The Killing Of Google Reader Highlights The Risk Of Relying On A Single Provider
from the leaves-open-an-opportunity dept
Every few months, Google has been "shutting down" various offerings they feel are under-used, in an effort to regain some focus. Many of these are uncontroversial, though a few have been surprising and freaked some users out. Many, for example, were surprised and upset when Google announced it was phasing out iGoogle. But today's news that it is shutting down Google Reader took many, many people by surprise. My Twitter feed blew up with people freaking out about it. For those who use it, many really rely on it for their daily information gathering process. I know the feeling, because I used to do that -- though a few years ago I shifted to mostly using Twitter via a well-organized Tweetdeck, and found that to be just as (if not more) effective, though a somewhat different overall experience that took some getting used to.Still, a very large number of folks I know feel like they practically live inside Google Reader -- and I know (for example) that Google Reader is a huge driver of traffic to this site, so I get the feeling many of you use Google Reader as well. The thing that seems to have so many folks upset is the fact that there really aren't any comparable alternatives if you want that same basic experience. In fact, you could argue that Google effectively killed off many of those alternatives. Back in the day there were things like Newsgator and Bloglines, but both were effectively marginalized or pushed into other markets because Google Reader really did become the de facto standard RSS reader that so many used and relied on.
Anyway, I have a few separate thoughts on all of this and might as well go through them bullet point style:
- This highlights the problem of relying too much on a single provider when there are few alternatives. As such, I wonder if Google may not realize the wider impact of this move. For example, it has me directly rethinking how much I rely on Google Calendar, Google Drive and Gmail. Now, I don't think any of those are going away any time soon, but not too long ago (um, yesterday, according to some...) you could have said the same exact thing about Reader. I'm now planning to do a more serious personal audit of services I use and how reliant I am on a single provider, and start making sure I have working alternatives in place and ready to go. In the end, this will certainly make me a lot less tied to Google's services, which is probably a good thing, but probably not the sort of thing Google is hoping its users will be doing.
- As mentioned, personally, I moved away from RSS readers to a purely Twitter/Tweetdeck approach to consuming news. It took a few months of doing both, but when I shut down the RSS reader, I never looked back. It's a different experience, but has some benefits. But, what that suggests is that if people are looking for a culprit for what brought us to this moment, Twitter is the prime suspect. Yes, Twitter and RSS are different in many significant ways. But, in terms of the basic user benefit that people get out of both ("my stream of news & info"), they clearly compete.
- The lack of serious alternatives represents a serious opportunity for someone enterprising. Believe it or not, before Google Reader even launched we at Techdirt had built our own RSS reader, called the Techdirt InfoAdvisor, that functioned quite a lot like Google Reader, but which had some other really useful features for us internally and for some of our business clients (we would use it to curate accounts for clients, with added commentary from us). Eventually, we shut it down, because (as Google has discovered), it's actually a lot of work to maintain something like that for a variety of reasons, and soaks up tremendous resources. Still, my first reaction was to joke that maybe we should dust off our old code, put it up and see if anyone wanted to use it. We're not likely to do that (unless all of you start throwing money our way), but someone else likely is going to jump into this space quickly. They may not build a huge business out of it, but I'd bet if they weren't looking for VC-style hockey stick returns, that someone could build a decent business out of it.
- It is always interesting to look at product lifecycles, but most of the time when online products die off, the writing was on the wall long before it happened. This one struck me as a surprise since so many people relied so heavily on it, and it seems really abrupt and likely to upset the basic workflow of so many -- especially in the journalism and academic fields. I can respect the reasons for killing off a "non-essential" product, but it feels like Google seriously underestimated the level to which people had built Google reader into their daily lives.
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Filed Under: alternatives, google reader, readers, rss, shutting down, single providers
Companies: google, twitter
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dependability meets deplorability
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Re: dependability meets deplorability
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Re: dependability meets deplorability
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http://www.odonnellweb.com/2012/10/is-google-preparing-to-kill-google-reader/
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Selfoss FOSS reader
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Re: Selfoss FOSS reader
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Re: Selfoss FOSS reader
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You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
And now we have "a serious opportunity for someone enterprising" to give away FREE services! Who wants to pony up a few million?
