Ugh, Google Reader wasn't a "huge part of the web," it was a product offered by a company. If GR and RSS were basically equivalent then Google was right to conclude that RSS wasn't popular. RSS is an open standard and GR never had any compelling competition even though it should have if RSS were used widely at all. That people are still angry over this shows how out of touch many developers are with the real world / average consumers.
That does not really follow, nor is it a good point. A product offered by a company can be a huge part of the web, and if RSS and Google Reader were equivalent it still could've been popular. One can dispute both, saying that it was only known in a small circle even back then, but none of those points speaks to that.
> That people are still angry over this shows how out of touch many developers are with the real world / average consumers.
I'd rather see it as a lesson on how long developers remember if they feel betrayed by a company. Google Reader + Google Plus real name policy + its integration into Youtube was like a perfect storm to undermine Google's popularity, and then came Snowden. But it began with Google Reader, and I think that is why people remember.
PS: Given who the author is I think no one can fault him to give in his reasoning much importance to RSS.
Google Reader was a huge part of the web experience for a small number of rather vocal people. It was a social network for many of them, and they feel like they lost something they built and owned.
Myself, I used google reader. But only for RSS. So I just moved to a different reader and I've been fine ever since.
I guess I just don't see the point of complaining when a company shuts down their own product.
It was a free product. It came with no guarantee. Just because you liked it doesn't mean you were entitled to it, and it doesn't mean Google did anything wrong by shuttering it.
If you are still using RSS, you need to get with the program. RSS aggregators are out of style for a reason...
What are you saying? That we should use Atom instead? There is no important difference between the protocols. Or are you saying that we shouldn't use "simple syndication" anymore? Why, so we can let Facebook tell us what to look at? Yeah no thanks.
I believe parent is saying that RSS became something publishers publishers did not prefer to Twitter, Facebook, and real-time search. Simple syndication might be preferable to users, but it is not for publishers.
Sure, but I don't see how that's a criticism of RSS? "Nobody uses it because users prefer it!" Besides it still drives e.g. podcasting; apparently those publishers are still making money.
Publishers of text, as a whole, do not prefer RSS to other options to serve the same purpose. That's not a criticism, just a comparison. It means that given the choice, which publishers mainly are, they opt for things that aren't RSS.
Wait - bear in mind that at the time the alternatives were MySpace, Friendster (already dying), Orkut (also a Google product, and no traction in the US).
"Only for RSS" is the technologist's blind spot - the _experience_ of RSS is what Dave is talking about. What was "the blogosphere". That's been completely co-opted by huge corporate platforms.
Let me clarify. I moved to a different reader so that I could continue to have the experience of RSS. To this day, I continue to have the experience of RSS. It hasn't become unavailable. RSS just became less popular, and Google Reader shutting down was a recognition of this.
By the time Google Reader was shut down (2013), Twitter and Facebook were real and strong social networks. There were also plenty of other readers. With this in mind, what do you think the non-technologist sees as the great loss of Google Reader being shut down? Bearing in mind that the experience of "the blogosphere" was already shrinking, not caused by Google Reader shutting down, and that the experience of RSS continues to be available? Can you help me understand?
Also, Google literally has hundreds if not thousands of products, but everyone just loves going back to the one decade old example of Reader being shut down. Also Reader was nothing special; there were dozens of other just as capable RSS readers before and many more since.
Reader is a convenient example of a product with a large following that met a simple need. Google is notorious for product and feature churn; being one of their paying customers is exceptionally frustrating as you're basically at the mercy of the Product Management's whims when it comes to features in the product. (Either having them added or removed) No one is denying that other products have a similar issue, but with many other products, you have the option to not update or to stick to a version that meets your needs. With Google, there is no choice.
ou
Similarly, with their free-in-exchange-for-data products, you can't really count on anything being around that long because it's entirely built in Google's world. Any other standalone product, it works even if the company goes belly-up.
Whether or not there are alternatives is kind of irrelevant -- not all alternatives are built equally, not all are cross-compatible for some functionality, migrating out of a product is not always simple, nor is migrating into a product.
Google burns good-will with every product they off; the numerous iterations of chat application is a perfect and current example of this, as I don't doubt that there's probably already a new Google chat product in the works in some department that will be pushed out to Android shortly.
I'm not so sure it had a large following (do you really think it had as many users as say, G-Mail?). However, it is clear that it had a very _vocal_ following, and many of the people who used Reader were people who used it to follow developments in the tech world (e.g., bloggers and journalists), and hence, had a very loud megaphone to complain when it went away.
There were also a large number of other RSS web readers; some web based, some app based, some desktop based. The claim the lack of interest in RSS today is due to Google Reader's withdrawl just isn't backed up by the facts. In fact, I think the cause and the effect are mixed up here. I'm pretty sure that if RSS had managed to achieve mass market appeal, Google Reader would have very likely stuck around.
