Google Reader shutting down(googleblog.blogspot.com) |
Google Reader shutting down(googleblog.blogspot.com) |
Any alternative discussed here should have this import and SYNC feature, otherwise it is useless.
Still this video "Hitler finds out Gooder Reader is shutting down" at least put a broad smile back on my face :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=A25VgNZD...
(via Dave Winer tweet - https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/312049161677713408)
Firefox sent me to a google page which offered me an option to add it to either iGoogle or Reader. I recalled that iGoogle is being shut-down and thought it was strange that it was still offered as a prominent option. I guess now it makes sense.
I seems strange to me though that Reader will be shut down before iGoogle, which is slated for November 1, 2013.
It's a new reader with a similar experience to NetNewsWire. It costs $2/month but there is a free 3 day trial. I created Feedbin because I was looking for an alternative to Google Reader that's simpler than what's already out there. No social junk, no ads, no content discovery. Just an RSS reader.
We should less depend on the large corporations. The idea about I think last time is that we need some kind of distributed Twitter (like we have perfectly worked distributed email now).
If you can't replace one tool with another you are in trouble definitely.
If Google still decides to kill the service, I am going to use Feedly ;).
I signed up for Google Reader...
Sorry, folks - I may have caused the shut-down.
I think a lot of competitors spend time working on the UI and miss the power that is behind it.
(I would include Google in this list, even if they didn't have the front end UI the Atom API would still be a useful thing.)
I wonder if building something on elasticsearch would work.
If you can build something that will take any URL, figure out which bits are changing regularly (the news items, etc), and push the changes to a Reader style interface, you might be on to a winner.
It's 2013, a reader should be possible without RSS.
I've been looking through alternatives. I'd like it to look like this, http://wp.me/aseR-cr , be web-based, have keyboard navigation, and not much else.
Is there a web-based newsbeuter?
(I use a desktop reader for news (FeedDemon) and an Android app for podcasts, I don't really know what I'm missing by not using something like reader.)
- The feed digesting functionality could have been merged into Google+
-Google Reader could have become a news reader skin on the of G+
As long as Google Reader remained a stand alone service and yet deeply tied into the search index, it has been doomed.
I would gladly pay $40/month to access Google Reader.
Is Reader costing them that much money? Put some ads on it then. Is this a Captain Ahab thing where Facebook is the whale? Then someone should let them know that no one really likes their Facebook ripoff because no one likes the actual Facebook. Facebook is a fucking car crash. I wish Google would just make cool stuff and continue not being evil and knock it off with the master plan bullshit.
Just consider this part of Jobs's most poisonous legacy: his epigones.
What is the best alternative RSS reader ??
Message when clicking "import": Hey! Because of the huge load we started seeing from lots of concurrent feed import operations, we had to limit the number of imports active at any given time. It looks like right now there are no available slots left, so you might want to visit this page some time later. Meanwhile, feel free to subscribe to feeds manually. Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience.
> There are 41600 users in the import queue ahead of you.
I bet they're happy right now.
I guess I would rather to go a paid solution. It's for the same reason that I am thinking of this move that I went to Pinboard from Delicious for - advertisements were not my worry, it was the chance being shut down.
Was Google Reader bringing any revenue to Google? I mean I never saw any ads in there, so I doubt it but some of you might be knowing better.
Not sure they have killed for just being out there not bringing any money home or they will be focussing on Google Currents now?
But stuff like this http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.ht... is more sad than the news itself :(
I just want sth like email. Like currently I host my mails with Google Apps with my domain but I can take it to my VPS any minute and my email will still be up and will keep syncing to my desktop/mobile clients without a problem. Or maybe I would shift to some free provider like ABC, XYZ etc.
He's not very communicative but I suspect this means he's working on something :)
That way, I don't have to depend on any web services.
Not sure about Outlook 2012 for Mac though...
for more information, visit me on reddit username: 7hundredand77
Maybe this is the wake up call to get Akregator back up to snuff, though. I might look at the code to see if theres anything I can do, at least.
Twitter and G+ are not viable alternatives.
Google alerts to RSS were wonderful. I'm sure they will shutter alerts soon too.
For me, RSS is a necessary evil. I always opt for email subscription when I have the choice, because I find it infinitely more convenient to have my subscriptions and emails in the one place, rather than in two separate products.
However, for sites that do not offer email subscription but only offer RSS coughHNcough - I reluctantly use Google Reader to subscribe. Meaning an extra account to check each day.
Hopefully this won't merely result in everyone switching to just another RSS aggregator - instead, I hope it will prompt websites to start using more convenient subscription methods, whether that be email or something else.
RSS is dead. Long live... ???
Now I switched to Android, I've been using Google Reader so I can sync it online too.
So now this sucks, what's the alternative?
To run it, use the r2e command and you can follow the guide here:http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/getting-started-with-r...
I think I will try this and set up some filters to move the feed emails out of my inbox for later viewing.
Newsbeuter is serving me well, as usual, for years.
I'm going to spend some time looking at the two main Perl solutions, Perlanet & Plagger (used respectively by http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org & http://perlsphere.net).
* Perlanet - https://metacpan.org/module/perlanet
* Plagger - https://metacpan.org/module/Plagger
Failing that I may produce a custom solution with a feed aggregator library (for eg. https://metacpan.org/module/XML::Feed::Aggregator).
netvibes.com
Also, fuck any RSS feed reading service that charges monthly. I'll pay for an app, but I'm not paying a monthly subscription fee to read freely available content.
This was the home page of "My" internet.
Since September 5, 2010 you have read a total of 300,000+ items
Every alternative reader website / service: Fuck me thats a lot of traffic.
http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Ask_Google_to_keep_Google_R...
real reason they are shutting it down...they want all that sharing/interaction in Google+...which i hate.
I've been working on a news solution of my own, Scoopinion, since 2011. It's a discovery engine that ranks articles based on how closely they've been read. Users install a browser extension that lets them track their own reading (within a set of whitelisted sites). It's a little bit of quantified self for news. The data is used for recommendations and to help journalists in their work.
It's not a drop-in replacement for Reader since you don't get the full firehose of headlines from your feeds, only the most engaging stories.
I don't know why. It's a great eulogy for Reader, written in 2012.
That is my biggest concern, I really like the UX of the mobile reader app for browsing blog entries.
Now I just have to wait for its servers to stop melting.
Not sure how they plan to support the service.
I've also been working on a similar news reader app called BlogRoll: http://blogrollapp.com
It can import your Google Reader feeds and has a tiled layout (which may not be everybody's cup of tea), but it works well for photo-focused sites like food and fashion blogs, and it handles other news sites and blogs quite well too.