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Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
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Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
I dare you to bastardize a RSS reader so people are forced to watch ads to page through the feeds. If you can pull that off, then you can talk about how RSS is just like over the air TV.
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Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
I never compared RSS to OTA TV. I compared Google Reader to OTA TV, but I'll admit that comparison is shaky. With Google Reader you can customize it how you want. OTA TV OTOH, YMMV. HTH. HAND.
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Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Look, Bob, Blue, whatever your name is at the time, I'll give you a little peace of advice. I respect your dedication to trying to discredit Techdirt, but you absolutely suck at it. All you're managing to do is give more credibility to Techdirt while only managing to get your alternate personality to agree with you. Think before you post and you may actually be able to convince people you're right. However, you'd have to convince people you're sane first.
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Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
And, with that, you prove you have no idea what you're talking about.
It takes web pages full of ads and boils them down to the pure headlines.
And then double down on pure ignorance.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
How many ads do you display in the TechDirt RSS feed? How many are on your site? Only a few sites mix ads into their feed as if they're regular articles and that's frowned upon by everyone who's been bullied into believing that everything must be free.
The RSS format discourages advertising and makes it difficult to have the ads and the content comingle in a way that makes it clear which is which. It's a cute idea but the emergence of readers that let people read without visiting the site ensures that the sites get zero ad revenue.
But hey, one day someone will buy a t-shirt from them if the site includes a fake article pushing the t-shirts.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
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A number of popular ad-driven sites also don't make their full content available via RSS, and require the reader to click through to see more.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Yes, presenting ads as if they are articles is frowned upon. In all media, not just internet (or RSS feeds). However, many feeds so include ads and nobody raises much of a fuss about it -- unless those ads look like articles.
But the fact is, sites can put as many or as few ads in their feeds as they wish. It's entirely up to the site. So your point is moot.
This is wildly untrue.
Several of the feeds I follow include ads in a way that makes it very clear what's an ad and what isn't. There is no technical problem here.
Also, for those sites that for some reason really need to have the readers go to their website... well, they have RSS feeds as well, and each item in the feed provides a summary of the story, along with a clickable link that takes you to their site to read the full thing. Doing this is common and is not generally frowned upon.
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Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Which is presumably why people avoid things that force you to do that - including over the air TV. That's why VHSes became popular and DVRs. That's why people switch off crappy radio stations that give you ads every 10 minutes. Now that they have a choice, people are less likely to want to be force fed ads. I love the fact that you think this is a good thing. Before you start bullshitting about piracy, I'm talking about people switching to box sets and Netflix.
Oh, and most people I know also avoid webpages that force you to view ads in inconvenient ways. I can't count how many times I read on sites a conversation like this "here's an interesting story", "sounds good but it's a stupid slideshow spread across 20 pages to get more ad views. I closed after the first page". In other words, as ever, the "solutions" you support are actively turning away customers by forcing ads on to them. Genius.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
I hate the slideshows and other ad-driven gimmicks as much as anyone, but this is the world that Big Search and Mike want us to live in. They hate paywalls because it means they can't leech off of someone else's hard work.
Think about it from the advertiser's perspective. Are you going to buy an ad or a sponsorship when it's just going to be stripped away by an RSS reader? This is why RSS is going to die.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Have you started using the same definition of that word as everybody else, or are you still using that strange definition that nobody else uses? I lost track, although given your other logical fallacies and silly terminology used today, I suspect you're still using a rather unique version.
"Think about it from the advertiser's perspective."
No, I think about it from the consumer's perspective. Using too many ads is detrimental to the quality of both the site and experience, so I'll go elsewhere. If an advertiser has to demand that a site become less useful or less accessible in order to pay out, the site loses me.
"They hate paywalls because it means they can't leech off of someone else's hard work."
