You probably know this by now but Google Reader service is going to be shut down and discontinued come June. On March 13, everyone who logged into the service saw a lovely notification informing them about the impending closure. Most took to Twitter and (ironically) Google+ to vent their frustrations at this move. I was one of these people:
Google I am Dissapoint
This is not the first time Google has shut down a useful service. In fact, this is not the first time a Google service closure affected me personally. Back in the day I was a big fan of Google Notebook service which provided an easy way to “clip” quotes and links from the web. It was a great way to stash away articles I wanted to read later, or quotes I wanted to remember. Granted, it was a niche product. The public at large had no use for it, and it was mostly loved by perpetual web heads and hardware nomads who jump between 3-4 systems per day and needed a cloud based notebook before cloud was a thing yet.
When Notebook was discontinued I was pretty bummed out, but quickly learned that it could be easily replaced. Google Bookmarks service actually offered a superior way for me to manage and organize bookmarks, and services such as Instantpaper and Pocket picked up the slack in the “let me save this to read later” department. Not only that, but by the time Notebook was phased out there was a fully featured alternative already out there in the form of Evernote. So after a brief mourning period I moved on with my life and I haven’t looked back.
If anything, I have learned a valuable lesson: free services come and go, and you can’t expect niche products without a broad public appeal to stick around forever even if they are backed by a huge mega-corporation with seemingly endlessly deep pockets. Eventually an unprofitable and unpopular service will get closed, even if you happen to love it dearly.
The case of Google Reader is little bit different because it has never been seen as a niche product by its users. Back in 2005 when it came out, RSS was the new shiny thing. It was the hottest acronym and the most sought after buzzword. The internet was all about glossy Web 2.0 icons and feeds on everything. RSS aggregation was a booming and competitive industry with actual premium fee based services. It was a place to be.
Naturally Google noticed it, and wanted a piece of that. So they created their own cloud based reader service that was fast, clean and convenient. Back then I was using Bloglines which was serviceable, but not nearly as polished and shiny as what Google was offering. So I immediately switched, ported over my OPML file and was relatively happy user ever since. No one was really sure how Google was going to monetize this service, but I guessed that Google saw a value of collecting OPML’s from millions of people, analyzing what they subscribe to and using that data to deliver personalized ads or something. So it made sense, and at first Google was 100% behind this product. They were determined to keep it running and keep innovating.
The interesting thing happened when Google decided to add “social” features their service. It was a relatively new thing, because previously reading your RSS feeds was mostly a solitary experience and “social media” as we know it wasn’t in the business of aggregating content. I believe Myspace was still the king and Facebook might have still been for college students only. So we shared links the old fashioned way – by copy and pasting links from our RSS reader into our email and forwarding to the people we liked.
Note: we all had Gmail, and most of us used Reader because it was not only the best service around, but it also managed to stifle and push out all competition. No one could really compete with the software giant on performance and man power, so all the other readers were sub-par in comparison and they slowly dropped off. Reader became the de-facto industry standard for RSS reading, and adding direct sharing features between users made absolute sense. And then something magical happened. The RSS aggregation service suddenly became a social network. Simple aggregation and organization of news was transformed into peer to peer news curation system. That all happened before other social services got onto this bandwagon.
Last December, around the time Google+ rolled out Rob Fishman wrote an excellent piece about the rise and fall of Reader as a social platform and the sharebro phenomenon. It’s actually quite ironic that Google had this small, but vocal, beloved and intensely productive emergent social network already in place, and they decided to kill it in order to make way for their Facebook killer that never amounted to anything other than “third best” (if we are being generous). But in a way it makes sense. Google is a large company and their decisions are (and should be) based on economics of scale. They are in the business of making big things happen, and catering to a small niche interest group is justly lower on their priority list than conquering new markets and such.
Google Reader never had the numbers – it never had the critical mass of users to survive. And perhaps the “social network” of sharebos was exactly what kept it at that. It had value to a small but devoted community, so wisely Google never really messed with the formula. They didn’t want to burst that bubble by changing the service too much. But I think that a change was necessary. For most people RSS aggregation was still mostly a solitary experience. Not everyone who was subscribed to feeds in Reader was actually sharing anything or watching shared feeds. And while the emergent community of sharebros was booming, connecting to your real life friends via Reader was not always simple.
