML export. (But thanks Dave for standardizing that.)
I think everything is preserved in Feedly, and now that the pressure of Normandy is off I hope that they will work to address those people that brought them all of these new accounts, and all of the press surrounding this mass migration. The Reader theme is a start but doesn't go far enough.
They are currently in the process of publishing an API, some select developers already have access to it according to their latest blog so an iOS app is in the coming...
Yeah, I finally tried out NewsBlur yesterday after waiting as long as possible to decide on a replacement. There's a lot going on there. I think I've more or less figured out what it's all for and how to navigate around, but one thing is still bugging me -- what's that orange triangle on the left of the feed area, that follows the cursor around unless you "lock" it, for?! Totally unexplained ux element.
Yes, this. I was confused by it too until I uncovered that in a GetSatisfaction thread. If you lock it about 1/4 of the way from the top, the auto mark-read behavior is like GReader.
It should probably default to being locked...
One of my favorite things about Newsblur is how minutely configurable it is, but I think all of that is probably throwing off new users.
You don't find it buggy? For example, right now it claims several of my feeds are 404 and it won't let me fix them -- I have to delete and re-add them.
The "fix a misbehaving feed" dialog claims every URL I give it is 404. And now it has helpfully renamed all my broken feeds to "[Untitled]" so I can't tell them apart in the list.
It's super buggy! Dupes articles and it's happened twice when long reading sessions were lost without any indication of error - the "read" state of tens, maybe hundreds of articles were not updated. I've seen the code on GitHub in the past - it was a ball of pasta.
I've really enjoyed using Feedbin.me. They have a three column layout and keyboard commands. Makes it easy to read. Feedbin is web based, but they have an API that I can sync with Press on my phone.
I found it to be awful. It's so slow. I presume this is an artefact of using it from Europe, and the developers not taking latency into account.
I'm willing to overlook the bugs such as the same item appearing more than once in a feed (it's quite new), but the incredible slowness of it make it unusable for me.
For example, I loaded it before writing this comment, and as of this point, it still hasn't finished loading. I just get a spinny box and 'Loading...'
I also know from experience that if you click on something else, such as a folder, it won't override what it's currently loading, so the state of the UI will get out of sync.
You also can't read a list of items, you have to read one by one, incurring yet another AJAXy-load which doesn't necessarily ever respond, thus leaving in you in Loading... limbo.
That's interesting. I'm using it from Australia and it seems acceptably fast for me. I don't have a huge number of feeds, maybe this makes the difference.
Did you contact the developer? She seems quite eager to help.
Those are significant items that need to be worked on, but the main thing Yoleo does for me is feel good using it like Google Reader felt good several years ago. I haven't come across an RSS reader in awhile that didn't make reading feel like work.
I wanted to love it, but it takes forever to load on my iPhone 5. The base page loads fast, but the Ajax call to fetch articles just spins forever. (I live in Omaha, Nebraska, fwiw)
Thanks, I've spent a few months with Feedly but InoReader feels much more right! While Feedly does not allow you to export OPML, it still syncs with Google Reader so unless you've changed your feeds very recently, you can get them InoReader within a minute.
Looks and feels pretty good (though I'm not sure how they'll keep it in business).
I believe i came across it the other day and brushed off because I didn't see a Register link (not signing up with Google or Facebook anywhere). But I logged in today and was fairly surprised to see the number of features available to the readers.
The key to any good Reader is the availability of the customizing features for the end-users, plus of course the speed and scalability. As soon as I plugged in HN feed to inoreader, I saw thousands of feeds fetched ready for me to scroll quickly. That's a first good sign.
That iPhone-focused mobile view served me well for many years. I vastly preferred it to all iterations of the Android app and often use it on my desktop too. Showing only 15 items and being able to mark just them as read was a great workflow for me.
I have the exact same use-case: big hierarchy of feeds, and just reading the ones I feel like at the moment.