A bunch of crap, not unusual, but how would a paywall for the reader change the "leeching"? What about the people who charge for features of their site but allow other features free access? Unless you're delusional enough to think that people would pay a subscription to every single website they currently subscribe to via RSS, that makes no sense and just proves you neither have a clue about how RSS works nor how most people generally use it (many users subscribe to hundreds of feeds).
"This is why RSS is going to die."
No, it will die because it's an outdated technology that most people have stopped using and moved to alternative methods of receiving information. Google are shutting Reader down because - despite the vocal minority complaining - feweer and fewer people were using it. That has nothing to do with ads - I'll bet you anything that a paywall would have made it even less viable.
If you think that it's dying because people weren't charging for it or because of ads not being forced on people, you're wrong.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
You STILL don't even know what a paywall is. You still think having to pay for something constitutes a paywall. It doesn't.
"A paywall is a system that prevents Internet users from accessing webpage content (most notably news content and scholarly publications) without a paid subscription" take from Wikipedia.
More importantly, or simply, a paywall is when previously free content now requires a subscription to view. Again, news content and scholarly publications both being two separate things that tend to have paywalls.
"I hate the slideshows and other ad-driven gimmicks as much as anyone, but this is the world that Big Search and Mike want us to live in. They hate paywalls because it means they can't leech off of someone else's hard work."
Not even remotely close to true. Big Search (AKA Google) and Mike DO NOT hate paywalls for the reason you state. Google cares not a lick about paywalls first off. And Mike has no problem with paywalls, he merely points out how some websites have implemented them in a way that is negatively detrimental to their continued online presence. By which I and he means, in regards to newspapers, that they implement paywalls while ignoring the fact that they merely report on current news going on around the world. What this means is they are literally competing with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, etc other news sites doing the same thing. By instituting a paywall they are telling their customers that they are not free to view the news from that source without paying first. The average person in such cases is not going to pay to view news from one source (like the NY Times) when they can get the same news from the BBC for free. They're literally shooting themselves in the foot. They're pushing people away to other sources and further ridding themselves of customers they can't afford to lose as it is.
"Think about it from the advertiser's perspective. Are you going to buy an ad or a sponsorship when it's just going to be stripped away by an RSS reader? This is why RSS is going to die."
RSS readers DO NOT strip anything away. They aggregate content, like Google to a degree. If you want more information, you're free to click on the various RSS feeds and be taken straight to the source for additional information. If all you're wanting is the basic gist of something, then yes RSS feeds/readers will provide that, but for the meat of any given feed you have to go to the source and view any ads that may be there.
As far as ads/sponsorship. You've obviously never been a fan of anything in your life. There are numerous podcasts, websites, artists, etc who have such ads/sponsorships in their respective online presence. They even state as much flat out and more than a few say, "Hey, I'm doing this for free, providing you information/entertainment. I have an ad/sponsorship on my site, if you dig what I'm doing show a little support. Head to my page and click on the ad above and I'll make a few cents." And shockingly to you, people do exactly that. It's like connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy. They support those who they like.
Heck, I can't tell you how many things like that I see on a daily basis. Amazon tends to be the main ad/sponsor on such things. And if you click on the link and make any purchases on Amazon, Amazon will give a cut of whatever you spend back to the person who "referred" you.
It's win/win for everyone.
RSS isn't going to die anytime soon. It's use is too integral to the internet for the vast majority of people. It's quite easy to import RSS feeds from Google to any of the plethora of other RSS readers out there.
Please stop talking about things which you know nothing about. You only make yourself look like a bigger idiot. A task which sounds almost Herculean in effort, yet you do it so effortlessly it literally astonishes.
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Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
I challenge Mike to build the RSS reader. He's got the experience with building a site. He's drunk his fill of the Kool-Aid. Now's the time to step up, hire several million dollars worth of programmers and build a site that strips away ads from headlines and gives it all away for free. Show us what you know!
I'm guessing he could make some money on selling t-shirts with the logo of the RSS reader. Yeah. That's the ticket to wealth. I want to wear one to my next trip to the mall food court.