Here is what my almost decade long experiment with RSS has taught me: RSS is not actually the best way to consume “news”. It is a good way to keep up with a dozen or so favorite blogs that you really, really like. But if you want relevant news you don’t really go to Google Reader anymore. You probably go to Reddit or Hacker News (and Facebook/Twitter maybe) and browse the front page. Those services provide something even the emergent community of Reader could not; real time news curation. On news sites, relevant and interesting stories bubble up based on user votes and your subscription preferences creating a very dynamic and democratic content aggregation. Facebook bubbles up stories that were liked by the friends whose posts and profiles you view often allowing you to stay in your subjective “bubble” of feel good links posted by like minded people. Reader just gives you list. An ever growing, never ending list with no sorting or prioritization baked into the equation. Even worse, it nags you about your un-read items all the time.
Right now, I’m subscribed to over 400 feeds. I didn’t add all of them overnight – they sort of accumulated there over many years. I started with maybe a dozen or so, but you know how it is – you stumble onto an interesting article so you subscribe to the blog. Sometimes that article has 3-4 interesting links, and you subscribe to these too. This shit adds up. My Reader gave up on counting my unread articles long time ago – it usually just tells me I have 1000+ of them.
Early on that counter was actually stressing me out. When my list of subscriptions was close to like a 100 and I was subscribed to some high post volume blogs that would vomit out multiple articles/links per day I would have to struggle just to keep up. It was like reading email. When you have unread emails in your inbox, it’s annoying – so you feel compelled to go there, prune out the spam, reply to the important stuff and file the rest for later just to reset the counter. It was the same for my RSS reader list. Eventually I learned to ignore the unread counter. Once I had few hundred blogs on the list it was simply physically impossible for me to actually zero-out that counter within a day. New entries were coming in just too fast.
This was doubly true for the shared feeds, which while often yielded a stream of wonderfully curated links that pertained to my interests, usually had very high post ratio and simply would clog up my feed with endless stream of information I simply never had time to weed trough. In the recent years I basically separated my dozen “must read every new entry or I’ll die” blogs onto a separate folder and I just zero out that one on most days. And I’m very picky about what gets on that list based on topic selection and/or post frequency. If you are too productive, you’re off because “nobody ain’t got time for” multiple posts per day.
Don’t get me wrong – I like Reader. I use it every day. But I would like if I said I use it as much as I used it in 2006. Or that it provides me with the same value. It does not. The web has moved on, and while RSS as a technology is still relevant and important, the straight up aggregation may no longer be the best paradigm for news consumption. Other than the brief flirtation with the social features, Reader haven’t really changed since it’s early days. It has not adjusted to the ever increasing torrent of information we are accosted with every day. It is great at collecting and amassing links but doesn’t help you to filter out the interesting from the mundane, and the awesome from boring. You have to do that manually, and the more blogs you subscribe to, the more difficult that becomes.
Could they have saved this service? Could they have improved it? Yes, I think the current news aggregation paradigm could use some changes:
- Unread counts are evil, and they need to be banished. Once you subscribe to enough feeds they are an instant guilt-trip immediately after you log in. It’s like a passive aggressive nag. “Look who just showed up… Hey don’t mind me – I’m just sitting here holding your 1000+ unread posts in a queue, but you are a busy guy so take your time…”
- Filtering and prioritization should be a major focus. News feeds should be ordered with respect to objective popularity of the posts, and your subscription preferences.
- The social features should have been kept and expanded upon. Sharing a link from your feed should bump it up on your friends front pages based (weighed on mutual relationship and reciprocity) and shared posts should be starting points for discussions such as they are on Facebook or Twitter for example.
