Google shreds Reader in new round of 'spring cleaning' Google is killing off Reader, its web-based RSS reading service, as part of its latest round of culling little-used or unprofitable products. A spring clean, if you will. The service will disappear on July 1st, 2013. Google’s reason for the termination, revealed in a blog post, follows: “There are two simple reasons for …
I honestly can't see how twitter could ever replace RSS for feed aggregation. The twitter stream always inevitably ends up getting horribly polluted with shit and the 140 character limit is just too limited for a news feed model. Does anyone know of any other good web based RSS aggregators that work across multiple platforms and devices? (Windows, linux and android preferably).
I know, I know, it's free so you don't complain because you are getting more than what you're paying for. With free services you are the product, not the service itself. And all that. First was iGoogle, my home page for the last few years. Now is Reader, the place I visit most frequently from my iGoogle home page.
While Google is perfectly free to kill whatever service they want, and to be honest, they do it in a very gentle way, what with giving you a means of exporting your list of feeds, they need to be aware that what they are killing with each "spring cleaning" is not only a few products and services.
What they are destroying is the trust that I, and I suppose many others, had on Google as a "user first" entity that looked for ways of helping people organizing information, turning a nice profit as a side effect.
We have plenty of other companies out there trying to MBA-maximizing short term profits, cross-leveraging their product portfolio to push people to use their offerings designed to maximize the amount of data they can sell and playing dirty tactics to outflank the competition instead of competing on quality. We don't need another, thank you.
Now, I suppose lots of people are rethinking where are they placing their blog posts, their videos, their photos. Because if they can kill an immense popular service like Reader, what's next? Blogger? Picasa? YouTube?
You've got to wonder about YouTube. By all accounts they make a hefty loss on it, and they haven't managed to turn a profit with more-and-more intrusive advertising, because the bandwidth costs are so high. It also brings them into conflict with the media industry, who they'd like to buddy-up with to sell stuff through Play. Was YouTube one of the reasons they failed to get much content for Google TV?
On the other hand YouTube is one of the most visited sites on the internet, and there would be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth if it went away. Plus it may be they're closer to making a profit (or at least breaking even) than people think.
I'm looking at Feedly at the moment, partly as it offers both a Web interface and an iOS app, but also because it can link up to Google Reader (so hopefully I can lift-and-shift my feeds, etc. over to Feedly with minimal hassle).
Perhaps I'm overlooking it (perhaps to be expected, as I'm new to Feedly), is that I can't find the option to set up a distinct Feedly account, as opposed to "piggybacking" on your Google login. Given that I'm joining Feedly BECAUSE Google is retiring Reader, I don't want my Feedly setup - if I stay with them - to have any dependence on the Chocolate Factory.
Perhaps if I get the Feedly app on my iPhone, it might give me the chance to create an account there?
I now have Feedly running as a Firefox plugin under Windows and as Android apps on tablet and phone. A Chrome plugin and iOS app are also available. It uses my Google login to pull Google Reader feed subscriptions across and as stated above, they are developing their own backend to give a seamless handover when Google kill Reader. Not sure how I'll 'login' when that happens.
Feedly is a bit 'graphic artist' and is full of space between items. There is a 'list' view that seems to work in the FF plugin but I always get the 'magazine' view in the Android app and they seem very keen to put great big photos everywhere. The Google Reader had wonderfully sparse and simple layout and I miss it already, even though it's not dead yet.
Feedly is very nice - better than Reader. Just downloaded it when I read the comments here on my Android - much better in that it opens links directly inside Feedly - no need to navigate back and forth between browser and Reader.
Feedly is definitely a drop-in replacement - it grabbed all my feeds from Reader instantly. I installed it, told it I was a Reader user, and instantly all my feeds were there. Seems to load material faster than Reader as well. Kind of glad this happened - otherwise I wouldn't have found a better reader.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I was annoyed to learn that iGoogle will be withdrawn and now am more annoyed that Reader will go the same way. As for CalDAv, I don't think I use it but I can imagine why people are pissed off. Many commentards here are venting their spleen (and other bodily parts) so, if we're so smart, what can we do about it?
Would it be viable to develop a cloud based service that gives synchronised data/feeds/services using apps across many platforms to replace these lost services? How much would any of you be prepared to pay to subscribe to such a service?
Please, put a business plan together and Kickstart it or something. I'd be interested in subscribing to such a service but I suspect that we'll all develop new ways of working/consuming and get used to whatever new personal arrangements we make.
CalDAV is for the calendar (if you use it). CardDAV is how your iPhone syncs it's contacts with GMail. And then there's IMAP for the emails. As I understand it, since they killed Exchange Active Sync for new users, you now have to set up 2 accounts to connect your iPhone to Google.
The GMail account set-up in the iPhone is set up to sync mail and calendars, so it may be that the Google Calendar API is already used, rather than CalDAV. You then set up the second account to sync contacts by CardDAV.
If you set your iPhone up before January this year, then it can do all 3 using EAS - and the deadline for killing that has been extended (that's how my iPad works). But if you've set up a new iPhone since (as I have) then you have to do it a different way. Messy.
Ah, CardDAV - I was getting mixed up with that. I re-checked the iPhone settings, and I'm pretty sure the setup there is how you described it (GMail for mail/calendars, CardDAV for contacts).