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Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
I would be one HTML 5 page loaded anywhere you want and it would be free. The only thing it would cost me is a weekend of work.
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Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Less of of course implementing DRM for OOTB and Bob of course.
Nigel
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Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
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Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
It's not the coding, it's the maintenance. People write with the silliest complaints. And then someone changes a tag and you want it to look just right. The little bits add up.
And remember. If you put up any ads or slow down the news reading, Mike and the charm school graduates around here will pillory you and talk about how you're censoring people and breaking the Internet. You'll be evil. Your only choice is to give it all away for free. One day someone will buy a t-shirt and you'll be able to take a date out for a hot dog.
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Re: Maintenance
Look, Google didn't kill Reader because they hate you, or they hate RSS, or whatever. They did it because they don't want to spend 3-5 full time employees on a product that has a tiny (if dedicated) userbase and zero revenue.
Now there probably weren't 3-5 people working full-time on Reader, by the end. But you add up all the background services they use, the guys working on BigTable and GFS and so on, the hardware teams, the administration... It adds up.
Google-scale products have staggering complexity; you don't keep them running on a whim.
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Re: Re: Maintenance
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Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Huh? You do realize that we, ourselves, have ads in our RSS feed, don't you? Oh, I forgot, you have no clue what you're talking about.
You'll be evil. Your only choice is to give it all away for free.
Nope. Have never said that, suggested that or hinted at that in any way shape or form. The whole point is to understand what things make sense to charge for and what things make sense to give away for free. I don't know why you have to make stuff up so consistently. Strange.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
And at least own up to your wacko obsession with giving away things for free. When newspapers put up paywalls, you're dishing out insults and put-downs about how they "don't get it." In the few cases, when you actually endorse paywalls (Louis CK, Kevin Smith), I get beaten up for even suggesting that they're paywalls. You and your clan of nutty content leeches continue to hate almost all forms of pay. Admit it. Own it. Don't insult us by claiming that you've never even hinted at it in any shape or form.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Oh God, no, a flashing annoying ad is the least likely thing I will click on. If you want me to instantly close a page and never return to a site, make sure you have one of those utterly moronic pieces of crap that blocks half the page I'm trying to read or plays sounds.
No wonder you fail to understand arguments here - your idea of business seems to be to do as much as possible to stop people from clicking on ads or even from accessing the site in the first place.
"you actually endorse paywalls (Louis CK, Kevin Smith)"
OK, it's confirmed, you still don't have a clue what you're talking about and are using the most idiotic versions that suit your equally stupid argument. Carry on, I suppose..
It's a shame that you're so obsessed with lying.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
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Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Hi, Bob!
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
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Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Difficult for you, given that you claim that "(we) blather on about how the Internet owes them everything for free" - a blatant outright lie - you never bother explain how people are wrong. You only invent your own terms and make up your own reality. Facts, please - your turn.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
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That's the new technology you're hearing about? Do you live in 2002? No wonder your ideas are so wonky.
"t-shirts"
Ah, the siren call of the moron who hasn't been listening to a word that's ever been said here. Please continue, even if your name wasn't recognisable as that of a regular idiot, your use of this argument lights it up nice and bright.
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Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
You can hear all of the whining from the tenured professors. I want my free RSS feed.
But even Google can't make money at the game.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
Sarcasm doesn't go well with written text, which you'd know if you read the stories here about it. You are a genius though so maybe you already knew that /s
"Giving away everything for free and letting the people remix it was going to be the future of publishing."
Do you honestly have to simplify everything to something that's completely untrue in order to make your arguments, or are you capable of addressing what people say?
"I want my free RSS feed."
Of course they do. Nobody would pay for those and they're an advertisement for the content. You don't half come up with some strange fictions about technologies. Are you saying that people need to pay for company's advertisements now?
"But even Google can't make money at the game."