Here's a screenshot of it: http://bit.ly/Yc1P9C
Every alternative I've seen so far in this hole topic(yes, all of them, I've tested all of them) is either poorly designed, bad UX, weird browser problems or trying too hard to be more then a RSS reader. Guess I'll just have to spend 2 days and build my own. Oh, well :)
I have a similar use case, where I want to automatically download chosen podcasts. I just created a "download" label, got an RSS feed link from my client and put it on a podcasting app. Now I just need to label the episodes I want to listen to on Tiny and they'll be automatically downloaded to my phone.
Google reader,of the RSS readers, you were the best, reliable, unencumbered by partisanship, unflavored by ideology. You were the best. Too bad, I must say goodbye, too bad I must go to newsbeuter or some other webreader, too bad you must die.
Truly I hate google, I hate what Google has become, I love the web, I love what the web was supposed to be. I love RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS and I will mourn you when you are gone.
I'm putting this out there in case anybody finds it useful. I made it years ago but never got around to promoting it. The idea was an online bookmarking app that tells you when the bookmarked pages have changed, and for technical reasons it eventually turned into a simple news feed reader.
It also supports drag and drop and for browsers with side bars (damn you Chrome!), it works... in the side bar.
I've moved onto other things but if you're really into it, get in touch and I'll try to move your data from Google Reader.
It means when a website is taken offline, if you are subscribed to, say, a content RSS feed through them, you can still browse the history and content.
I just switched to Akregator, which will locally cache feeds (and you can configure it to do so permanantly) but it is a local copy. You can host your feeds via a feed host through it, so I imagine what I'm going to do is run Akregator off my server box, archive my feeds, and access it from my servers ip.
I think they announced this while the news cycle is wall-to-wall New Pope Mania to cover up this appalling summery execution :)
I'm dropping Google a note and offering to pay a subscription if they continue services. Probably won't make a dent, but worth a try.
Far if it costed too much, i bet people would be happy to fork out $10 a year for it?
I've been using it daily for the past 4 years, to be honest nothing comes that close to it, and most likely the majority of people who use RSS readers use Google Reader.
Also now most of the iOS/Android apps are fucked now since they all use Google Reader.
Tldr; Google are dongies.
Because they would rather that you use Google+. The writing was on the wall when they started disabling features a year or two ago.
Keep Reader alive and I'll CONSIDER using G+
Until then, I'm not going to touch you.
And there is no option to save this data. Or is there?
Edit/Update: I'm probably part of the problem. I never click ads - maybe they just had too many freeloaders like me? :) Weirdly, I also never block ads. I just don't click them.
I presume this death announcement doesn't meet the criteria for a HN black banner though.
I may reevaluate feed idea when I see intelligent reader that will show me early the most interesting stories from my subscriptions and will do it with a style. Reading must be a pleasure, not pain. Typographically web is a horrible place, there is so much that can and should be improved. Feeds should be your better (i.e. correctly) looking versions of the texts you can find on the web.
Google Reader Plus extension improved a bit comfort of using GR, thanks to multi-column view for instance, but it wasn't enough to keep me using GR.
This isn't a traditional email-inbox-style feed reader. It's like Flipboard for your feeds, on the web.
In beta - feedback warmly welcomed.
Also, very interested in talking to RSS fanatics.
We promise to have all the basics of Google Reader covered, including importing your feed data (or as much as possible through the API).
Of course, if you're looking for something to move to immediately, NewsBlur is an awesome product :)
That will happen if you stop developing it and ignore requests for new features. Conesus has done a good job with Newsblur and I'll try going back to that, but I really wanted to have Gmail-style filtering of my RSS feeds in Google Reader, to to mention being able to maintain my sharing/tracking data within the Google ecosystem.
This is a major failure on Google's part. Complaining about a declining user base when the product was left to stagnate amounts to blaming the users for the company's lack of vision. Why Google would want to abandon this extremely rich source of behavorial data and trend emergence is beyond me; it suggests a loss of direction, for which short-term reactivity is no substitute. Put another way, you can't lead the herd by following it faster. I am shocked.
As I say, I've used Newsblur before and thought it OK - at the time I just somewhat preferred Reader's cosmetics. So the above is not just a reaction to the necessity to switch platforms.
I love offline clients, quite often I'm stuck in a remote location where 3G has yet to penetrate so I like to have a couple of hundred items to read which will sync when I reach connectivity again.
I need the RSS service to track what I've read across multiple devices and have the client support offline usage. Any recommendations?
Would be interesting to see a marketshare breakdown.
I use Google Reader heavily, but I never go to the web pages. I have native apps on my desktop and mobile devices and just use Reader to keep my subscriptions synced.
No ad views, no service.
I find the Google Reader web interface to be dreadful and ugly, so I never go there except to manage my RSS feeds. Third party devs have created newsreader apps so much better than Google did, it's not even funny.
Yeah, but they don't want us as customers, they want to sell us as Soylent Green out the back door.
With this news, the only remaining things I'll use Google for are search, GMail, and some libraries like Guice & Guava.
They could compete with a solid mobile app / desktop app and monetize that. Lots of ways to leverage it against Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. All those services are building freaking news aggregators, and Google is killing theirs which is maybe the best and most useful?
It seems really lame and evil.
If an ad supported feed provider fails to add ads to their feed they just do not understand the medium. One of the core ideas in RSS is to avoid visiting all the subscribed sites!
The service itself at that level is comparatively straightforward. Hopefully someone (twentyfivesquares?) will step up and offer a replacement. I'd be willing to pay.
iReadG has been great because it will download all the rss feed data and allow me to browser it and star items without an Internet connection which is great for those times on the road when there is no signal. I have no idea what I'll be able to use to replicate this functionality now that Google Reader is going down.
Very very sad.
I've got YEARS of starred items "saved" in Reader. I use it everyday to stay abreast of news (1000+ items / day). Between Google Reader and iGoogle... Google has deprecated most of the tools I use on a regular basis. This makes me seriously question using Gmail and Apps for Business.
EDIT: Just RTFM'd. Looks like Google TakeOut will let me export most of the stuff I care about. Still, this sucks. I'll probably just keep using it and hope (like iGoogle) the deprecation date gets pushed back. Otherwise... productivity boon due to lack of RSS feeds.
Also.... Feedburner users should see the writing on the wall!
I can't imagine the likely demographic profile of Google Reader users was worthless to a company that sells targeted ads as well.
This is the first internet product shutdown I've ever been affected by.
Maybe I don't need to spend so much time reading up on random news. Who knows, it might be good for me.
But I will miss you.
anyway feedly has a replacement coming soon:
http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/
> We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.
> If you are a Google Reader, give feedly a try before July 1st, and you will be able to migrate seamlesly
So it will also die when Google shuts down App Engine? :)
I think the most important feature for any alternative is the import of the Google Reader's feeds and structure including all tags!
It is an open source self hosted rss reader with a responsive skin. I'll be migrating tonight nad since it is open source I can contribute when I run into issues!