I was nervous that Google might be doing something rash and ill-advised by canning CalDAV - as the Reader announcement shows, it wouldn't be the first time :-(
It's not so much Reader itself going away as the API used by various desktop and mobile apps to sync feeds across multiple devices. Some of those apps will still work, but without the sync (such as NetNewsWire), others seem to have been designed as Google Reader clients (such as Reeder), and seem likely to break horribly...
The long-established FeedDemon won't be developed any further (http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.html), others may follow.
There's definitely scope for a service to sync RSS - I'd pay for that...
I'm giving Feedly a whirl at the moment (as a potential GR replacement), and it looks like it could do the trick, except it bothers me that Feedly appears to "piggyback" on Google's authentication, and I can't find a way to set up a "discrete" (separate) Feedly account.
Any other "cloud-based" RSS aggregators (with or without iOS app) that can import OPML from GReader, but don't depend on it in any other way?
About half my daily desktop web browsing comes from Reader, and almost 100% of my Android phone and tablet browsing comes from articles linked in Reader. Being the only service I know that seamlessly syncs across all devices, I'm going to miss it.
And what of all the news aggregation sites and blogger types who use Reader as their main source of finding stories? Before those stories filter up into the web2.0 world of retweets, Likes and (lol) +1's someone has to find them and get the ball rolling. Reader is one of the most convenient and well-established sources for doing that.
I read the news and was rather pissed off, as someone who is something of a news/information junkie Reader was a nice way to get through lots of feeds quickly and easily at work and home.
Now i'm thinking, why bother, get some time back and just ignore lots of the shit that passes for news these days and do something a little more productive...
I love Reader. I was most upset when they lost the ability to share a select list of posts (outside G+) but could cope with that.
I then used it to help a blogger who had moved (and lost) all their posts - I exported their entire archive for them from Reader, and lo, they managed to import them onto their newly hosted blog.
Don't kill it!
It's Google spring cleaning time again!
As per usual we're killing off our least used products. This time around those are gmail, AdWords, and Search. The Google domain itself will redirect to Starbucks which is were you'll be able to find us all. We hope the minor inconvenience to the customers of our least used services won't affect your overall enjoyment of your Google experience. Ask for a triple frothy cloudy and get a 10% Googly discount!
I've been using Reader for years, probably the third most used Google product after search and mail. Obviously the resources it was consuming is too much and isn't being adequately supported by ad revenue, but the "if it works, don't fix it" mantra should have stepped in.
Not happy at all. It's how I've been consuming my news from tech, local news sites, F1, & all sorts for years. Hell, we've got a decent number of subscribers for our RSS feed that contains new products added to our site.
Truly pathetic how everyone bitches about Google using harvesting all their information blah blah blah, and totally forgetting all the free stuff they get, those same people then go off crying like children when those free services are culled.
It's a give and take relationship with Google. You get lots of free stuff in exchange for a little personal information.
Or did you REALLY expect to give nothing and get lots of free stuff?
Well that's all very well. Except they're killing the free services, while still harvesting the data.
Also if Google do something, and give it away for free, then they could kill or damage existing, and stop new, paid-for services getting to market.
Actually I'm starting to wonder if we should look seriously at banning and/or regulating a lot of free services. It can be very market distorting if companies offer stuff for free, when they're getting their cash from a different-but-related market. Look at 'free' mobile phones on contract for example. Customers end up paying much more for the phones, get locked into long contracts and the features available on phones get dictated by the telcos rather than the customers. It was also bad for the environment as people updated and threw away perfectly good dumb phones each year, just to get the latest shiny that was little different. As happens the market somewhat corrected, as the manufacturers and telcos got a righteous spanking from Apple.
Obviously it's up to Google how they run the their company. I don't believe the shareholders get much of a say, as the executives own disproportionate amounts of voting stock compared to the financial value of their holdings. But if they do an awful lot of stuff for the information or the customer goodwill, and still make almost all their cash from advertising. They probably don't want to get a reputation as behaving completely randomly though. You gain some nice PR from giving things away for free, but you create more bad-feelings from stopping a free service than you created goodwill when you started it. Do that too often and you're basically spending money on anti-marketing...
My main use of Reader is for the Android podcast app Listen. They neutered Listen last year by taking away the search function but it was still easy enough to add podcast feeds manually. Reader now going altogether will sadly make my favourite (non-browser) app totally useless :(
Can Google Currents handle podcasts?
Thanks Andrew, I've got DoggCatcher on my list to try, along with some other names I've picked up: Stitcher, PocketCast, BeyondPod and Podkicker. I basically just want something that's easy to add a custom RSS link to, will download the podcasts automatically and if necessary store them until I get round to catching up on them two months later! I shouldn't be too difficult to please.
And on the question of whether Google Currents will do Podcasts, the answer turns out to be Yes... and No. It's fairly simple to add an RSS feed and listen to a *current* edition of a podcast. From what I can make out, there's no facility to listen to older episodes or store them in any way. The clue is in the name I suppose :/
So last year I spent an age transferring all my RSS stuff over from iGoogle to Reader. Shouldn't have bothered - they're killing this too. Won't be trusting Google any more with any hosted services. Tempted to close our work Postini account too so we can implement a graceful exit strategy before they pull the rug out from under us there.
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