Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten Ten years ago, on March 13, 2013, Google said it was discontinuing Google Reader, a popular application for reading RSS and Atom feeds. Google's decision to do so, part of a corporate initiative dubbed "Spring Cleaning," proved vexing enough to prompt a petition to save the application, though to no avail. The web app, …
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What happens when the crocs offer you a safe space on a mastodon server that turns out to be a trap?
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You guys are not going to believe what happened to me today, but I swear to you it's real. I have used firefox for many, many years. With at least 6 different ad and script blockers. DDG go as a search add on. I haven't touched a windows browser since forever.
Today, I was forced to log on with my pc to update a legit out of date software. I usually take an old mac, download from that, then transfer over to the pc by media card. THIS particular vender said no, you have to use a pc. I disabled updates for 30 days, then went into services and disabled from there. I cautiously turned on the wifi, and my pc/AI started humming. Fans and all. I knew it wasn't good, but it wasn't the usual bloat ware. This was different, and I didn't know what. After a few minutes I turned off my wifi and rebooted.
Guess what? It deleted my mozilla set up. It vanished.
Now it's trying to force me to use the AI instead. GFY windows. I will find a work around. This was a criminal act. You are criminals.
Please, check out these resources: https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/paranoia/about-paranoia/
I was very disappointed, but not that surprised, when Google killed Reader. Fortunately, feedly.com came along, allowed you to import your feed list and has a pretty good interface on desktop and mobile.
RSS can be such a useful tool, but who wants things that are useful that you can't make buckets of £££ with?
I have "Want my RSS" to expose the feeds and use Vienna to read them. StackOverflow allows you to subscribe to particular topcis like this.
RSS is limited, too limited to be useful for press releases, but it is piss easy to parse. Except for the inevitable extensions for longer articles which generally include images, multiple headings, etc.
That's a compliment from one geek to another. How many of us do things a certain way because we're perfectly happy doing so and it pleases us, even though we know there's easier methods? I took some time last night to use MP3Tag to tidy up the cover art and track listings of a couple of albums when it would be far easier just to stream from my Napster subscription than curate my own collection. Napster you ask? Why yes, I use a slightly crappy, more limited music service because it apparently pays a teensy bit more than Spotify per stream to the artists I cherish. Ans sometimes I listen to the same music on vinyl.
I came to this article using Feedly...
In my opinion, RSS-feeds allow one to easily find articles from the actual sources and from newsmedia with differing points of view - the opposite of the funneling into bubbles that seems omnipresent nowadays. (Note that it is up to oneself to find "interesting" or "relevant" feeds and to subscribe to them. And that feeds may suddenly stop, restart or start under another name.)
Half of the problem is that just when RSS feeds were starting to become relatively common on more general audience (less techie) sites (eg, BBC News) and you could start to explain to your friends how they could easily drag the RSS icon to their browser's bookmarks bar to subscribe (nice and simple UI, for a nice and useful feature), suddenly most of those sites got seduced by the dancing of a newly discovered bird with bright colourful plumage, which was beckoning them into its walled nest, and then it all started going downhill from there…
The Feedly interface is pretty easy, with the ability to search for feeds by name, rather than having to find and past-in a feed URL. Also has pretty nice grouping and management interface. Not perfect, but pretty good.
Also: there aren't all that many sites (certainly only one or two that I care about) that don't have an RSS feed. I put that down to 50% of web sites running on Wordpress, and Wordpress has RSS turned on by default. Comes for free and brings traffic to the site, so why would anyone turn it off?
When Google shut down Reader it became obvious that the way forward was to lean heavily towards software and on-line resources that were't controlled by big, greedy corporations like Facebook and Google. Linux instead of Windows. LibreOffice instead of Office. And hosting my own web sites and email instead of Gmail and Wordpress.com.
Over the last decade it has become abundantly obvious that none of these mega-corporations give a sweet god-damn about the end users. They just want to monetize everything and everyone to the maximum amount possible. That's why using their products has turned into a massive steeplechase race with multi-factor identification, massive amounts of data collection, and with "upgrades" that remove much-loved features to the benefit of the people making the profits off of you.