If you think about it, a lot of I just written above is essentially what Google+ offers to us right now. Or Facebook. Or Twitter for that matter. In the last decade we all have suffered from information overload, and social networks became one of the channels through which we learned to filter this torrent. So to remain viable in modern times “news aggregators” must transform themselves to “social news curation platforms” which is just a different name for social networks. But what is the point of building a social network if you know it will be small, underutilized and always in the shadow of the current market leaders. I think Google has learned a lesson or two from the Buzz fiasco which clearly illustrated you can’t just side-line a social network onto an existing service and expect it to conquer the world, no matter how well established said parent service might be. Side-loading social network onto Gmail did not work, then why would making Reader more social do any better. You have to go big or go home. Hence Google+ got the focus and resources and Reader got the axe. And in a way G+ is I guess one of the replacement options for Reader. Too bad it is actually failing at it so hard.
I think Marco Arment is exactly right when he says that the death of Reader might actually be the best thing that has happened to RSS in years. Google more or less ravaged that market. No one could competed with something that was subsidized by the company that is commonly believed to have infinite amount of money (and infinite number of servers powered by unicorns). The only development that was taking place with respect to RSS was in the mobile field – but even there, Google Reader sync was a must-have feature, and the designers were bound by limitations of Googles stagnant but dominating presence.
Death of Reader is opening up a market niche that can and will be filled up in the next few months. As we speak, the existing RSS aggregation services are scrambling to beef up their servers and write adequate “import from Google” routines so they can welcome Reader refugees in July. Many of them are already getting more traffic than they have ever anticipated to get. For example Feedly which a lot of sites mentioned as the “closest of kin” to Reader went down hard the day after the big announcement:
Feedly…
So while I’m bummed out that I’m losing Reader – a service that I’m used to and that I like, despite it’s glaring flaws and parental neglect of it’s creators, I’m actually a bit excited for what lies ahead. The next few months should be really exciting. We will likely see some new RSS aggregation services to crop up shortly. Most will probably try to replicate the simplicity of Reader, but some might actually offer new and exciting features. Perhaps we will even see some new standard taking place. What we could really use is some decentralized way of syncing OPML files and associated data (likes, reades, discussions) across different readers. Because that was really the killer feature of Reader – it was the easiest way to keep your phone RSS reader in sync with your browser based one regardless of OS or platform you were running.
For me personally, this will also be an occasion to clean up my subscription list. Before July I will have to sit down and purge out all the defunct and abandoned blogs and really try to narrow down my subscriptions to the stuff I really, really enjoy reading. So wherever I will end up next, I will start of with a new, clean and lean list.
How about you? What service are you looking at right now to replace Google Reader? How do you feel about the shut down? Let me know in the comments.
My experiences about unread counter of news are exactly the same, except I’m in the “I care about this” phase.
I’m not using Google Reader since more than a year, maybe years.
Instead, for most of the time I’ve had Fever running, for the last few months I’ve been customer to Newsblur. I’m annoyed with all you Google users, as you make that one load slow or not at all now. ;)
My jimmies are still rustled about Reader, but I’ve already begrudgingly moved on. I installed TT-RSS and have been using that for a few days now. It works pretty well, but the Android app doesn’t seem to update as quickly as the web app. I tried Feedly for about an hour, but I just don’t like the magazine interface on the Android app. Just give me a list of feeds I can flick through.
Can you share your “must read every new entry or I’ll die” list?
Having installed TT-RSS too, I have to say it works pretty well. Overall the Android app seems to work more or less okay, even though it’s sometimes slow and unresponsive…
I usually have a high unread count, but I skim headlines pretty quickly, so it’s okay most of the time. Of course, if I don’t look at my feeds for a whole week-end I start getting 400+ unread articles and it gets tough…
I ultimately agree with you about the future: Google Reader closing down will probably — after a short, painful transition period — be a good thing for the web, as a variety of alternatives with fresh ideas fill in the massive hole it leaves behind. Maybe Google Reader is the IE6 of RSS/Atom readers and we don’t even know it yet. However, we have very different use cases for RSS/Atom readers.
At the moment I have 152 subscriptions in Google Reader. This has probably gotten almost as high as 200 on occasion, but I keep it tightly curated. This means my unread count is at 0. I read/watch nearly everything that comes in. So I don’t seem to have the unread counter problem you have. If a site hasn’t published anything in over a year, I drop it. If I notice I’m reading less than 50% of the content of a feed, I drop it.