I switched to Newsblur, and apart from some small issues with the UI (which is getting better), I've been really happy. The iOS app is also nice. The downside is of course that it costs money, but it really isn't that much IMHO.
I also switched to newsblur, and I'm pretty happy with it. The UI is definitely clunky, but after you get used to it, it's really not so bad. It's free for some number of feeds, has a sane business model (i.e. it has any business model), the entire thing is open source, and it has an open API so you can build your own client if you wish!
I've not felt the need to try any others since switching
I've actually tried Feedly first for a number of weeks and it drove me half insane for similar reasons to that of jwz. I switched to Newsblur and after a few buttons it goes into 'works almost like Google Reader' mode.
I've been using The Old Reader (theoldreader.com) which, as the name suggests, is very much like old school reader before they crippled the social features. Sure, it doesn't have a dedicated mobile app, but the mobile site looks pretty nice.
I thought you were flat-out wrong for a moment, then did some digging: Feedler 2.0 does indeed support Theoldreader, however Feedler Pro (which was what I was squinting at) is still on version 1.12.5, and only supports Google Reader.
As Feedler 2.0 only showed up in the app store yesterday I assume the Pro version is stuck somewhere in the approvals process ...
Yeah, I've been using the free version for ages. When they added the old reader support, I bought the pro version out of gratitude, only to find a google login screen! I'm sure the pro app will get the update soon...
I've tried TT-RSS as a replacement and it works quite well. It's self-hosted, depending on your point of view that may be an advantage or disadvantage.
+1 for tt-rss. I've been a big GReader user for years and I love that tt-rss is self-hosted. Fuck the cloud. Nobody can take it away from me now. :)
It's been heavily modified since the news of GReader going away was announced and it's easy to write plugins for it. I've got my version of it tweaked to the gills and it's even better than GReader was in my opinion.
Syncing feeds is a little bit harder of a problem than the author lets on. It's not just about storing a state file in dropbox. It's also about efficiently pushing the delta of what's new. A central service is vastly more efficient at that than millions of clients pulling their own feeds.
But I 100% agree that Reeder is (was) the awesomest client and all I need to be happy is a backend replacement that just Makes Reeder Work. I don't have to care about Feedly's UI if it's just a backend.
One imagines they felt they were leaving too much on the table, or that they felt the counterparty (ie, us users) didn't value it as much as they did their lost opportunities.
Personally, GR is one of few services that I would have gladly paid $100/year for. They should at least have asked us users if we wanted to pay for the service in exchange for letting it live on.
Even then, there probably aren't enough of you to make it worthwhile (and you're not a growing market). Keeping things free gives the provider tremendous leeway to do as they please.
It should be trivially easy to look at the Graveyard, and find products that Google cancelled, where someone else later produced a competing product - for pay - that has attracted comparable users.
I disagree. As part of writing http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns I read through scads of blog posts, forum threads, articles etc for figuring out which of the ~300 entries were paid; aside from a Google Maps API charge which very quickly blew over and has been forgotten, there were no blowbacks to Google starting to charge for something, much less your incredibly hyperbolic 'magnitude worse' blowback. Reader's shutdown has cost them vastly more than switching to a subscription model ever would have.
I am amused by your attempt to shame me into agreeing with you, but some complaining about price increases is not a 'blowback'. Dozens of new readers and business starting up and endless bad PR (I have Google Alerts set up, so I see the new articles all the time, and the Reader is still generating bad press especially now that the shutdown is nigh) - that is blowback.
They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes, we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone else to fill the vacuum.
no, you seized control of an open RSS ecosystem with Reader and Feedburner, made those a platform no one could compete with, and then pulled the plug on the ecosystem.
If you don't even understand that, that's why you can't be trusted.
My comparison is simply that someone built a solid product and gave it away. Yes, people still pay hundreds of dollars for the same software when Open/Libre Office will work for most people.