Any suggestions?
I think they made a quick short headed cost analysis in this, that archive and search functionality needs server power. Actual userbase does not provide enough money juice to balance.
Now, let the alternatives pour in.
My worst fear: Just couldn't find any service yet that provides this search capability in your very private hand-selected little back-catalog of the internet back to 2007 and earlier. Including sites that are no longer available in the wild. Nobody else will be able to provide that without access to the Google Reader Servers.
Hope this current uproar gets enough traction to find a solution to save this searchable and indexed archive of the internet/blogosphere somewhere accessible for everyone.
I actually it daily but only through apps like Reeder.
I'm going to be fubar for keeping different apps across devices all in sync...
Google killed with their free Reader the biggest part of the market around RSS. Switching off Reader opens up this market which should be still large enough for a few indies to find their niche. Maybe even reinvigorating RSS while doing so.
Adding on to this:
What he hell do I do with my starred items now, it's literally the best collection of content I have curated in my life and I reference it all the time.
edit: petition to keep it open http://www.change.org/petitions/google-please-don-t-kill-goo...
https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-r...
Google already killed reader in their hearths when they made the g+ update. Instead of neglecting it for years to come they did the right thing and let it go for good.
Google has fallen very far.
http://tt-rss.org as a replacement seems the winner for me so far.
With Google Reader as an API devs had a way to get historical data on practically any RSS feed going back many years. That ability will be lost/gone forever. Even if Google sunsets the reader app, I wish they'd keep this data source open. Its hugely valuable and I don't think there is any alternative to it.
I think that having cached all this data on their server over the years of their own free will, they've put themselves to be in a position where they have a somewhat fiduciary responsibility of keeping this data alive and open.
Any new application starts in a state of tabula rasa -- all history, prior to some point in 2013 (or late 2012) will not be accessible, considering that a typical site/blog feed contains only 10 to a few dozen most recent items. Presently, in Google Reader, I can click on a feed and flip through items all the way back to 2005 (for those sites with that long of a history).
I know that Google Reader search has been flaky as the product has languished, but it still the most powerful way to search a select group you sites you care about (incidentally, the Google Labs custom search engine product is on life support too, if not set to sunset soon) and search for a topical phrase of interest and get a set of results with that matching text.
I have swapped Delicious with Diigo (After shopping around many alternatives). I really hope the process of replacing Google reader isn't as long or as painful as that was.
The ending of Delicious and Google Reader is the end of an era of my use of the Internet. I wonder if it's a function of my age that I now see that as a sad and worrying development rather than an opportunity to be grasped.
I've been using that view since the Reader announcement prompted me to give Feedly a second look. Works perfectly.
No need to backup your feeds, it uses your google account for now.
http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/
Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly
Google Reader Posted on March 14, 2013 by @feedly
Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting from some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandie back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered.
* Your data on all websites * Your tabs and browsing activity
I'm not very comfortable with that. It also seems very unnecessary for an RSS reader.
This answered here.
edit: They're fixing it! http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/
Edit: It looks like I'm also happy that I chose to host my own CalDAV server, too.
Edit 2: @koenigdavidmj - Apparently I can't reply that deeply. DAViCal is the CalDAV server I'm using (http://www.davical.org/). My wife and I sync our iPhones to it and it's been a godsend for my personal organization. (Now if I could just find a decent replacement for Mozilla Sunbird...)
As of now, CalDAV is Google's recommended way for syncing with iOS devices http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
Due Disclosure: Though I have no official connection to Prismatic, founder Bradford Cross is a friend and I am biased to Prismatic. It is awesome. Try it at http://getprismatic.com/
Edit: I think there's a 50/50 chance this decision gets reversed.
Edit: looks like http://feedly.com is going to get my vote for now.
--
[a] As long as your machine remains "yours", i.e. free of the same restrictions.
He's also very responsive to requests for features.
I don't know what I'm going to do about this. I guess the reality is that social won and RSS is dead. Or at least social is much more monetizable.
I've tried so many other different RSS aggregators but kept coming back to Google Reader. It worked well, had minimal fluff, and was fast.
R.I.P. Google Reader
I'm open to alternatives, but I haven't seen any I could really latch on to.
I hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story sharing was launched last Summer and I expect NewsBlur to be around for quite a while.
It's also fully open-source, in case you decide to build your own private community: http://github.com/samuelclay.
I also have a full-scale re-design in the works, but if you can't get to the main site you can try using the beta site: http://dev.newsblur.com
I've been rooting for you and recall enjoying the blog posts about its making - I've always figured that "RSS is dead" and there is no longer money in clients (people used to pay for desktop readers!)..
Except that Google would kill Reader eventually and somebody will soak that userbase of nerds right up. And NewsBlur is clearly the top choice and will hopefully occupy similar mindshare as Reader did for us until now. Congrats, well played. :)
I wonder what the next one along these lines will be as now would be a great time to start building it.
That said I do think that going after markets abandoned by the big guys is an excellent way to go. Usually they abandon it because its not a billion dollar business and isn't worth their time.
I believe now that you need to start attacking their market-share before they close the product down and use the closure as a marketing opportunity.
Now is too late. The right time to have started building it was 2-6 months ago. Now is the time to market an existing solution.
Citing the great gretzky quote, the "puck" is already here.
With backstitch (http://backstit.ch) we get questioned a lot why Google is no longer supporting these types of services (and if this means there is no opportunity there since they aren't worried about it anymore). We honestly feel like there is a lot of surface left uncovered when it comes to personalized/streamlined content and it just doesn't seem to be part of Google's refocusing (this has been seen with the shutting down of a lot of their lab projects as well).
In my industry merchant accounts are very difficult to come by. We are considered high risk. Even with a year of processing records showing 1 chargeback out of >3k transactions I can't get access to a merchant with decent rates(currently paying 3.7%). All the big players turn us away. There's gold to be mined off the beaten path.
That said, I lament the lack of a desktop app. I've been using Reeder for OS X, and I'd really like to have some sort of desktop app instead of relying on my iPhone or a website. Have you considered talking to existing app makers (e.g. Reeder) to see if they might want to switch over to using your service as their backend?
Conesus: Have you considered running a Kickstarter for a desktop version of NewsBlur, in order to gauge interest? I'd definitely contribute.
I used to use GR every day, then on a whim I switched the free newsblur version. To be perfectly honest, it doesn't offer me a lot more than GR did, but after hitting the 60 feed limit a couple of times I've now gone paid and I'm happy to support a service that does exactly what I want it to do. It would have been nice if it imported by saved(or linked or started or whatever they were called in the end) stories from GR though.
One peeve though, I have no idea how to manage my feeds. Is there any easy way to move them round through drag-and-drop? It appears I have to move them manually one by one, but I have a lot of feeds and I'd rather not do that!