I don’t use any of the social features, nor was I ever interested. The recommended items were never interesting: mostly just xkcd comics (already subscribed) and Lifehacker articles I don’t care about. It was purely for following the ~150 sites I regularly enjoy (like yours). When I move to another reader, social features isn’t something I’ll be looking for. As you mentioned, reddit is better at community aggregation.
Something else is that I never read anything inside the reader itself. I only needed it to provide me the article links. I always click the article out to a new tab. Here’s my Google Reader routine.
1. Place the mouse over the top headline.
2. (maybe 25% of the time) If it’s a video, copy it and hand it to youtube-dl.
3. (maybe ~70% of the time) If it’s interesting, middle click it. I don’t read it yet, I just tossed it out into a new tab without focus.
4. Press n to advance to the next article. My mouse is still in the same place, so the next headline is already under it.
5. When empty, my browser is full of tabs of interesting articles.
I kill the tabs as I make my way through the articles. Videos are saved in a directory and I delete them as I go through them (generally at 120% to 150% playback speed). Sometimes it takes me a few days to get to some videos, so they sit there and wait.
The next service I use needs to provide this sort convenient behavior. Since I regularly access it from at lease two computers, it can’t be a local reader. There’s a lot of state to track. Since the other reader services are down, I haven’t been able to try them out to test for this behavior yet.
On the other hand, I’m open minded about this. Maybe I’ll learn a new workflow I like better from one of the alternatives. Unfortunately there’s only about three months to make this time-consuming transition.
Also, in case you hadn’t seen it yet: http://youtu.be/A25VgNZDQ08
Still going through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief over this Google product extermination.
There is NO competing product that can fulfill what Google Reader delivered. And while I hope I am proven wrong, I cannot foresee any future endeavor that come close to rivaling what Google Reader provided for a user like me. You, Marco, and others like minded are viewing this from a programmer geek’s perspective and miss the cultural and zeitgeist shift, downplay the features that really only can be served by a Google or an entity with that resource capacity.
First, if you have less than 120-150 feeds, RSS consumption is simply a “new stuff” toggle and/or stylistic aggregation (like Flipboard, Zite and others do) to give you a “newspaper” of your various feeds. Groovy and all but really not the magnification and multiplication factor that Google Reader awesomely shines — efficiency/performance, archival and search.
First, efficiency and performance — this might be the one that a new offering might be able to match — but thus far, I haven’t seen it. Desktop RSS clients make my box sputter and smoke for any subscription total greater than a few hundred (for grins, downloaded Vienna, the F/OSS Mac RSS app and attempted to sync my Google Reader account — an hour later, app was still in a “not responding” status though the little red number on the dock icon kept increasing… …after another 45 minutes or so of this I force quit and wiped from the disk). And the online hosted offerings are not very responsive — not even close to the caliber of Google Reader (and keyboard driven too) that has no problem handling my ~3,400 subscription total.
Second, archival — most RSS feeds feature 10 to several dozen recent items. So any new venture is going to be handicapped and not able to go back much further than this year (or the past few days or months in many cases). In Google Reader, when I discover a new site, I can rapidly traverse the entire site offering (well, since Google Reader 2005 inception) in Google Reader. An ability just not fathomable even clicking through the pages on the site itself.
Last, there is “search”, the ability to search through all my feeds and get a chronological list of results matching the text phrase — who is going to do search better than Google? Even, though they’ve let the product languish over the past 18 months, still, I find this incredibly useful and cannot see somebody grafting an equivalent (or greater) search engine onto an RSS reader. Something that was built-in-integrated with Google sphere.
I used GReader lot, with over 37k read items…
I bought the fever last week and so far I have been pretty happy with it. It has good support of shortcuts (works well without mouse!).
The spotting of the “important” feeds is however not so much magic… It just counts how many articles links towards certain link…
Its simple, clean and I can be sure it won’t go away/change in the future :P
What that other guy said, about still being in the caring-about-that phase… me too. Around about 100 feeds, selected to be about the right level of noisy that I actually stand a chance of clearing the queue every so often, the noisier ones set to auto-discard after a few days.