The difference is that Google gave away access to the product, while Open Office and The GIMP gave away the product. If Open Office dies (like it almost did in the LibreOffice fiasco), you can grab its source code, recompile it, and keep on working. When Reader dies, you have nothing.
Your apologia is begs the question of whether Google could make money or find a fit for it when they never even allowed the team to try:
“‘There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,’ he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”
Had there been interest, revenues were easy to find: a college student trying their first project would at least have slapped some Google text ads on there. Given Google's other projects, they could have just made Reader a service with a $5/year charge, bundled it with Google Drive subscriptions, etc. The Google+ integration was a hopeless botch full of obvious opportunities to make both services more valuable but they simply did not try and succeeded only in making a strong, active, influential community use their services less and distrust their executives‘ vision and competency.
I was considering various things, with a strong desire for something simple and likely to stay around for awhile. I thought about emacs gnus, Thunderbird, and some of the new entrants.
I realized that I would be as happy with something that just sent me a filterable email for every entry in all of my fields, since I already have good interfaces for reading and culling mail on all of my platforms.
So I found one. http://blogtrottr.com/ It seemed nice and had an easy import. If something happens to it, I'm sure I can find another.
For now I'm filtering it all into its own folder, though I try to keep my feeds pretty low-volume, so it wouldn't even be a huge deal if they all landed in my already-pretty-noisy inbox.
I just did that this weekend, but so far I'm quite happy
I've tried just about all of them and as July 1 approaches I'm definitely getting anxious that I haven't found an RSS aggregator "home" just yet. I set up Tiny Tiny RSS on a Red Hat Openshift gear and it actually seems to work quite well. My main problem with it is that it doesn't seem to work in anything other than Safari.
The mobile options for Tiny Tiny RSS looks like it's going to take some legwork to set up so that will be interesting.
It's such a waste since Google already has a decent app that hooks into their API (on Android at least). All of this work by them that makes me very happy only to be ended. Such a shame. I'm really going to miss it.
I would like to see an argument for not releasing the Google Reader Android app source code, I can't imagine what in there exposes a critical Google service. If that was the concern they could leave that component out. (I'm talking about the internal Android component that provides the Reader login facility and sync option.)
I also configured an instance of Tiny Tiny RSS. I found TTRSS-Reader to be very easy to configure - just the url, username and password, and possibly some certificate information if you're using a self-signed one (ok, it wasn't a huge fan of my wildcard certificate, but that's a small problem for me). You just have to enable API access in your account for it to work.
I had no problem setting up YATTRSSC as my mobile client on my iPhone. All I did was check the enable API checkbox in preferences and I was good to go. It’s a PhoneGap app so feels slow and clunky but since I do most of my reading on my computer I tolerate it.
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[ 11.4 ms ] story [ 603 ms ] threadI set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've written and then some, but it seems the momentum just isn't there yet.
Protip? Getting people to talk to you is another form of sales.
Also, don't ask questions in public for which the answers that could cause them to get blacklisted in their field of choice. That's a pretty good way not to get an answer.
Rachel tends to be a drive-by participant in this community. Look at the comment/post history and the profile which is exceedingly well tuned.
Lastly, why do you care what IT people that used to work for Google think of the Triumvirate?
API: http://www.newsblur.com/api
Open Source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
Also, cheers for not including a link to your Kickstarter.
Reader itself had a whole bunch of stuff which got in the way. One time I tried mocking it up with most of that stuff gone and I liked what I found. That's the sort of ideal I went for with my own thing: enough of a bar so people know it's a feed reader and not some scuzzy content thievery site (since they arrive when they see it in their referrer logs), and a way to flip through the posts.
The Kickstarter was an attempt to try something really "out there" for me and see if it would work. It looks like it will not.
Open sourced mine here: https://github.com/swanson/stringer - it's <10 minutes to deploy an instance to Heroku and be on your way. All the data is in your own database - do whatever the hell you want with it.
You could also, you know, just release what you have as open source without asking people to pay $30,000 for the privilege?