Intigi is a paid service, primarily targeted at marketers, but we do have a number of startups and founders using the product for content discovery and sharing. You can quickly share content you find to social media, a WordPress site, or to an RSS feed (e.g., to connect with IFTTT).
I'm one of the cofounders and happy to answer any questions about the service and would love any feedback, if you decide to give it a test spin. Please email me at mjfern(at)intigi.com.
Might be worth a post or two
It works from the browser, including mobile browsers, and native apps are coming. There's also an OPML importer, though currently experimental, and subscriptions can be consumed as OPML, RSS, etc.
Can anyone confirm that the Android Listen app will cease to function (i.e. refresh your existing feeds) once Google Reader is shut down? Am pretty sure that it relies solely on Google Reader's "Listen Subscriptions" tag for refreshing your podcast feeds, so that's definitely another gap that needs filling.
EDIT: And OPML is the other option when you signup. It's an easy import process, since it's really quite important to get that part right.
(1) It lets you add subscriptions to regular websites without an RSS feed.
(2) It lets you search for articles that were published before you subscribed to the feed.
I think you could add (2) simply by redirecting to Google search using the site:sitename.com argument.
(1) may not be that simple to add but it would be an incredibly important feature to have.
It was super simple to import my feeds from Google and I find that the navigation in NewsBlur lets me read/scroll through items (and ignore articles that aren't interesting) much faster than Google Reader.
Anyone looking for a Google Reader substitute, definitely give NewsBlur a try!
I hope HN finds it useful too. It's also fully open-source too: https://github.com/shenfeng
I need, 100%, to see my content in forward-chronological order (most-recent-last).
I've already given $24 for a year of NewsBlur, and I am super excited about being able to share and comment again. But, I know I'm not alone in wanting correct sorting.
Just 1-2 things I miss: - how can I mark an article read/unread? - could I delete an entire folder? - is there a limit on the number of feeds it can handle (I tried to import from reader, and I miss some feeds/folders)
<RSS>"Rumors of my death are much exaggerated"</RSS>I tried to add this feed, for example: http://denver.craigslist.org/search/cto?maxAsk=28000&min...
without success, but it could be your server getting hammered.
I think that's a testament to how functional your app is. The iPhone app, while not up with Reeder (the iPhone app), is still very solid.
I look forward to the redesign too. The beta site looks great!
"NewsBlur experienced an error
The error has been logged and will be fixed soon so you won't have to see this message again."
It lets you display RSS feeds (and bookmarks, tasks and notes) in a similar layout.
(Also plugging a side project of mine :-))
https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/commit/f5ec4fa37d0a81...
Hopefully it will go back to 64 once things get under control.
The layout feels visually ... cluttered? ... but the functionality is excellent so I'm happy. Also the Google Reader import failed the first time, but succeeded the second.
Make sure there is an export feature, for some reason, I can't find it, and I'll be a daily user.
Google Reader is the core of my information diet. Not twitter. Thousands of blogs starred, liked, and commented. An interesting feature that you couldn't replace is automatic translation: reading a russian blog asmit was written in english. Once I shared one of its articles and one friend asked me if I knew russian or if it was a joke my share! Because obviously the share was in the original language.
Google is evil. While I can understand a business decision, there are ways to hand it over to other companies or organizations.
I share some of my previous criticism:
- Extraction of Main Text Content Using the Google Reader NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/extraction-of-main-text-content/
-Google Search NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/
- The Data Portability Fact Sheet: http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/
- Reverse Engineering and the Cloud: http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-a...
Sad to see it go.
What do you guys recommend for replacement? I know about NewsBlur [1], but I never liked it that much.
I think I'm just looking for something that would emulate Reader's full-screen view as close as possible.
edit: Here's what I consider an absolute must-have in RSS app:
- complete navigation with keyboard (j/k preferred)
- full screen mode (really, I don't need a sidebar of a fixed header all the time)
- feed view (not just list of items, show me excerpts!)
And I know I may be the weird one, but I really, really dislike readers that try to show me items directly from feeds webpage. I find it jarring and distracting when I have five totally different layouts flash before my eyes within 10 seconds (I skim headlines and then skip most of items in my feed).
And for the love of god, please, please, no goddamn 'WE LEARN WHAT YOU LIKE' or any kind of bullshit 'smart selection'. I selected my feeds myself, I can manage them just fine by myself, just get out of my way, please.
That's because there was almost ZERO innovation done on this product. Very few (mostly visual) improvements, and very few new features. The latest posts on Google Reader blog are from 2011 http://googlereader.blogspot.com/
I'm sure there's more engagement with Reader than Plus, with its millions of users who don't really use it (many of whom aren't even really aware that they are signed up for it).
Later edit: Like many other will most likely do in their replies I'm also going to suggest an alternative that I've tried in the past. http://theoldreader.com/
Later edit 2: They even added a nice pop-up now. https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.imm.io/Zg6A.png
With some luck it'd attract enough developers to keep the project alive. Or maybe somebody would figure out a way to monetize the effort. Either option, it'd be much better than just let the service die.
It's not unprecedented. Google did exactly this with Google Wave.
Sadly, I don't think this will ever happen. This project is too small to justify the resources needed to clean up the code and solve any dependencies. And, differently than Chromium / Android / Google Wave, Google Reader is not a platform / protocol / OS. It's just yet-another pet project for a company that - sooner or later - has to justify its investment to Wall Street.
This isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, product that Google creates just to later destroy it, when it discover it has no business or economic justification.
Keep this in mind when developing for Mirror API, or anything else that is not core for the company.
This news is really rubbing me the wrong way; I've been a long-time Google customer, even a 'Google hipster' as my friends would say. I'm an early-adopter that often beta tests. I was the only one at work with GMail when it was released, and was always out of invites that first year. Same for GVoice (which I've had since GrandCentral), GWave, Apps for personal domains, and Chrome (where I've posted many bug reports that were accepted).
I've been with Reader since the year it came out, though I never used any other RSS reader -- I'd tried several, but they all sucked; Reader was just a breath of fresh air, "cloud" based before that was even a buzzword, and I've introduced many a friend to its wonderful utility. My favorite feature was the _'note in reader'_ bookmarklet, which they killed in favor of crappy G+, but now they're going to outright kill the entire product?
My only hope, if they don't grant a stay of execution, will be that they open-source the code such as they did with Wave. At least then I'll have some hope of retaining my most-used web app of all time.
From your 117 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 398 items, clicked 189 items, starred 7 items, and emailed 0 items.
Since October 26, 2010 you have read a total of 20,685 items.
Needless to say, I use this app 10x more than any other, including email (edit: ok I might be exaggerating).
Also, it looks like the Google Operating System (unofficial blog) recognized the distress signals back in December with "Google Reader, 'Constantly on the Chopping Block'"[1].