To be honest it’s mostly comics rather than news, I should really curate the list down a bit – a lot of these comics aren’t all that funny any more. Maybe make room for better things, or just have fewer things in there. That said, it’s an easy drip-feed of stuff to look at it, and it’s lame when it empties out completely. Maybe more high-volume things on auto-delete… preferably with a respectable signal-to-noise ratio
Sounds like you might have some good pointers, and it’d make for a natural follow-up article too – what do you subscribe to in this carefully selected sub-list of yours? If you do go through the rest to pick out the good ones, what survives?
With Google Reader vanishing, I feel like I am loosing a good friend. I used Thunderbird’s RSS reader for quite a while before tripping over Google Reader. My main reason for the transition was the same as yours . . . I had many workstations that I worked from and keeping a sync script going was quite painful.
For me, Google Reader was the perfect solution. Besides being a cloud based reader, it had many other positives. I could easily email a story or shoot a link to my favorite social networking site. Once I bought my first Android based phone, the Google apps made everything seemless, especially Google Reader! It just worked.
Feedly has been my crutch. The automagic method of finding all my feeds and bringing them in was awesome. I am getting used to the new layout, especially on Android.
As you have stated, there are positives to come out of this. In the transition, I found many dead or obsolete feeds that needed to be cleaned-up. It also allows someone beside Google to step-up and giver us features in a reader that we never thought we would need.
@ Naum:
Well, regarding archiving, it’s obvious that any new solution won’t have many items from the past. That said, the future poses an interesting problem. There are two ways of building an archive, as far as I can see:
* Just save from the moment someone subscribe to the feed – this worked from Reader because as the dominant player, it had a very large pool of users to feed its archive. It’s doubtful that any other client will achieve any similar position.
* Crawl the web – this is expensive in many ways, and it’s an iffy proposition for any service that doesn’t have cash to burn like Google does.
I think the best solution to this would be to distribute the problem, building something like a DHT for sharing feeds, findable by their URLs (used as keys). On the other hand, much like BitTorrent, this can be abused by leechers and, of course, it removes any upper hand over archiving that some services might have, so I’m not particularly confident it’ll happen. But It’d be nice ;)
I use Feedly and I am happy with it. It is not perfect, but it replaces reader advantageously. Also, not being an IT guy, I can not use Reddit or any of the fancy systems. But I need a good RSS news reader for my work (market intelligence) so I need something sturdy.
I used reader A LOT. And by that i mean: i had >>300 Items in my inbox everyday and i managed to zero that pretty much every day (3-4 weeks per year excluded, where i touch no pc and afterwards pretty much just click on “mark all read”)
The removal of social sharing features was a horrible thing to me, since i used that feature long before it was widely known to build myself an rss-feed with “important” things (more like 2 feeds, one starred, one shared for more/only really important entries).
I replaced those feeds by only having “starred” later, but since then reader never has been the same to me. Those iFrames for +1 were imho a joke, you couldn’t just press ‘l’ while scrolling through your feeds via ‘j’ and ‘k’, no you were forced to actually CLICK on it and after that click back into the main html-frame, because without that you couldn’t continue to scroll via keyboard.
Lately reader felt more and more slow and keept filling my RAM on my AC100-Netbook faster and faster. Currently i only need to open the page to pretty much grind my system to halt. So i were looking for something new anyways.
ttRSS was never an option because of PHP/mySQL-Bullshit that will never run on g33ky.de, but otherwise it’s nice.
I don’t like Feedly, because of it’s UI.
I like TheOldReader better, but that one has currently no Client for my Smartphone.
Currently i’m playing around with rss2email, that’s a small python-script that runs over some feeds and transmits it either via smtp or sendmail (i tried it with smtp and local mail/mutt, having mutt locally and forwarding everything via ssh is a neat feature i still evaluate).
After some problems with the 3 years old version uBUNTu delivered to me, i now installed the current version (that supports opml and the likes, even more authed smtp now WORKS) and everything seems fine until now.
You can tell it pretty detailed how it should behave (config is another python-script) and it seems pretty usable to me.
Time will tell if and how i continue to use it.
