Nilay Patel
David PierceTomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the end of Google Reader. So I tried to figure out what went wrong, and wound up with a story about a better social internet we could have had and instead threw into the trash https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social
Mike Taylor 🦕@davidpierce A VP telling an engineer "Don’t confuse this for a conversation between peers" tells you absolutely everything you need to know.
Brian Bartky@mike @davidpierce Yea. If I heard something like that I would start looking for a new job.
Casey@mike @davidpierce For real. If someone ever said that to me…
cobalt going beige today@davidpierce reading the history here is a flashback to many approaches I used to make internet content organized and really useful to me in both work and personal life. Reader was a big loss to me 10 years ago and then later Google Plus. Now getting braced for Gmail to be axed perhaps in sudden but typical Google fashion. Great article here.
shnonksGoogle Reader's demise is what sent me to Reddit in the first place. Now I'm on to the Fediverse, and, ironically, back to an RSS reader.
Jim@shnonks @davidpierce Different path, but the same. I went from Reader to several stand alone RSS readers, but eventually just switched to Twitter. Now I'm back at https://theoldreader.com for most things.
saiftheboss7@davidpierce Loved the article. Really well written and I loved how you showcased the evolution of Google's failure to build a social platform time and time again.
@saiftheboss7 Thanks so much!
Shannon Clark@davidpierce I was one of those power users of Reader (though not for one hour a day - it was probably many many more than one hour each day)
For me a huge feature that no RSS reader I’ve found since matches was the cross platform stability of Google Reader - I used it on my phone and my computer and it was a seemless transition with it keeping what I had read / hadn’t read yet easily in sync.
I also leveraged custom rss feeds in lots of ways (feeds with anything referencing my startup etc)
vinz@Rycaut You might want to have a look at Inoreader. I use it in the exact way you described. Plus it has neat things like newsletter-to-rss and custom CSS for their UI.
Steven Roose@davidpierce @pluralistic I still miss it.
TubbDoose@davidpierce I’ve yet to meet someone my age who has heard of RSS. I even had to explain it to the other web developers at my university’s student newspaper.
Krupo@tubbdoose @davidpierce university student web developers are in general, of course, still kids learning stuff though - with some prodigies as exceptions :)
Lelani CarverThank you. Great read, would have missed it if not for #Mastodon -off to add TheVerge.com to Feedly.
Ten years, and I still miss Google Reader.
Pamela Fox@davidpierce I opened the article and just CTRL-F'ed for "Gundotra" since that's how I'd summarize it. :)
@davidpierce Reader is where I spent my lunch breaks, getting caught up on the 3-4 blogs I followed at the time. I still go back and read those blogs, but not as loyally. It's nice to see one of them still follows the same format that I enjoyed in the early 2010s.
@weisinator @davidpierce I recently went back and 90% of the blogs I followed just don't exist anymore 😢
dosidosankofaI still high key miss it, looking forward to checking this out
Pablonius Monk 🇺🇦@davidpierce Really enjoyed your wonderful piece on @theverge , David. I learned a lot about Google Reader. Had an inkling about the tension between Google Reader & Google+. But this explains just how corrosive Google+ was on other parts of the company.
Last week I found out from @davew that Mastodon has RSS support built-in. @mgs has pointed out today that Twitter has just scrubbed out any last vestige of RSS support.
Dave Winer ☕️@pabloniusmonk @davidpierce @theverge @mgs
twitter got rid of RSS support a long time ago.
@davew @davidpierce @theverge @mgs Yes indeed. Our local paper of record #DallasNews got rid of their RSS years ago in favor of Twitter. Since November I had been using a hack with OpenRSS.org to fold their Twitter feed into my RSS reader. Today it's broken.
BJ Nicholls@davidpierce still happily using Feedly. Google's whims are the core problem with relying on their apps.
@davidpierce Great article—thank you for writing that. I was a big user of Google Reader and was saddened when they pulled the plug. I tried Feedly but didn’t like it.
Next, I joined Twitter since most of the sites I liked had a presence there and I didn’t want to join Facebook. And when Twitter started its death spiral I joined Mastodon. 😀
Opalium@davidpierce I feel like "a better X we could've have but threw in the trash" is a recurring theme in the last few years, and this worries me.
hojomo@davidpierce So, 3days old? I came here after reading your latest piece - Where are we all supposed to go now? Thought I'd be able to boost it, yeah RT, like we used to do on Twitter, and NOTHING! Verge also contribute to the mayhem, because you don't give us an app to sign into - if we want to join in the comments (a la YouTube) we have to "Sign in & Join" - duh? But then Verge isn't trying to be social is it? Not even for money & ratings? I think, like we got used to subs for streaming.....
Woozle Hypertwin@davidpierce Why do you say "we"? Nobody except Google made that decision.
@davidpierce of course
"Ultimately, Wetherell ended up spending some of his 20 percent time — Google’s famous policy of letting employees work on just about whatever they wanted, which ironically died about the same time Reader did — building Fusion into a more complete feed-reading product. It handled RSS, Atom, and more. After a while, he wound up showing it to the folks building iGoogle, the company’s recently launched web-homepage product. (iGoogle has since been killed, of course.)"