Yes, they can. They just chose to simply the services they offered. Unless you're saying that Microsoft shutting down the Zune program meant that nobody can make money selling portable electronics - which makes as muchg sense as what you're claiming. Perhaps if you stopped whining about your "Big Search" conspiracy fiction any understood how things worked, you'd understand reality.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
You want a free RSS feed? There are loads of them. Here's Techdirt's. It's free. Here's a bunch from arstechnica. All free RSS feeds. Here are Dilbert RSS feeds. A veritable free for all. NPR, CNN, NY Times, Apple, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, all free, every last one of them, and that's what I use or found on the first page of searching for rss feeds.
Keep going with your ignorance bob. You're not foaming at the mouth yet.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
I don't remember anybody saying this, oh, ever. People do say, and it is true, that providing something at no monetary cost (not the same as "free") can be a good business approach. But not an approach that would be universally good for all businesses. It depends on the business plan.
It also remains true that "letting" people remix is a huge part of the future of publishing -- just as it has been a huge part of the past of publishing. This is a different issue than whether or not people pay money for the content.
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Re: You mean relying on FREE products is risky?
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Maybe I didn't have this thousand+ feeds to follow I do now..
Bloglines had technical problems, and that was the final straw that pushed me to use Google Reader instead. It just wasn't usable at times, for a day or two which I couldn't tolerate. I hear they fixed the problems, but switch was done.. and now it's time for another.
Seriously thinking if I want to use GMail or Drive/Docs anymore either - but jumping into Microsoft's ship.. no way. It has to be something else.
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Twitter
For example, I don't want to listen to a conversation between a celebrity and a plebe, or Mike and some fan. But I might like a summary after the fact that sums it up, say in your standard article. I don't need real-time, I have enough going on. My feed reading is my idle catch-up time, and hopefully by the time I get to the article things have settled down to give me a more complete picture than just the initial rapid-fire impression.
As for what this article talks about, I've always feared this. I've always feared some link to Google, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft is cut off for days, or weeks, and they mysteriously are silent. There's no guarantee Google is even clear after the Gaia breach years ago, they were hacked to their very core, and gave very little details on how well they cleaned it up, let alone the hundreds of other corporations hit. Putting your lifeblood data on these massive platforms, where the complexity themselves are cause for alarm, is a recipe for disaster.
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Re: Twitter
For example, I don't want to listen to a conversation between a celebrity and a plebe, or Mike and some fan.
Have you ever actually used Twitter? (1) Don't follow people you're not interested in and (2) the conversation tweets DON'T SHOW in your feed. The only show if you follow both people. So if you're not following "the plebe" or "some fan" you NEVER saw them. At least not since 2007. So... your complaint seems odd.
My feed reading is my idle catch-up time, and hopefully by the time I get to the article things have settled down to give me a more complete picture than just the initial rapid-fire impression.
So, um, follow the *exact same sites* that you follow from RSS via Twitter... and you get the same things.
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Re: Re: Twitter
This isn't 100% true, as some people will sometimes retweet part or all of the conversation. But you can block retweets as well if you want, of course.
Personally, I'll just stop following anyone I find annoying on a regular basis.
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Google has done this for some time
Not using Google took some getting used to but I have found good alternatives, gotten used to them and no longer need fear they will just cease to exist.
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Re: Google has done this for some time
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Re: Re: Google has done this for some time
While I would say that's really a concern for anything, I suspect that some of these big internet entities (for lack a of better description) are more susceptible to this. What I mean is that Google/Amazon/Yahoo! have all branched significantly from their core business, it only makes sense that a lot of what they try will eventually be shuttered. Where as a smaller (product-wise, not financially) company will more than likely continue support something even during the downsizing of consumer use, since it will represent more of their business.
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Re: Re: Google has done this for some time
However all too often I have had to use those tools to pack up at the drop of a hat not by my choice but by theirs. Including Wave which I persuaded others to join only to have the service yanked away just when we really started to utilize it. No the commitment is that of learning to use and then relying on a tool and in some cases having an identity locked to it or recommending others to adopt it. For the most part the replacement tools I have found are either offline or self-hosted putting me in complete control and ensuring they will be available as long as I want them to be. The additional problem I encountered was when a Google product is broken there is no way to contact them to report it.