BTW: i’ve never really used google notebook, google tasks on the other hand is something i use pretty aggressively through “mail.google.com/tasks/a//canvas” and some android-applications that sync with it. Since it’s seen no new features (Reminders? Time?) since years i guess it probably won’t live forever too.
@ Grzechooo:
Heh… You know what cured me out of that? Subscribing to boingboing.net and few other high frequency blogs at some point. They used to post like 10+ entries per hour and I didn’t want to miss anything. Eventually I figured out it’s not possible to keep up with them – or at the very least not healthy.
@ Peter:
I’m trying to figure out if I should use Feedly or Newsblur. Fever is new to me. I like how their website says “Only $30”. This seems quite high for a desktop RSS reader. :/
@ Rob:
TT-RSS seems interesting. The fact that you have to provide your own server is both good and bad. It’s good because privacy, it’s bad because it’s pain in the ass. I’ll check it out though.
@ pew:
Well… To be honest, a lot of the blogs on that list are now defunct. Others are run by people I know (either IRL or from the web) like Pancake Theorem or Null Program. So I might be biased about liking them.
The rest are not necessarily blogs but shows these days. For example, Twenty Sided used to be wall of text blog about gaming and RPG but nowadays it is mostly videos as the author is pouring his wall of texts into actual books these days.
I watch a lot of stuff from The Escapist and Channel Awesome – so that’s bunch of pure video feeds out there.
The problem with some popular text blogs is that they will often go colab and crank up volume to the point where you can’t really follow them (like Boingboing for example). Some are still manageable (like Jeff Attwoods Coding Horror, Kevin Kelly’s Technium, Bruce Shiner’s security rants and etc..).
@ Chris Wellons:
Well, my goal is to reduce my subscription count to a volume where I could actually do this but I hate deleting things from my list. :P Oh no… Am I a feed hoarder?
@ k00pa:
But that’s a desktop client, no? Does it somehow sync over the cloud? Can you use it at work for example? Does it run on Linux? Those are kinda crucial things for me.
@ Matt`:
Yeah, I just looked at my feed list and it is a total mess. I might post my “important” list at some point but half the blogs seem to be abandoned or in stasis or changed focus since I subscribed. I mentioned a few above. When I get around to cleaning out my feed list, might make a post out of it.
@ Naum:
Very true. There is another side effect I forgot to mention in the blog: for a lot of people Google Reader is RSS. They have never experienced feed reading outside of it, and will likely not search for a replacement. When Reader dies, they will stop reading feeds. So a lot of blogs will loose a percentage of their subscribers overnight. Some people are really concerned about this – especially those who can’t really make a “Google Reader is Dead, Use this thing Now” type post due to the nature and topic matter of their blog.
@ alphast:
Wait… You don’t have to be an IT guy to use Reddit. Just remove stuff like /r/programming and /r/technology from your subscription list. I also subscribe to stuff like /r/SF, /r/books, /r/askhistorians and etc..
@ Dr. Azrael Tod:
Well, Tasks has been tightly integrated with both Calendar and Gmail. Last time I checked they were being treated as a special calendar type, with tasks being events that don’t need to be associated with a date. And since Gmail needs compete with the likes of Outlook, they need a viable calendar feature. So I think tasks will stick around for as long as calendar will.
Been putting Feedly through the paces and have been pleasantly surprised.
It’s not Google Reader, but you can customize it to look like Google Reader, that is, a more stylistic and typographically aesthetic Google Reader (Preferences -> Titles/Condensed). It synced up my Google Reader account with no problem. Performance has been decent enough and in some respects shines brighter than Google Reader. But still, the search function is lacking (even though it seems to be feeding off Google Reader API). And there’s some hotkeys and preference settings MIA (i.e., hotkey to goto Index, setting to auto-show unread as I care not for read/unread display/counts).
OOTH, that this product is so reliant upon the Google Reader API might mean come July, it simply buckles when it has to perform that crawling and archival on its own.
I have always kept my list to around 50 feeds, which are those that matter most to me (TI is one of them!). For the rest, I rely on whatever shows up in the social medias.
For the time being, I opted for The Old Reader which is basically a Reader clone. It took a week to get all feeds imported!
@Luke:
Hmm, perhaps I should try your “therapy” ;)
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