It probably goes without saying that, perhaps despite appearances, Kickstarter projects require a massive amount of marketing to have any hope of success.
http://Readable.cc
Feedly is documented. Type "feedly keyboard shortcuts" or "feedly tutorial" into google and you'll get all kinds of good (and concise) information. The fact that you didn't try to find any documentation doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Um...
DuckDuckGo is already becoming habit, and I'm pretty close to convincing others in my company that we need to switch off of Google Apps, because Google hides important messages from me and doesn't provide support [1]. What else does Google do? Drive? Dropbox is better. Plus? Haha. Google is putting all their effort behind things they're only mediocre at, chasing after the fashionable new kids on the block, and dropping the ball on their core competencies. Maps will keep me around for a while though. However, a maps app that cared about my privacy would win me over...
Every giant sees their peak and gradual decline. Google's just came very quickly. I hope they see a renaissance.
[1] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/aU4UUye3...
Maps, as I said, are different.
Even if you're not using Gmail's webapp, it's an entire email infrastructure serving as the backend for Mail.app or Mailbox or whatever you use. At this point, if someone doesn't have their own mail server, they're probably using Gmail.
How would Google know when it never tried to monetize them? (See above threads discussing this with quotes from people on the Reader team.)
People who used/use Reader digest information. A lot of information and quickly (at least if you are using it correctly).
They are often the hubs in social/meme networks. I find cool stories all the time and propagate those stories out. It is hard to value that, if there is value there at all.
When the demise of Reader had been announced, bluntly feedly sucked. It looked like Pintrest (is that bad?) It was missing the key feature in a reader... the reading part. Pictures are nice and layout is ok, but seriously I just want to read really quick.
Feedly has gotten better or maybe I just have figured out the correct way to use it? Hard to say.
What I have really learned from google closing reader is that you cannot trust someone you are not paying with your data. And maybe you cannot even trust someone you are paying... how depressing.
- Sparrow and all the other companies who were acquired and saw products killed
- the countless other companies that just went out of business
- the problems you run into when hiring people to develop custom software
- and so on
There is no substitute for individually (and regularly) assessing the risks and benefits associated with all the software and services you use. And even then, you will make mistakes.
Reeder for OS X is scheduled to get Feedbin support in the near future.
"There's a list of articles, one per line, stacked vertically on the screen. After you've scanned your eyes to the bottom of the screen, how do you see more? You scroll it up, right? Ha ha ha. No. You swipe right. Madness."
Oh. THAT'S how you do it. I thought it was impossible to scroll down a list of articles. When you swipe down on an article list, feedly alternates between showing you a single article and a portion of the article list. I have no idea what the intended function is.
And do the different width bars on the homescreen mean anything?
I switched to newsblur which looks like it's from 2003 and has a terrible home page. But at least it doesn't surprise me.
Once made to show full items by default, Feedly became acceptable for how I use a feed reader. However, this option only appears to be available on the desktop site, and not on the Android app, and all the other options feel too weird; the cards and magazine layouts look pretty, but are completely unusable ("I just want to read my feeds!).
Yoleo almost does it for me, except I sorely miss the ability to scroll through a list of unread items (it forces us to hit J or click on the next entry in the third column to make the next item visible).
I find the NewsBlur UI awfully clunky, and I will admit that I can't bring myself to actually using it as the replacement. However, it exposes an API, and I built a much simpler UI for it: http://www.altfeedreader.com/ — it doesn't do everything that NewsBlur can, but it does 99% of what I want in a feed reader.
In the end, I haven't settled on what I will use, and there's still Digg Reader (to be released tomorrow) and AOL Reader (released, but buggy enough to prevent me from adding anything when I tried it).
I have a flaky experience using the cloud.feedly.com. Sometimes it logs in, sometimes it doesn't. Just tried and I am able to login. for now...
http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/21/summary-of-the-last-100-da...