Where's my pitchfork...
1. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-reader-const...
It's not ready yet, but I thought I might as well toss up a launchrock page and collect email addresses from other folks who might be interested: http://signup.viafeeds.com
Here are my guiding principles:
1. It's going to cost money. I refuse to 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.' I imagine that for more casual users, this'll be a nominal amount. I won't compromise on this because....
2. I want to build something sustainable, and have it be enough of a profit center for me that I'm willing to focus on it and continually improve it for years to come.
3. I want to build something that I'll love more than Google Reader. I spend at least an hour a day in Google Reader, and want to make sure that whatever I build has the simplicity of Reader.
I have a lot of interesting ideas I want to try out around inclusion of contextual information and the ability to easily save or share articles or clips of articles in multiple ways. From conversations I've had with friends in the journalism world, there's a real need for a product like this, especially one with a legitimate business model.
Regarding where this fits in relative to NewsBlur: I think NewsBlur is doing a lot of interesting stuff, but it feels heavyweight to me, compared to Google Reader. I want a very minimalistic, "just the facts, ma'am" experience.
What do you want to see in a news feed product? Where do you think Google Reader could've or should've been in 2013 if Google had properly maintained it?
Anyway, to reiterate, if you're interested, head over here and enter your email address: http://signup.viafeeds.com (I just created the domain an hour ago, so hopefully it'll have propagated to your DNS server).
| 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.'
It started off as a joke, then it became a lame joke, and now it is just an idiom.
According to the Economist style guide, in writing, you can either use fresh expressions, or expressions that have been so worn out that they are just part of the language now and no longer register. Avoid using expressions that are over-used, but not to the point of becoming idiomatic, yet. Those will annoy your readers.
Good news for the competition, anyway: Google Reader being pretty good yet completely free and not (obviously) monetized occupied a lot of that space, which is now freed up.
edit: In fact, I see NewsBlur is completely unresponsive now, presumably due to sudden interest.
White House Petition!
The problem is that internally you're competing for resources against products with (a) tons of users (Gmail), (b) tons of revenue (AdWords), (c) high strategic priority (Android, Google+).
To justify staffing a smaller product, you have to argue that it has the potential to be as big as the other products, and that the marginal impact of an engineer is higher on an under-staffed product.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/tell-google-not-di...
What I'd really like to see here on HN is a post comparing other RSS contenders like NewsBlur and The Old Reader.
It is my most accessed browser URL.
It is the primary method I peruse new stuff on the web.
It is the only RSS app that can handle my volume of RSS subscriptions (all others choke and sputter once the feed total is greater than a couple hundred).
Wasn't a big brouhaha about windows phone only supporting Exchange protocol and not the open standard that's used by everyone: CalDAV? Oh, and now Google is discontinuing it! Let's see how much longer Exchange will last...
Sigh, I'm not really sure I trust Google to do the right thing anymore.
http://winsource.com/2013/03/11/caldav-and-carddav-support-f...
So even as Microsoft is working to implement support for Google calendar syncing, Google pulls the rug out. This also leaves iOS users with no Google calendar syncing mechanism.
If Google is open, they have a strange way of showing it.
As enterprises using Apps upgrade and find that they no longer sync with any of their brand new software, people are going to be very upset - particularly those with egg on their face who sold their company on Google Apps (like yours truly)
AppEngine's deprecation policy:
7.2 Deprecation Policy.
Google will announce if we intend to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to this API or Service. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate that Service without these changes until the later of: (i) one year after the announcement or (ii) April 20, 2015, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):
# required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or
# doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden.
[0] https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms scroll down to 7.2
This seems like a huge mistake. Why doesn't Google want to be the one place I can go for everything? They should be cultivating that kind of brand loyalty, not stomping all over it.
Code Search, Google Search API (twice), Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets), Google Pack, Image Labeller and Google Dictionary.
Friends don't let friends rely on free web services.
* Code Search -- how did I forget this awesome tool? What an invaluable, educational, and fun tool that was.
* Google Video -- somewhat redundant with YouTube, but I always felt Video had a place in that it seemed to be much more liberal than YT and also allowed larger uploads.
* Google Desktop -- ok, this one did hurt. My primary use for it was to search my Outlook mail at work (f'g Outlook search is the worst I've ever seen in any product). Now I'm back to never being able to find an email...
* Google Notebook -- a very awesome online clipbook / personal wiki. I still miss it.
* GOOG-411 -- I still miss this service too. Going online is just too slow and tedious, not to mention impossible and/or illegal when you're driving (whereas hitting a speeddial for GOOG-411 was quick and easy). And no, the "voice search" on my phone is not the same, not even close.
* Google Health -- this was a very neat service that I think was ahead of its time, and I didn't use it much (as I didn't have many health issues at the time), but as I age, I'm wishing more & more I had a centralized location to store my medical history on my terms.
* Google Dictionary -- another tool I used on a daily basis. At least there's an official extension[1] that I can use in its place that is functionally equivalent (for my uses); just turn off the pop-ups and invoke it manually from the button.
Pretty scary how many of my tools and services that I came to rely on were shuttered; however, I think the powering down of Reader will impact me the most.
1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...
I will never trust Google again.
Apparently the only Google service I don't have a good alternative for is Google Books (for search; kindle, torrented bookwarez, and scribd works fine for the raw PDFs)
What other free hosted service provider deserves your "trust" that it will never, ever go away, and which provides facilities for exporting all your data in a nice way (a feature which will likely be accessible long into the future)?
I'm just as irritated as you are, but given that they've provided notice and good backup/takeout options, I don't see a betrayal of trust anywhere.
I learned this lesson when I made the mistake of Google Voice (which was free for some aspects).
It just goes to show, if you're using Google software that has no advertising and isn't used to sell advertising, it could end any day, and it probably will some day.
I'll be purchasing a Feedafever license, which also happens to work with Reeder. http://www.feedafever.com/
Sunstroke (https://goneeast.com/sunstroke/) is a better Fever-specific client for the iPhone, I think... but it doesn't have either an iPad or a Mac version. On the Mac you can use Fever's web interface but on the iPad you're pretty much out of luck, as there are no native clients and trying to use the web interface there is crazy-making. (Actually, the web interface is a little crazy-making in any web browser. It's just a lot crazy-making on the iPad.)
I guess it's time to start searching for a new RSS reader. Too bad that I already did it a while ago, and every time I went back to Google Reader.
The biggest problem for me with other feed reader is that they try to add too many features to the simple format that RSS is. No, I don't care about "hot news", and I don't care about "suggested stories", I just want to read the feed I've added to it. My brain is good enough to skim through that list by just reading the title.
And most other reader lack integration with a mobile platform (Android/iOS/WP). Yes, sometimes they have a mobile client, but usually not nearly good enough as 3rd party clients.