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Re:
https://www.google.com/takeout
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2013/03/how-to-export-your-goo gle-reader-account/
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Replacements
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Re: Replacements
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Re: data export
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Not A New Situation
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Re: Not A New Situation
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What was in it for Google?
I wouldn't be surprised to see Google News go away shortly too.
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Re: What was in it for Google?
I wish they would it would kill the newspapers and all their whining.
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Re: Re: What was in it for Google?
If Google News goes away, the newspapers go back to being the portal. Their front page traffic goes up because people want news. Google News is just the easiest, cheapest way for people to get it now. But even Google can't make money on it.
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Re: Re: Re: What was in it for Google?
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Re: Re: Re: What was in it for Google?
If Google News goes away at some point, I'm going to look for another aggregator. I'm not going to go visit every major (or small) newspaper's website just hoping that they have news that is relevant to me on the front page.
You can keep your 20th Century news-reading inefficiency to yourself and your IP maximalist friends. I'll be moving onto the next part of my day while you're still turning pages hoping for something interesting.
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Re: Re: Re: What was in it for Google?
...in the early 17th century.
Front page traffic might go up but overall traffic will be down as fewer people will bother typing in the newspaper's url just to search the site manually for news they want to read then clicked through to an article they already knew they wanted to read on the way in. The reality is that a large part of newspaper's business wasn't the content, it was that people didn't already know what they did and did not want to read and to find out they had to buy the whole paper. Now that someone else has done that business better you want to pretend it's all about the content. It never was.
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here's hoping
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Re: here's hoping
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Re: Re: here's hoping
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Re: Re: Re: here's hoping
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To use a print analogy (oh boy, this will be dangerous), Twitter is to Reader as a newspaper's comment pages are to the news pages. Sure, the comments can point you to interesting things, and add both context and a finger on the collective pulse, but if you want to get to the heart of it, you need to read the original source.
Reader is a good way to get the content, and then follow up with the comments etc. if necessary.
Personally, I mostly skim headlines through Reader, expanding and reading articles that catch my interest. I can't stand using FB or Twitter as news sources, because there's too much other crap intertwined with news. Plus, it requires following all the sources, and putting up with everything they do that isn't news.
This means that sometimes there's just far too much noise. Setting aside the sources that use their twitter for both news dissemination, as well as other things like competitions etc, sometimes the volume of news alone from their social accounts is too much. For a while, I followed @glynmoody on twitter, because I liked his stuff on Techdirt. And then my feed became 90% Glyn.
Which is not to say it was bad content - it was just that I was drowning in the volume of it. So I stopped following Glyn, and suddenly Twitter was usable as a social tool again. (I still feel bad about this Glyn - sorry).
To me, Google Reader is my morning newspaper, and I'm yet to find anything that does as good a job of getting me the news.
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Re:
You say that as if Twitter doesn't have original sources.
Personally, I mostly skim headlines through Reader, expanding and reading articles that catch my interest. I can't stand using FB or Twitter as news sources, because there's too much other crap intertwined with news. Plus, it requires following all the sources, and putting up with everything they do that isn't news.
See, I do the exact same thing with Twitter via Tweetdeck. I skim all the headlines and "expand" (i.e., "open") the articles that catch my interest. RSS already requires you to follow "all the sources" as well. Just follow the same feeds via their Twitter accounts. Most major blogs/news publications publish pure headline feeds which are basically just like their RSS feed.
Which is not to say it was bad content - it was just that I was drowning in the volume of it. So I stopped following Glyn, and suddenly Twitter was usable as a social tool again. (I still feel bad about this Glyn - sorry).
This is why something like Tweetdeck is useful. Just sort different people into different columns and you're fine. Have a main column with just the news sources, and shunt the "noisy" twitter users you like but which are too busy off into their own column, which you glance at only if you have the time.
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This sux!
