The Death Of Google Reader And The Rise Of Silos
from the the-changing-web dept
I've been talking a lot lately about the unfortunate shift of the web from being more decentralized to being about a few giant silos and I expect to have plenty more to say on the topic in the near future. But I'm thinking about this again after Andy Baio reminded me that this past weekend was five years since Google turned off Google Reader. Though, as he notes, Google's own awful decision making created the diminished use that allowed Google to justify shutting it down. Here's Andy's tweeted thread, and then I'll tie it back to my thinking on the silo'd state of the web today:
Google Reader shut down five years ago today, and I’m still kind of pissed about it.
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) July 1, 2018
Google ostensibly killed Reader because of declining usage, but it was a self-inflicted wound. A 2011 redesign removed all its social features, replaced with Google+ integration, destroying an amazing community in the process.
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) July 1, 2018
The audience for Google Reader would never be as large or as active as modern social networks, but it was a critical and useful tool for independent writers and journalists, and for the dedicated readers who subscribed to their work.
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) July 1, 2018
There are great feedreaders out there — I use Feedly myself, but people love Newsblur, Feedbin, Inoreader, The Old Reader, etc. But Google Reader was a *community* and not easily replaced. Google fragmented an entire ecosystem, for no good reason, and it never recovered.
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) July 1, 2018
Many people have pointed to the death of Google Reader as a point at which news reading online shifted from things like RSS feeds to proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It might seem odd (or ironic) to bemoan a move by one of the companies now considered one of the major silos for killing off a product, but it does seem to indicate a fundamental shift in the way that Google viewed the open web. A quick Google search (yeah, yeah, I know...) is not helping me find the quote, but I pretty clearly remember, in the early days of Google, one of Larry Page or Sergey Brin saying something to the effect of how the most important thing for Google was to get you off its site as quickly as possible. The whole point of Google was to take you somewhere else on the amazing web. Update It has been pointed out to me that the quote in question most likely is part of Larry Page's interview with Playboy in which he responded to the fact that in the early days all of their competitors were "portals" that tried to keep you in with the following:
We built a business on the opposite message. We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information.
Somewhere along the way, that changed. It seems that much of the change was really an overreaction by Google leadership to the "threat" of Facebook. So many of Google's efforts from the late 2000s until now seemed to have been designed to ward off Facebook. This includes not just Google's multiple (often weird) attempts at building a social network, but also Google's infatuation with getting users to sign in just to use its core search engine. Over the past decade or so, Google went very strongly from a company trying to get you off its site quickly to one that tried to keep you in. And it feels like the death of Reader was a clear indication of that shift. Reader started in the good old days, when the whole point of an RSS reader was to help you keep track of new stuff all over the web on individual sites.
But, as Andy noted above, part of what killed Reader was Google attempting desperately to use it as a tool to boost Google+, the exact opposite of what Google Reader stood for in helping people go elsewhere. I don't think Google Reader alone would have kept RSS or the open web more thriving than it is today, but it certainly does feel like a landmark shift in the way Google itself viewed its mission: away from helping you get somewhere else, and much more towards keeping you connected to Google's big data machine.
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Filed Under: decentralized, google reader, open internet, rss, silos, social media
Companies: facebook, google
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Good ol’ Alphabet Masnick, shillin’ for Google by [checks notes] lambasting Google over its decision to shut down Google Reader.
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Please cite, with proper references, the evidence that Mike Masnick’s paycheck relies specificially and only on money from Google.
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But, like most conspiracy theorists, facts don't matter once they believe in something. After all, negative articles about Google are just more evidence that he's paid to write the positive ones, apparently!
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Re: @ "lambasting Google"? After FIVE years he muses a bit?
Your stupidest comment ever, and that's compared to this gem:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180312/06535239401/lucha-underground-wrestling-sends-legal-t hreat-to-journalists-publishing-spoilers.shtml#c131
"You can stop referring to pro wrestling as "fake". We all know that the match results are fixed. We all know the feuds are (mostly) scripted. We all know the characters portrayed in the ring are not truly representative of the people who portray them. This is common knowledge and acting like it is not just so you can feel a smug sense of superiority over the people who enjoy the performance art of professional wrestling makes you an asshole. You are not smarter than wrestling fans when you say "LOL it's all fake". You are not a better person than a wrestling fan if you have to look down upon them as idiots and fools because they enjoy pro wrestling in the same way some people enjoy Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead. So when you feel another urge to call out pro wrestling as "fake", ignore itas hard as you can."
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Wow. That hurts, man.
You went through my comment history and didn’t tell either me or the NSA agent assigned to me?
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Single point of failure
Companies are fickle in general, and Google especially so. Over the long term, any community dependent on a single irreplaceable entity is going to die. Reader's code was maintained entirely by Google, not available outside of Google, and dependent on Google to continue running the infrastructure.
RSS is inherently decentralized. They found a way to centralize it, and later proved the point of everyone who complains about that. Archive Team has a list of other such occurrences, and there's no reason to believe this will stop happening. We can't avoid silos by relying on the generosity of random companies; only something truly decentralized will work.
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The death of "don't be evil".
Google's focus went from wanting to be useful to people to wanting to use people. Not that they don't still have a lot of useful stuff, but it's only there as a way of exploiting people. Stuff that doesn't help them with that goal eventually gets killed off with a big middle finger given to complainers.
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Google looked at google reader, inspected it, then turned around and shat all over it and tried to make a facebook clone that was a failure. Because why would you try to out facebook... facebook by trying to do everything it already did or adding features no normal human would understand or want.
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The first sentance "Oh God... the last thing I need for my RSS feeds is "social integration"." which you obviously skipped over.