Hopefully they'll change their mind, but I doubt it. Time to force myself. Sigh.
I don't know if there are any 3rd party clients, though. I know it has a mobile UI, but it's web, not native.
I know it has a mobile app for android, but it always seemed sub-par to gReader or Press for me.
If an API or service is really valuable, Google shutting their version down shouldn't be too bad. Other people can try to make some money offering a replacement.
So is getting updates from people and projects you care about really such a niche thing? Have I missed some other huge channel that supersedes RSS? Or are we about to actually lose something profound here?
Kudos to Newsblur, which I never heard of before today. I'd like to sign up for a paying membership, but it seems like this is exactly what everyone else is doing, so servers are dead...
The worst part is how the big guys kill all competition with their free products leaving few alternatives for users.
The real pain comes when your email address is no longer valid. You have to hunt down everyone you've ever communicated with to give them a new one. A lot of older, and more casual, contacts will be unable to reach you.
Of course, somehow, spam needs to be tackled.
Unfortunately, nothing. However Google makes it really easy to export this data.
Of ALL the things they would shut-down, they have to kill Reader!?? Nooooooooooooo!! Aaargggghhhh....
Oh well, guess it's back to RSSOwl[1]. Maybe this will even motivate me to get involved in hacking on RSSOwl a bit and help those guys out.
This will probably also serve as the impetus for me to start adding some Reader like features to Neddick[2]. That was always sort of in the back of my mind, so why not go ahead and jump on it?
[1]: http://rssowl.org/
But the first issue may be mitigated by hardware improvements since the last time I was using RSSOwl regularly, and I have some ideas around the second issue.
I remember at the end of college and right after (I graduated in 2008), many of my close friends were on GReader and we would share and communicate directly through it about interesting things we were reading. It was an awesome way to interact, and nothing has replaced it for my group and me. Google's implicit (although I could be reading their intentions incorrectly) strategy of trying to route that interaction through GPlus did not work for us. Too much overhead and it never materialized. Now we just use email, which is fine. So on the whole it's a type of social interaction that has simply gone. It's a shame, because I think that Google could have done something with this. But they are just one company and the number of innovative things they're doing is really impressive.
Maybe this will clear the way for a competitor that replaces the social interaction component and innovates on it. I'd be a user for sure.
MIght want to give it a shot.
> You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Not even a description of what it is or why I want to give them my information.
Sorry, but /close
Hmmmm
The only approach that I've seen to exporting stars is to use the fact that Reader will create a feed of just your starred items. Then you can view that feed in some other reader and manually mark each one there (ugh).
Edit: Oh, and the read/not read history is, AFAICT, also not exportable. And I do use this as well.
Is there a win8 version (win store, not desktop).
tks
Nice app btw. The only good thing from GR closure might be that the dev community comes up with some real great alternatives. And yes, I hope paid ones.
Yes, exactly. Google Reader is literally the only way to find past episodes of some podcasts - the files are still up, but after a site redesign nothing else links to them.
This is quite valuable because it includes historical data, including stuff that's dropped off the currently available RSS feeds (many sites only list recent posts in their feeds).
Unless expressly permitted by the content owner
or by applicable law, you agree that you will
not, and will not permit your end users to, do
the following with content returned from the APIs:
* Scrape, build databases or otherwise create
permanent copies of such content, or keep cached
copies longer than permitted by the cache header;
* Copy, translate, modify, create a derivative
work of, sell, lease, lend, convey, distribute,
publicly display or sublicense to any third party;
* Misrepresent the source or ownership; or
* Remove, obscure, or alter any copyright,
trademark or other proprietary rights notices,
falsify or delete any author attributions, legal
notices or other labels of the origin or source
of material.
Google will announce if we intend to discontinue
or make backwards incompatible changes to this
API or Service. We will use commercially
reasonable efforts to continue to operate the
Google Feed API without these changes until
April 20, 2015, unless (as Google determines in
its reasonable good faith judgment):
* required by law or third party relationship
(including if there is a change in applicable
law or relationship), or
* doing so could create a security risk or
substantial economic or material technical
burden.
This Deprecation Policy doesn't apply to
versions, features, and functionality labeled
as "experimental."
That's pretty strong!
I don't think Reader can find anything that Google search doesn't know. Using site:sitename.com in a regular Google search should bring up past entries as well.
That's the hard part. Reader integrates nicely with Android's Listen (podcast app), and the reader app, and there's plenty of standalone clients that sync with Google.
That's my most-used Google app. By far. Colossal disappointment.
I honestly don't know what I'm going to do now. As far as I'm aware, nobody besides Google has been archiving RSS history for the past few years. It's a massive pain to dig for old podcast episodes any other way, as full feeds are extremely rare.
Then your mail client becomes your RSS client. Gmail has j/k key bindings, is relatively unadorned, and facilitates your skim / skip workflow. Excerpts might require some work, but perhaps you could coerce them into the subject line.
Aaron Swartz wrote a nice RSS to email gateway btw: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/
I have a crappier one that delivers directly into a Maildir, and I use it to read news in mutt: http://search.cpan.org/~acg/rssdrop-0.2/rssdrop
* Remember your read messages, even across clients
* Star and read for later
* Cross-platform
* Configurable archiving
* Keyword filtering
* Search past articles
* Organize feeds into folders using configurable rules
* Social! (Use the "forward" button.)
Here's a little bit I wrote about using rss2email + emacs. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HOWTOReadFeedsInEmacsViaEmail
Combined with Instapaper, I have feel like I have achieved the perfect reading workflow.
Pretty sure you can sync with your Google Reader account and then delete it from the app, and it'll remember your subscriptions. Just deleted mine and it works fine.
If someone wants a pitch here: don't go for a reader, go for a simple WebDAV like system to keep feeds in sync cross-app with APIs so simple that every dev would include it in its feed reading app!
You never use Google Code Search RIP?
Google shapes the way many people discover, use and keep information (google search, maps, news, finance, gmail, etc). To let Reader languish then kill it because "usage has declined" is rather self-fulfilling. I bet if they didn't update their satellite images and road data, Maps usage would decline as well.
They could have been working with the community to define new standards - tags, markup, etc - to allow richer interaction between rss readers and sites (thinking geoloc micro format work, and other semantic markup work in recent years). Making 'reader' a first-class citizen in its suite of services, then using interaction data as more relevance signaling seems like an evolutionary step that only a handful of players the size of google can make good use of, but apparently in their infinite wisdom, they'll just shutter it.
Now it's all multiplexed into their G+ timelines and I happen to catch about a third of it in between their useless updates about being in a park with their kids or a new funny meme.
If usage is declining with nobody stealing users, it's less a sign that innovation stopped than the overall market demand started shrinking. In which case, adding more features might not make a ton of sense. There's not a lot of business sense to investing more in capturing a larger share of a declining business.