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Here's a list of crowdsourced alternatives to Google Reader
http://list.ly/list/33u-google-reader-alternatives-crowdsourced-list?feature=search
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You do know you are relying on Twitter/Tweetdeck just like you did Google reader at one point in the past.
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Re:
Yes, absolutely. Which is why I got worried when Twitter announced their changes to Tweetdeck a couple weeks ago. So I've been thinking a lot about the issues of relying on one provider.
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Re: Re:
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Re: Re:
"The Killing of Google Reader Highlights the Risk of Relying on a Single Provider" (headline)
vs.
"I moved away from RSS readers to a purely Twitter/Tweetdeck approach to consuming news. It took a few months of doing both, but when I shut down the RSS reader, I never looked back." (text)
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RSS Reader
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Re: RSS Reader
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The risks of the cloud.
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Just about in a panic
The biggest use of my smartphone is to read articles from Google Reader. I even have a special mobile section for feeds that embed their stories(like Techdirt), so I do have to go to an external site to get spammed with unnecessary content. Just straight text for me.
I can't even imagine using Twitter to get news. That's like relying on local gossip and rumor to find out what is going on.
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Re: Just about in a panic
I wouldn't hold your breath.
Look, Google doesn't "owe" you anything. I know you didn't say that, and I'm sort of putting words in your mouth, but that's the impression I get whenever someone says "If only I yell about this loudly enough, surely I'll get my way!".
Google is a business. They are kind of quirky, and they sometimes do things "for the users" instead of "for the money", but at the end of the day they're a business. And they make mostly rational decisions, just like everyone else. So if they cancel a product, it means (1) it's not making a profit, (2) it's not going to make a profit, and (3) these are still true if you count "goodwill" on the balance sheet.
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Re: Re: Just about in a panic
As to your "reasons", it can just as likely mean they've become too shortsighted and distracted by regime change or excessive growth rates to see that they've forgotten their core business. To me, their recent path suggests that that's what's happening.
And, please, can we just stop with the stupid "they don't owe you" crap? Everybody knows that, nobody said that. It's not some kind of deep philosophical point as you seem to believe.
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Re: Just about in a panic
It's obviously early days using this for me, but so far I'm very, very impressed. BTW, the free version is ad-supported, but for $5 you can get rid of the ads.
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newsfox
rss rocks for skimming news, hope it doesn't go where usenet went, another service that provided content without any fancy whatever i really liked
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kill google+
So I killed my google+ account in protest.
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iGoogle
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Re: iGoogle
I use iGoogle as my browser homepage. I have it open all day every single day.
I have not found anything better (a few contenders though), so I will also use it until it finally gone.
Besides, doesn't this article come around every time Google does their spring/fall cleaning?
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Re: iGoogle
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Re: Re: iGoogle
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Re: iGoogle
I keep trying to push that out of my mind hoping they will change their decision but knowing they won't.
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Took me forever to find an RSS feed reader I liked...
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Re: Took me forever to find an RSS feed reader I liked...
In fact 100% of the traffic to this site (and the other news sites I read) by me is through iGoogle. When that's gone, I don't think I'll be visiting many of them anymore...
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Took me forever to find an RSS feed reader I liked...
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Unfortunately this enforces my decision not to go Google Docs etc. And a few other cloud services - paid for or not.
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RSS Reader Alternative - News Maven
However, it was written in the sky with the lack of updates.
Hopefully, News Maven will help solve this. If you are finding Feedly, Flipboard, Pulse etc. not suiting your needs (too much like a magazine or involves installing unnecessary browser extensions/plugins and less like an RSS reader) register for News Maven - http://newsmaven.co
It is everything you loved about Google Reader without losing your RSS subscriptions!
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Link to how to export your Google Reader RSS feed
It is pretty simple.
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Single provider not the issue
The problem here is cloud services, that we don't own the product and/or the product isn't open source. This makes us vulnerable to a single point of failure. RSS is an open standard but still people are in pickle because Google did the ecosystem around RSS well enough. Whenever we don't have the server in our own house we are vulnerable to a sudden shut down. And even then we could have a power outage or loss of internet connection.