I understand that this offers greater convenience, but it also overlooks something people enjoy about the Internet. People like having different websites and services to check, with notifications unique to each one.
It's kind of like spreading out your Christmas presents instead of tearing them open all at once.
I have never watched much TV, skip most movies, and am unable to play any first shooter from Doom onwards without getting motion sick. Plus I think that I should respect copyrights.
Let me turn it around. What true nerd would consider consumption of mass market media a defining characteristic of nerdom? As opposed to, say, burying your nose in a math text for fun?
Wow, I thought this was just me! This prevents me from playing even the good stuff like Portal, which is a terrible pity.
It was clear to me that increasing the field of view would not help.
Shame about your respect for copyright in the digital age; I'm in full agreement with you otherwise.
Additionally, RSS feeds just seem pointless to me; I visit web sites when I want to consume information from them. I dislike the idea of turning my computer into a television.
24-36m people is a vocal minority?
"which is why Google shut down Reader in the first place" - nope, Google wants to stuff us all into their walled Google+ crap and feed us ads. Notice the lack of RSS feeds for updates.
"You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority" - this is a discussion that involves Google's cack handed behaviour with Reader, what do you expect. If you don't use RSS then why the hell do you care, stay out of the discussion.
Very, very painful.
His blog's color scheme also has no bearing on evaluating actual products' UX.
Just for the record, all the people complaining about jwz's green text have no idea what they're talking about. It might be old-fashioned and out of style, but it's totally readable. There are way worse websites, even among designers who should know better. What's funny is that it never fails that someone criticizes the green color, and says something about not taking the content seriously, every time jwz's posts get hackernewsed.
Yes. In your OWN blog. This one is retro styling for the intended audience, and we won't have it any other way.
"Eye-burning"? Maybe lower your brightness? I have -3.00 diopters myopia and can read it just fine.
Not to mention people worked for 15+ hours on green on black displays and you didn't see them complaining -- and that was with phosphor displays, with an electron gun blazing, and tons of others issues, from flickering to v-sync.
E.g., the green model of the H19/Z19 (super popular), various IBM synchronous terminals (the ones I remember from the system/34 had a particularly saturated green phosphor), the later H29 (a very pleasant bright whitish-green), various cheapo Wyse models from the final days of dedicated terminals (though usually these were pretty adjustable), the original PC monochrome monitor (adjustable, but typically quite bright and saturated green), etc.
[Not that I actually like jwz's blog style, mind you...]
I too tried the Feedly iOS app and found it didn't suit my workflow and stylistic preferences. But I didn't need it. My favorite way of consuming news over the past couple years has been with Newsify, with Google Reader as back end. Now my favorite way continues to be Newsify, but with Feedly as back end. The transition was seamless.
My only 2 complaints are:
1) I was only able to import 1000 starred items into Feedly.
2) No search - but that's coming.
So - I wish I hadn't had to spend a dozen or two hours over the past few months evaluating alternatives to Google Reader. But I'm quite happy that Feedly stepped up to take Google Reader's place.
Both Press and gReader decided to support Feedly, so that was simple enough. There were a few hiccups in the transition (initial bugs, creating my Feedly account in-app was confusing), but now everything is working as smoothing as it did with Google Reader. I can even directly compare that, since I've switched to Feedly on my phone but not on my tablet (yet).
https://github.com/smithbr/rss-readers-list
Get coding. This sort of angst is the inspiration behind a ton of open source projects.
As of this writing, only one iOS app (Newsify) is ready while two Android apps (Press and gReader) and a widget (Pure News) are. See: http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/19/feedly-cloud/
This will presumably be sorted out soon. Perhaps the combination of Feedly's late deployment and Apple's approval process have complicated things for some developers. I did notice that both Press and gReader had to bugfix their initial Feedly support. I can certainly imagine an iOS developer having a harder time dealing with a late-breaking issue like that.