So the question becomes not "why is everyone using them?" or even "why are they doing things like this?", it starts with people like me who got to ask themselves honestly "why do I keep relying on these guys?".
Gmail is my main email account and it makes me deeply uncomfortable. I love OS X, despite its ever-increasing flaws, and that makes me feel like a hostage experiencing Stockholm syndrome. Facebook is the only thing in this category I actually stopped caring about on my own, but if I'm being honest that's more my friends' fault for re-enacting soap opera scripts online and offline, and less because Facebook is a data-grabbing virus that screws its users over at every turn (which it is).
My only face-saving answer to that conundrum is those products offer me some things that others don't, they have features that large companies are better positioned to deliver on. However, that's not a permanent state of things, as the complex features of yesterday become increasingly more feasible for smaller developers to tackle tomorrow. Maybe it's a good thing that Google and others are finally straight-up bent on filtering nerds like me out of their customer base, maybe that's the kick needed to overcome inertia and complacency.
Even for search, there are really only a few companies crawling now -- Google, Bing/MS, and Blekko. I'm going to try Bing for a month (I tried in the past, and it wasn't great, but was close) and Blekko for another month, but I'm pretty sure I don't care about any other Google services.
Boy, you really summed up my own personal feelings on this. I'm beginning to rethink my own Gmail usage now.
---
OTOH I do feel sad that reader is gone as it has been a part of my daily life for many years now. Some say that RSS is dead but I cannot find any alternative to feeds I've collected.
Working.
/mutter.
I know there is an ad service for the feeds but as far as I am aware they aren't very profitable.
Maybe there simply isn't a good upside to keep this service going and its a business decision?
Perhaps The Old Reader just does the same?
http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/45337829605/unexpected-day...
By the way, interface looks cleaner, I wish so were the intentions :-)
http://theoldreader.com/feeds/import
"Thank you for uploading your OPML file. We will soon start importing your subscriptions, which might take up to several hours depending on the amount of feeds you have.
There are 22325 users in the import queue ahead of you."
It may take some time indeed... I have 114 subscriptions and some of them can be dead now, as I haven't used GR for quite some time.
Other alternatives I tried are also disappointing. July 1 will be a terrible day for the Internet.
sigh
Bugger.
Mark my words, Blogger is next for some choppie-choppie. Have you noticed how it, too, is steadily being neglected/deprecated in favour of posting to some G+ river of drivel?
I highly recommend the blog though, it does a really good job of keeping an eye on all things Google beyond the normal press releases. Today there's a post with some interesting Reader data points[1].
1. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-reader-data-...
Compared to my clients that choose Exchange-friendly services like Office 365, the clients on Google Apps (paid or not) have been feeling a world of pain since the Office 2013 upgrade. I remember reading a post on some official Google blog late last year talking about how they were going to aggressively target and steal Microsoft's purchase in the enterprise. In reality, they're struggling horribly to even retain the customers they've coaxed over, in my experience. Whether they like it or not, ActiveSync is the most pervasive protocol for syncing mail, calendars, and contacts across a wide range of devices. It's a travesty that they're choosing a holy war against Microsoft instead of supporting what would serve their users best.
As an aside: I implore you not to say things like "protip" here. It comes off as immature and condescending if not outright hostile. I realize it's a quick and snappy way to get upvotes from like-minded users but it's really that kind of phrase which prompts people to complain about redditization or 4chanization when they refer to the declining post quality of HN.
My guess is that it is. Anecdotally, I would guess that only my programmer or tech industry friends and me seriously care about getting updates from projects, or from people they don't know socially IRL. I would guess that my non-programmer friends want social updates from people, which social networks do provide, and they are somewhat interested in what the rest of the world is talking about, but just as a form of entertainment, so there's no need to group all the updates together because it's just as fun to check each individual site every now and then.
I guess there is a crowd of political news buffs too, people who would want comprehensive coverage of various takes on various recent events, but I don't know any personally (who aren't also programmers). If you don't care about multiple points of view then reading one or two newspapers or magazines is sufficient and there's no need for a feed reader.
There's also journalists and PR people whose job involves keeping up with zillions of updates.
And podcasting.
So, my guess is, yes, it's just a niche: programmers, a small subset of news buffs, media professionals, and podcasting.
Looking at the bright side, it doesn't matter to me if most websites drop RSS as long as the ones most relevant to my niche continue to use it; so if RSS becomes forgotten about by most people but is still used by websites that target programmers and by news websites, that's enough for me.
I used it throughout the day and run all my CPD and almost all my non social media based marketing through it.
Currently looking at Feedly and I have 6 posts in my Saved in 1 screen shot instead of 17 with Reader. Working my way through the alternatives and on hour 8 so far. Grrrr.
It isn't niche in the same way as GMail isn't, or Apps.
Why not RSS? Formatting was often not quite right - if I wanted to read something, I often ended up clicking through to the original site anyway. And I didn't like the e-mail style expectation that I would read everything, or at least mark it as read (which felt like admitting defeat). It just began to feel like a chore. When I log in to twitter, it doesn't tell me that I have 1439 unread tweets.
The second I completely agree with you on. Even these cool readers that prioritize stuff you're most likely to read, by necessity, keep track of what's read and unread, and I get exactly that same itch that I need to stay on top of everything. It's completely artificial and almost ridiculous, but there it is. And I can't imagine how a reader could solve that problem without creating the even worse worry of missing things. (Which ironically evaporates when you don't use a reader and therefore no longer expect not to miss anything.)
Perhaps there is a novel solution there though, waiting to be discovered.
The project site is here http://rivers.silverkeytech.com and you get the app here http://goo.gl/kShgp.
The app is a bit young but it is maturing rapidly. I deploy a new version every two weeks or so. The next update is due in a few days.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/giving-you-better-goo...
Else, the first thing people try to do is find a way to close/remove/delete it so they can get started, which leads to the down arrow on it, which doesn't work to delete it. And now they're stuck wondering how to delete it...then they close the window without even tasting something they may have enjoyed.
After you register you start with a completely empty panel which you can then fill with your own blocks.
Sorry for the confusion, I'll try to make it more clear :-)
I mean-- err, yes, totally too late! Don't worry about it.
We've been working on it for the past few months.
I hope someone at Microsoft is paying attention. They should just step up to the plate now and announce IMAP + CalDAV + CardDAV support on their services for those who want it. I'd switch in a blink.
A fanatic motorcyclist (for example) is going to scour all sorts of obscure information sources that non-fanatics will not have the patience or time for. But that pattern of scouring will point towards the factors which do move the mass of consumers some time later. Heavy users of Reader were supplying Google with a lot of high-quality data, and if the product had been given the same attention as something like GMail that information would be worth proportionally more.