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Re:
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Corporations are founded for the following reasons:
1) To shield their owners for liability from what the company does
2) To sell funny-money on the open market for whatever amount they can convince people to buy it for.
3) To achieve life beyond death of the founders
But, as we now know, "Corporations are people, my friend"
So we now have "people" that can't die, can forge their own money, and can't be sued (except for anything but money; see item 2 above).
What's not to love? I mean, Tony Soprano couldn't have come up with this racket.
Oh, wait. I called you people. Aren't you corporations? Why are you reading this?
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The Horror! The Horror!
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Re:
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Re:
To avoid having to use a browser just to read RSS feeds, maybe? Back when I used my desktop for reading feeds, that was why I used a separate reader.
Now, I use my smartphone for this type of reading, and there, avoiding the browser is an even bigger win.
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openstates.org
The project from the Sunlight Foundation just opened its doors, it tracks laws from 50 states of the US.
It is getting closer now.
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Great timing.
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An alternative...
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Relying to much on a single service provider
Google fooled me once, but never again... diversify, diversify, diversify
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TweetDeck Going Away
How do you feel about TweetDeck going away? Have you researched / moved onto replacements, yet?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57572483-93/twitter-kills-android-iphone-and-air-desktop-apps-f or-tweetdeck/?tag=mncol;txt
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Re: TweetDeck Going Away
It's not going away. They're just shutting down the old AIR versions...
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Re: Re: TweetDeck Going Away
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Google will lose more
Shut down Reader and you might as well shut down everything else, because I'll be done with Google. This includes ever buying another Android device.
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Still trying to push people to G+
I would have happily paid to retain both services.
In thinking about their actions, I suspect Google anticipated others doing this and this is part of their strategy to push users to their under used social networking platform.
Like you Mike, I'm not questioning my reliance on Google and am looking at moving to alternative services for most things.
This is actually a good thing in the end because as you point out, it's going to open opportunities for new players in the market. Yes alternatives exist, and if anything more will crop up.
Anyways, on to research and test Google service alternatives.
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Wikipedia's feed aggregator comparison page provides plenty of alternatives. I personally use RSSOwl.
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Or it's simply an preemptive move in anticipation of the German Leistungsschutzrecht.
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Mobile & Desktop
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just duplication?
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Worst Tribute Ever
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Alternative: Found
Here's what my just-started Netvibes reader looks like- http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc140/Forest_GS/netvibes_zps5a9755bc.jpg
They look pretty similar to me, anyways.
The default is set to "show all", but it does "mark as read" while you scroll. To change it to "show New only" you need to click the "Change Display" button on the top-right. (hover the mouse over the button to see what the button is called)
Acts exactly like Google Reader for me now.
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Bloglines
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OwnCloud
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Google Reader alternatives
It's not like there's no Google Reader alternative available. I know at least three of them:
* Newsblur - http://newsblur.com
* The Old Reader - http://theoldreader.com/
* Hivemined (not yet available) - http://hivemined.org/
I've stopped using Google Reader when they shut down the social features. I started using Newsblur a few months ago and have been quite satisfied.
Also, and most importantly, it's open source [1], so if it goes down someday, someone else can set up the same service again under their own infrastructure - which is not something you can say about any of the other readers. That's also the main reason I do use http://identi.ca instead of Twitter.
The only problem in having many alternatives to Google Reader is that it tends to fragment the former user base. So, some of the people you used to share to are going to use one and some are going to use another. Google Reader used to be a central point where you could share to all of your friends at once. But I think the upside of using an open source reader now outweights those negatives, as it's more of a guarantee that the service will cease to exist all of a sudden - which is the point being discussed here.
[1] https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
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I agree
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replacement?... I would better UPGRADE..
You you will enjoy the change, I felt a real Upgrade after I start using http://startific.com
It has a beautiful interface, you will love it!
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Top iGoogle Alternatives
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salam kenal
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