At some point I used RSSBandit (Open source desktop RSS reader for Windows), and I set up its %appdata% directory to be a subdirectory in the Dropbox folder. This can be done by modifying one of the config.xml files in the program's files. It worked. The whole state of the application was shared between computers.
Desktop app, synchronization between home and work, that was all I needed.
Besides its somewhat quirky UI, the main problem I have with feedly is that it seems predicated on the assumption that you will more or less read through all articles, one by one, in order, and finish them.
That's not how I use reader at all. I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category. Yadayada.
Feedly basically flattens and linearizes everything, and doesn't give any summary information, so I constantly feel unsure what's available without looking, and once I look, I quickly get lost in the undifferentiated flow of articles.
Of course Google reader also allows a more "feedly-style" one-big-stream mode of operation via its summary feeds. Except that it does a better job of it by allowing multiple different views, and provides summary information for all of them too.
And despite all that flexibility and power, Google reader's interface seems far simpler than feedly's... it's really just a tree-list-view thingy like we're all used to from a zillion apps, and everything just sort of works like you expect it.
It does all that, and because it's web-based, everything's always in sync no matter where you read. It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps, but it works pretty well on smartphone browsers (and even on dumbphone browsers, although it started to flake out during authentication a few months ago, presumably because Google wasn't keeping it updated).
So basically reader's about a zillion times better, with one glaring exception: it's going away... TT
[The closest free replacement I've found so far is "yoleoreader", which kinda gets the vibe right, although it's a bit rough in places...]
I was seriously starting to think I am only one who wants this from web-based rss-reader. Most of the native rss clients are built around this behaviour and I really cannot understand why web readers don't. Maybe A/B testing with bad test cases (or without enough diverse user population) or maybe we are just crazy.
> It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps
Android at least has. It was/is really nicely hidden under all unofficial, privacy violating rip-offs in the Google store.
So.. if they were smart they'd do something that's impossible, you're saying.
Personally, I want a centralized solution, not a standalone daemon running on a private server. I switched to reader from a Gnome feed reader after losing all of my subscriptions due to losing access to a home directory. From there (in 2004 I think) I've built a massive collection of diverse sources covering every position, philosophy, point of view, etc. I can. I have so many feeds that I cannot possible read all of them, and so many that the Feedly mobile UI on Android won't even display the entire list.
Feedly appears to have imported everything I want from Reader, including the tags that I have created over the years, and the folder structure. None of this appears to be in a simple OPML export. (But thanks Dave for standardizing that.)
I think everything is preserved in Feedly, and now that the pressure of Normandy is off I hope that they will work to address those people that brought them all of these new accounts, and all of the press surrounding this mass migration. The Reader theme is a start but doesn't go far enough.
They aren't charging anything, maybe they should make an app...
It should probably default to being locked...
One of my favorite things about Newsblur is how minutely configurable it is, but I think all of that is probably throwing off new users.
Today I see it's just (a) email address and (b) know who you are on Google. Glad to see they changed it.
I'm willing to overlook the bugs such as the same item appearing more than once in a feed (it's quite new), but the incredible slowness of it make it unusable for me.
For example, I loaded it before writing this comment, and as of this point, it still hasn't finished loading. I just get a spinny box and 'Loading...'
I also know from experience that if you click on something else, such as a folder, it won't override what it's currently loading, so the state of the UI will get out of sync.
You also can't read a list of items, you have to read one by one, incurring yet another AJAXy-load which doesn't necessarily ever respond, thus leaving in you in Loading... limbo.
Did you contact the developer? She seems quite eager to help.
I do wish the doubles would disappear, though.
The current layout make it too hard for me to move quickly through a large number of items.
I appreciate the effort but even if it did manage to import my feeds the UI just doesn't work for me.
I've been juggling between that and YoleoReader to get better acquainted with them and will settle for one after getting properly used to one of them.
I believe i came across it the other day and brushed off because I didn't see a Register link (not signing up with Google or Facebook anywhere). But I logged in today and was fairly surprised to see the number of features available to the readers.