The author should really make that a priority, he has 2,5 months to make it happen.
I signed up in two seconds by using a mailinator address. It looks like an exact clone + sharing/contacts. On revisiting though, the XML import failed. Too bad.
It stores the mail in a folder tree rather than a single file, but that's fine by me. It's open source & cross platform.
So I wouldn't call it customizable.
A small warning: the OPML import will delete you current sites and replace them with the ones from OPML, they will not be merged with the current ones you have.
So, no dear this doesn't cut it.
Beggars can't be choosers. :)
But it irks me that a service I've been using for however long just one day decides to cut my quota by 80%.
It doesn't exactly spur me to start paying.
Google Plus was as well.
Currently, I am waiting for Google Now's gmail integration to get on apps already: http://support.google.com/nexus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
Those are just services that have/are affected/ing me; I'm certain there are plenty of other examples.
Technically, there's no reason it couldn't be done with RSS feeds. But the language of 'subscribing' encouraged thinking about RSS feeds in a different way.
I'm trying to understand why Google suddenly gets responsibility for archiving the entire internet for incompetent websites.
To index all the worlds information and make it universually useful?
Oh right, these days it is making shitty copies of facebook.
Yes. But failure to do that to someones satisfaction doesn't make them evil.
Or if it does... well I've failed at so many things I must belong to the axis of evil.
Google reader had decent random recommendations before the G+ update. I believe that a good recommendation system can guess relevant items for given user, but that was not what google reader has been doing for some time now.
I was talking about the 99.999% of the human race that doesn't frequent HN. If they buy a domain name with email when Google announces that GMail is sunsetting, it's already too late. Old/casual acquaintances, friends of friends, etc. will only have their gmail.com address.
Jokes aside, that would be horrible. I've a domain with GApps but I think my chat is still stuck there. Any ideas how can I break free and still able to chat with my friends(Gmail, Fb and some Yahoo) and have chat transcripts somewhere. Anyone?
Tomjen isn't my name, but it is close enough.
(In fact it only caches certain static files as determined by their file extension. It does not seem to pay much attention to Content-Type of Cache headers. Ugh.)
One of the advantages that PHP has is that virtually any cheap web-host in the world can run it. It's not a bad choice to sell a self-hosted product in PHP because of this advantage.
I'm not a huge fan of PHP for many types of projects, but I don't see how it benefits anybody to reflexively hate on something just because of a technology choice.
However, the fact that it supports PHP 4.2 and MySQL 3.23 makes me wonder how old the code base is! Makes me think it's using so many obsolete PHP methods, the deprecated MySQL extension, and is all procedural code (which almost always seems to be spaghetti code with PHP).
My friends are not posting on it.
Changing an email address or phone # is probably enough of a lock-in to be "impossible". Changing the service provider you use otherwise to provide your phone/email/etc., probably a pain, but possible.
Facebook doesn't support indirection (which is why it's crazy that businesses promote fb.com/site urls), but as you've pointed out, it doesn't actually provide a useful service, so if it goes away, no big loss.
It's perhaps somewhat nationalist, but Russian companies are slightly above Chinese companies on my list of "would I want my traffic going through their infrastructure", from a privacy/information security standpoint. I don't think this is irrational. (The US is far from ideal either, but has stronger laws, although is more likely to be "interested". The ideal would be a Canadian or European search provider run in some kind of hostproof model.)
I think over time DDG will do just fine.
What this does is eliminate the biggest point of lock-in to gmail. In the worst case scenario you can switch to another email provider with the flick of a DNS entry, no worries about losing your email address.
No need to be mean to a nice guy. :-\
Maybe it's just what I've happened to see, but my impression is th I certainly had to do a lot more upgradingat the PHP platform security issues were more frequent and more substantial than RoR has been. I certainly had to do a lot more upgrading. Maybe it's different these days.
But the major difference I've seen up close is that RoR makes it much easier for average programmers to be productive while still coding securely. If I'm going to be running J. Random Hacker's code on a personal server, I'm going to worry less with Rails.
All that said, I'd also be reluctant to install a Rails app. Just less reluctant than PHP.
Kalzmeus on SEO (click around his blog for more, guy's a genius): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
Also some quick, simple advice:
1. Blog 2/3 times per week minimum. Target a single, relevant keyword per blog post (relevant to your domain). The post title, H1s, H2s etc, image tags should all contain your primary keyword. Blog posts don't have to be long, but they do have to be useful.
2. Build a G+, FB, Twitter account for your site if you haven't already. Blast out your new posts to these accounts using Hootsuite (free, but you can pay if you like).
3. Build an audience on the social networks - just search around, follow relevant people and share useful, educational material. Don't spam.
4. Personalised mass email from Google Docs and Gmail (kind of hesitant to recommend this in light of Google shuttering services!): http://www.labnol.org/internet/personalized-mail-merge-in-gm... you need to have "newsletter" signs ups (blast out a digest of your blog posts once per month), calls to actions etc on your site for this to work properly (i.e. optimise your site to capture names & emails). Great, low cost/free way to make sure your audience stays engaged and coming back to your site. You can pay for this kind of service too, e.g. Mailchimp (they've a free tier), Constant Contact, or the likes of Hubspot for full suite of marketing automation tools.
5. Best of Startup marketing/SEO here, that I've compiled over the years (absolute gold): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag_fyIIMSJ6DdGt...
6. Check out Sell More Software by patio11: http://www.hyperink.com/Sell-More-Software-Website-Conversio...
Many engineers don't fully appreciate marketing as patio11 would be quick to point out, but there's a start.
That kind of thing is never going to help
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsearchco.de%2...
Not pretty but have some real examples. Please post your own and paste a link here or in the comments.
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Anonymous14 March, 2013 19:55
Obviously a comparison of search results is difficult due to the various signals used to alter search results, but as of 3/14/2013 I get what appear to be 'reasonable' results for both of your example searches:
"sublime text 2" "focus group" : http://i.imgur.com/4LpuUYq.png
cisco "anyclient" : http://i.imgur.com/kptK8HO.png
Again, doesn't necessarily detract from your issue, but just giving search terms isn't reproducible!
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I can now verify that Cisco "Anyclient" is not silently rewritten anymore. Will have to wait and see if they weeded out this particular snag, if they adjusted their fuzzing towards sane or if they just gave me a better bubble (I'd like that I think.).
I would seek out professional SEO company's and try to find the best deal. No way anybody could do all this stuff by themselves. In the end, it will be a worthwhile investment. From my own experience it's very time consuming to get it right.
However if you're a bootstrapped company, you may not have a choice but to put the time in yourself rather than paying for professional SEO services.
If you have a technical and non-technical co-founders, this list is a large chunk of what the non-technical guy should/will be doing.
Building a great product that people want is pointless without letting people know about it.