How many of the "large following" of Google Reader were paying customers? As far as I can tell, the answer is basically zero.
And that's the problem: Google has no idea how valuable its various apps and services are to their actual users, because the actual users are not the ones paying for them.
To reiterate, don't focus too much on Reader. It's just a convenient example. If you've never been a Google Business or Apps for Education Customer, it's very hard to explain the awkward position you're put in.
No Support
Everything is rolling update, regardless of how it affects your workflow or organization
Regardless of whether you use it or not, changes happen (addition/removal)
Google is incredibly frustrating to do business with as a paying customer, much less as a non-paying customer. However, their influence over the web at the moment is too strong. Gmail and spam filters are a perfect example; saying you can just host your own mail server is ignorant, willfully or otherwise, and your only safe bets are Google or Microsoft. There are workarounds, sure, but that assumes such workarounds will continue to work.
Google is a very capricious company to deal with as a customer, paying or otherwise. It's not about valuing apps, it's that Google has for some time maintained an attitude of "we're google, where else are you gonna go?", and the problem is that there is some truth to this. That's what the article is complaining about, that's what I'm complaining about. Market forces really don't enter into it at Google's size and scope. Others are just as guilty (Amazon, Microsoft), but right now we're talking about Google.
> Google is incredibly frustrating to do business with as a paying customer, much less as a non-paying customer.
Agreed, and that just makes the problem even worse: Google isn't even getting important information on the value of its apps and services from users that are paying them, let alone from users that aren't.
> Market forces really don't enter into it at Google's size and scope.
I don't think this is true. Google is responding to market forces, just in the wrong market. Instead of responding to market forces from their users (even including paying users, as you say), it is responding to market forces from advertisers. Google simply does not appear to see their business model as providing apps and services to people; that's just a side effect. They appear to see their business model as harvesting revenue from ads. And that business model is a really sucky one for all of us in the long term.
Beg to differ. The RSS Reader landscape had many, many competitors, then Twitter happened and Facebook opened up to non .edu domains. And then Google Reader happened.
RSS wasn't even the point. RSS as a standard is still in use. It's just that we've come to a point where it's a battle of platforms, and platforms mean money. Do you use Facebook, or Twitter, or IG, or Snapchat? I'd still like a unified experience, but none of those companies want to be a party to it. They want to take as much of the pie as they can get.
> Yeah, ask anyone outside of hacker news if they ever heard of Google Reader.
Consider that because of your highly-technical background, you may be underestimating the popularity of Google Reader and overestimating the popularity of Hacker News among the general internet-savvy population at the time.
Are you replying to me? That's exactly what I'm saying.
Google Reader was an irrelevant product to the general public, only adopted by a very small niche of users, just as Hacker News is largely irrelevant and unknown to the general public.
While CNN and Engadget had 24M and 7M RSS subscribers (which include Google Reader), the numbers drop quickly, with the 3rd one having 1.7M (NYT).
Also, apparently the Google Reader Android app had <5M downloads at time of shutdown.
Given that distribution and how fast it drops, I'd expect Reader to have had a couple million daily active users at time of shutdown, a tiny drop in the Internet & Google ocean.
And you can go around and ask people who don't work in tech: nobody will have heard of Google Reader.
Lets look at technologies Google has captured then adversely affected either the adoption or implementation thereof.
* Google Reader and RSS
* Google Talk and Jabber
* Gmail and self-hosted mail (not exclusively Google, but one of the big mail senders)
The post's point was not that this is malicious, it's about what happens in big corporations with big ideas, big roadmaps and big reorgs. The fact that this has happened quite a few times is unsurprising.
I disagree on the third point. It was spam and scams that ruined self-hosted email. Gmail (and other large providers) became the solution to that because the network effects of centralized spam filtering made for an increasingly valuable service to users.
Oh, and, perhaps a bit ironically with respect to recent conversation and concerns around Google and its acquisitions:
In September 2011, Google announced it would discontinue a number of its products, including Google Web Security, which was acquired by Google as part of Postini.[7] On August 21, 2012, Google announced it would be shutting down all of Postini's web services and folding the service's users into Google Apps.
I recall that, but it was no longer in my conscious memory.
They implemented Google Talk, which was fantastic and opened it up to the world with XMPP support, again, fantastic. Implemented Jabber federation which again was great. One of Google's stated goals was interoperability[1]. Because of this a lot of people moved from running their own Jabber servers to Gtalk. Google then started to add non-standard extensions[2] and in 2014 dropped all interoperability in favour of Google Hangouts integration, meaning that with a Gtalk account you could no longer talk to Jabber accounts.
If this was Microsoft, the term that would be used would be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but it's probably more along th lines of team reorgs and changes in strategy. Google claimed trouble with spam XMPP federation, but this[3] article sums up some of the feelings at the time, and it's more likely that with a bunch of different products Google needed to consolidate efforts and the new team had different prioritie (like hangouts and wave at the time).