The key to any good Reader is the availability of the customizing features for the end-users, plus of course the speed and scalability. As soon as I plugged in HN feed to inoreader, I saw thousands of feeds fetched ready for me to scroll quickly. That's a first good sign.
(1) confusing vertical scrolls with horizontal swipes;
(2) going back to the top of a story after rotating the screen;
(3) limited ability to manage feeds;
(4) an annoying delay when switching between screens;
(5) failure to follow the Jelly Bean "up" convention
(6) pictures would not be automatically scaled to fit the screen
it wasn't _terrible_ either. I'm sad to see Reader go, but there was plenty of room for improvement. I'm now happily using (and paying for) Newsblur.
That iPhone-focused mobile view served me well for many years. I vastly preferred it to all iterations of the Android app and often use it on my desktop too. Showing only 15 items and being able to mark just them as read was a great workflow for me.
Do any of the alternatives to Reader have a good app for Android ?
I switched to Newsblur, and apart from some small issues with the UI (which is getting better), I've been really happy. The iOS app is also nice. The downside is of course that it costs money, but it really isn't that much IMHO.
I've not felt the need to try any others since switching
As Feedler 2.0 only showed up in the app store yesterday I assume the Pro version is stuck somewhere in the approvals process ...
[1] http://www.ridly.net/
A limitation is that a feed can't appear twice in the treeview (or it will be duplicated), but apart from that, it's mostly a clone of GReader.
It keeps losing the unread status, even on articles i haven't touched (yes i've disabled auto mark).
It's a mess.
The UI is bearable, but this....
It's been heavily modified since the news of GReader going away was announced and it's easy to write plugins for it. I've got my version of it tweaked to the gills and it's even better than GReader was in my opinion.
Feedbin's web client acts pretty strangely sometimes, but it's the one that best fits my Reader workflow.
Else we end up with various shitty software that we end up thinking are the gold standard.
But I 100% agree that Reeder is (was) the awesomest client and all I need to be happy is a backend replacement that just Makes Reeder Work. I don't have to care about Feedly's UI if it's just a backend.
There was a press release at the beginning of the month about Feedy & Reeder collaborating.. what's the ETA? We're really down to the wire here. http://www.macstories.net/news/reeder-to-add-support-for-fee...
Oh, and F U Google. Thanks for the 4 months heads up, dick.
http://pinterest.com/googlegraveyard/google-graveyard/
People say they would buy things, all the time.
That's a factually incorrect statement. I'm sorry, but people who make factual claims are supposed to care when they're proven wrong.
They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes, we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone else to fill the vacuum.
If you don't even understand that, that's why you can't be trusted.
Bottom line is if there is a real market for something and someone makes a better product.
Google killed Reader and trust.
“‘There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,’ he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/
Had there been interest, revenues were easy to find: a college student trying their first project would at least have slapped some Google text ads on there. Given Google's other projects, they could have just made Reader a service with a $5/year charge, bundled it with Google Drive subscriptions, etc. The Google+ integration was a hopeless botch full of obvious opportunities to make both services more valuable but they simply did not try and succeeded only in making a strong, active, influential community use their services less and distrust their executives‘ vision and competency.
I realized that I would be as happy with something that just sent me a filterable email for every entry in all of my fields, since I already have good interfaces for reading and culling mail on all of my platforms.
So I found one. http://blogtrottr.com/ It seemed nice and had an easy import. If something happens to it, I'm sure I can find another.
For now I'm filtering it all into its own folder, though I try to keep my feeds pretty low-volume, so it wouldn't even be a huge deal if they all landed in my already-pretty-noisy inbox.
I just did that this weekend, but so far I'm quite happy
The mobile options for Tiny Tiny RSS looks like it's going to take some legwork to set up so that will be interesting.
It's such a waste since Google already has a decent app that hooks into their API (on Android at least). All of this work by them that makes me very happy only to be ended. Such a shame. I'm really going to miss it.