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The first sentence established context, dumb ass.
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Indeed. More accurately in context the first sentence depends on the second. To paraphrase; "I don't want my RSS feeds to have social integration because I have no interest in other's reading habits or making my own public no matter what source I am using."
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Google+ also killed off my favorite blog, John Walkenbach’s J-Walk Blog, (which had one of the most amazing online communities going) by luring John to Google+. Most of the wonderful community he’d built just drifted away; it was too hard to follow Google+ as a platform at the time.
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Oh, and I have no social media accounts, not even Google+ (which they push on me all the time).
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The quote you're looking for
I believe this is the quote you were looking for, but it's from Steven Levy, not Larry or Sergey.
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Re: The quote you're looking for
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And started the death of RSS
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I can hardly blame Google for this
Google isn't a charity, and they have/had no obligation to keep money-losing products going indefinitely, no mater how beloved. (I'm wondering when Google Voice is going to get killed; other than charging great rates for international calls, I don't see where any revenue comes from there.)
Google, as a company does a lot of good stuff, but at their core they are still a company that likes to turn a profit. It's foolish for anybody to rely on the parts of their enterprise that don't make money.
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Re: I can hardly blame Google for this
It has already begun with the death of a thousand cuts.
I began using it when it was Grand Central (before Google bought it) with the promise of "one number for life", for free. Period. And I had it linked to a free SIP provider (before Google bought it, too) using my own SIP hardware. This gave me free phone service with no monthly phone bill. Needless to say, the telco industry (AT&T, et al) didn't much like that, but there wasn't much they could do about it either. At least directly.
So, they approached Google. And Google, being the opportunistic exploiter it is, saw an opportunity to buddy up with other gigantic brethren exploiters in the telco industry. Google bought both Grand Central and the free SIP provider. Google promised users that things would continue as before with "great new features on the way!" And then one of the first things they did kill off SIP access and collect a big wet kiss from the telcos. No more standard SIP access. Now you had to use the "Google Voice" portal. And many people, such as myself, were also forced to give up their "one number for life" number in exchange for a new Google assigned number.
But at least it could still be accessed without have to pay a telco for the privilege. However, this still wasn't quite what the telcos wanted. And if Google had ambitions to more more fully partner with them, it was going to have to make amends. So, about a year or so ago, it cut off service to those users, like myself, who were avoiding paying a monthly homage to one telco or another. It instituted a new rule that users must have their accounts linked to telco provided phone number. And not just any number either. It had to be a mobile phone number. And it had to be provided by one of Google's "approved" mobile providers. None of that Vonage stuff or anything like that.
Having now made amends, Google was allowed to join the telco club and the Google Project Fi phone service was the result. A phone service with which Google gets to tell you which phones you can use with it (mostly Google's own). Remember when long, long ago the government decided phone companies couldn't dictate which phone hardware you used with your phone service? Yeah, well those days are long gone.
Yay Google!
Not.
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Ruining services is what Google does best. Many years ago, they bought Deja News, a Usenet newsgroup archiving service. Rather than keep DN's straight-forward UI, which was very flexible and their streamlined listing of results, Google slapped their web search UI on it, started sorting the results by popularity rather than any sort of sensible order, restricted it to about 3 results per screen, broke up threads into multiple pages, weirdly formatted into trees, obscured all email addresses, even though the people who posted real email addresses wanted them to be seen and hid "similar" results (often the very message you were searching for).
Basically they destroyed it in an attempt to commercialize it and package it for people who don't have the faintest clue what newsgroups are. I haven't used it in years because the last time I tried, I couldn't find anything I was searching for, even though I KNEW it was in the database previously.
Their support forum for YouTube is the most ass-backward, confusing site I've ever had the displeasure of using.
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@ " a few giant silos" -- You don't even know what a "silo" is,
Now, since this has already and will in future be cited as an "anti-Google" piece to claim that you're not a shill despite 20 years of blatantly pro-Google pieces: Where do you show least worry over "Google's big data machine"? And it being too big? Where the least suggestion that Google be constrained? -- Nowhere, of course.
Take the "Copia" link, anyone wondering why Masnick thinks that wistlful regard of a small branch of Google defunct for 5 years is in any degree "anti-Google". It is only when compared to his constant cheerleading.
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Per the Oxford English Dictionary’s third definition of “silo“, which is the most relevant in this context: A system, process, department, etc. that operates in isolation from others.
Every article on Google need not contain calls for the guillotine, metaphorical or physical. More pointed criticism of Google would be nice, but it is not required in every Google-related article.
Your constant whining does not make him “pro-Google”, either. Speaking of which: Someone can both write articles that praise Google for doing good things and write articles that criticise Google for doing bad things. The existence of one does not cancel out the other—no matter how much you want that to be the truth.
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In actual fact, those are exactly the sources that should be most trustworthy. If a source constantly praises even the least savoury things they do, or criticises even the most benevolent things they do, that source is clearly biased and unreliable. A source that supports the good but criticises the bad will tend be a better barometer within any grey areas (of which there are many).
Unlike some people, I prefer sources that aren't afraid to address the grey head on, rather than pretend everything has to be black and white.
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Re: @ " a few giant silos" -- You don't even know what a "silo" is,
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Re: @ " a few giant silos" -- You don't even know what a "silo" is,
Google does many things that I think are good, and also does many things I have problems with, and I've never been shy about either one.
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We have. We're still waiting for you to explain what power Yelp, Namecheap and Automattic have over this blog, though.
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Re: @ " a few giant silos" -- You don't even know what a "silo" is,
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I reduced my daily reading to a few websites and have been happier.
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