The Internet in its early days was a simpler, easier, faster thing. Heck, I can even remember the long-lost days when a search on Google actually turned up what you needed, not dozens of advertisements, and spam pages of no value. Yes, in the early days the Internet wasn't endlessly annoying, cluttered, and often dishonest.
Despite being an early adopter, and despite having worked "under the hood" to understand how it goes together, I'm finding that more and more I move away from the Internet to tools that don't waste my time, don't demand multiple passwords, and don't insult my intelligence.
My paper datebook is better than Google calendar. My printed books are better than the Kindle. My bank answers phone calls instead of directing me to a phone bank in Malaysia. And shopping at the local hardware store is better, and easier than spending an hour on Amazon trying to find what I need.
Really the history of the Internet will be one of one great idea after another that eventually become crap when the people who started it managed to bury users with crap and un-needed features, and turned a lovely tool into an annoyance. Whether it's Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Slack, the pattern is always the same. Until these corporations learn that sometimes the best next step is to sit on your hands and just let the thing function we'll just be heading for the next big disaster.
An alternative view is that Reader was part of Google's strategy of suckering people in to use its web sites when perfectly useable alternatives exist. Apart from alternatives other commentards have already mentioned there is Thunderbird which, together with its relatives such as Seamonkey, gathers mail, RSS and Usenet into a single application.
And in at least some browsers (I'm thinking it was Internet Explorer of all things that I remember), you could click on the RSS feed link and IE would ask if you wanted to subscribe right there. For all I know, other browsers are still doing this. I don't like my feeds processed by the browser, but it was a simple way to use them without needing to understand URLs.
And in at least some browsers (I'm thinking it was Internet Explorer of all things that I remember), you could click on the RSS feed link and IE would ask if you wanted to subscribe right there
In Vivaldi you get the RSS icon in the address bar when there's a feed available. You couldn't make it much simpler.
It was significant because it, for a lot of people, was the tipping point where Google became a company you couldn't rely on. Now they kill products with such ease and regularity that it's impossible for any consumer to commit to a Google service/product with any assurance it will still be there next month. Google lost a lot more than the user data of Reader users that day.
Indeed.
General rule of thumb I found was if I used and liked a Google product then it would at some point be discontinued.
Result of this was I have long since given up using any "new" Google products as I cannot rely on them staying available - about the only personal use Google product I regularly use is Android on my mobile (& market share of Android is so big that I'm probably safe with that for a while)
Here is the description of RSS I wish they'd written instead of the one they did:
When you're on a website which supports RSS, you can click "Subscribe", and whenever there is new content, it will promptly become available in your RSS reader. This is like "following" a person or page on social media, except that instead of allowing the social media platform to block and manipulate what you see for their benefit, you can see EVERYTHING, miss NOTHING, and can apply filters of your own choosing. An RSS reader looks like an email inbox, and depending on your preference, may show only a title and link to open in your browser, a picture and summary, or you may even read the whole thing right there in a unified fashion.
What I've never understood is why there was, and to a lesser extent still is, such wailing and gnashing of teeth over Google killing Reader. Mind you, I was then and still am now a heavy RSS user. But Reader was never the only tool in the toolbox, as Reader's own users must have known. I'm not saying this to start an argument; I'd really like to be educated.
[Why did it never get easy to subscribe to things in RSS?]
Didn't many places have a link you could click and open with Google Reader then bingo you were subscribed by checking a box? How much more easier did you want it?
Nowadays I have to find the RSS feed myself and copy and paste it in Feeder for Android so it is a tad more complicated but is not that hard.
Also Twitter definitely doesn't work as a RSS Feed unless you use a third party client that displays it like a RSS feed.
Even Outlook supported RSS feeds and may still do.
As Outlook was were I used to have to spend most of my time (as ex-employer didn't have any helpdesk software) I used to use that.
I do you Feedly, but I now pretty much use RSS just to follow a few webcomics so don't heavily rely on it
Vivaldi has an RSS reader now. OK, it's about as good as the one in Thunderbird (i.e. not very) and not up to the standard of, The Old Reader or NewsBlur, but at least it exists.
It actually seems to me that RSS is slowly getting more popular again, rather than less. Like last.fm scrobbling it hasn't gone away, but RSS is looking in better shape than it has for a while.
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