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Google didn’t just kill Reader that day, they killed my relationship with Google.
There have been plenty of services I used at Google that they killed however Reader was the one that didn’t have any good alternative. It was the one that hurt the most, and I don’t think I have signed up for a single Google service since the day Reader was killed.
What do you use for RSS feeds now?
Feedly is the closest thing to Google Reader that I’ve found.
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I’m not OP, but after Reader I moved to Feedly. I still have that account, although it’s rarely used nowadays.
It doesn’t have the social elements (which I did use with a group of friends), but it’s good at the core feed-manager experience.
Feedly has worked pretty well for me.
Social elements? Hmm is that the name of a feature?
I was upset when Reader was killed. But looking back and seeing what Google has become over time, I think it was for the best. Now we have entire companies that only do one thing: RSS, and they are good at it. If Reader was still a thing, I’m afraid it would have extinguished RSS.
Names matter, and Reader told everyone that it was for reading when it could have been for so much more. “If Google made the iPod,” he says, “they would have called it the Google Hardware MP3 Player For Music, you know?”
This is funny, but I think Reader was a good name. At least it reflected what I want to do with the product.
Isn’t the problem with RSS nowadays getting good sources? What’s your reader of choice and how do you use it?
I use InoReader. Most of the sources I want/need has RSS feeds. For the rest I create feeds using Feed43. I use it daily and that’s how I get news, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds (via Nitter), Reddit/Lemmy posts.
God, I miss Reader. It really was a great thing that Google ruined because they couldn’t somehow cram ads into it.
That was really the moment people realized Google is going downhill.
I moved off Gmail, GDrive. Use DDG for personal stuff and only Google at work. The only irreplaceable thing seems to be YouTube but whatever. I am not trusting any new product from Google.
What is your recommendation for a mail replacement of Gmail ?
Protonmail, Mailfence
Thanks
I always wondered why Google took this choice. With the help of this article I understand now.
RSS ist still not dead but many commercial websites and platforms are not interested in this because it is harder to monetize.
Although the advantages are obvious. An RSS feed is much more accessible in many ways. It is most times better readable, sortable, offline savable and more efficient to get. What is even better for the environment because a with scripts and external content overloaded web page has a much higher carbon fingerprint.
Google Reader died and so ATOM/RSS will because the lack of commercial success.
Man, google makes great stuff and ruins it.
And kills it.
“embrace, extend, and exterminate”
Such a good retrospective. Reader was amazing.
Google was angsting so much about Facebook’s success at the time, and weirdly enough if Google was actually good at product management, Google Reader would have been a great basis for creating a social network. Instead they went all in for Google+, whose value proposition over Facebook was… well… slightly nicer web animations.
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This is a great take. Thanks for sharing
Google’s an Ad company, and if a product can’t track you and feed you junk ads and seo-gamed content, then it’s not a google product. We see this time and time again. Maybe it’s a good thing? People can take research or ideas (from google or being ex-googlers themselves) and build a better company around the idea/app not shackled by Google’s ad business.
