I was upset when Reader was killed. But looking back and seeing what Google has become over time, I think it was for the best. Now we have entire companies that only do one thing: RSS, and they are good at it. If Reader was still a thing, I’m afraid it would have extinguished RSS.

Names matter, and Reader told everyone that it was for reading when it could have been for so much more. “If Google made the iPod,” he says, “they would have called it the Google Hardware MP3 Player For Music, you know?”

This is funny, but I think Reader was a good name. At least it reflected what I want to do with the product.

Google didn’t just kill Reader that day, they killed my relationship with Google.

There have been plenty of services I used at Google that they killed however Reader was the one that didn’t have any good alternative. It was the one that hurt the most, and I don’t think I have signed up for a single Google service since the day Reader was killed.

That was really the moment people realized Google is going downhill.

I moved off Gmail, GDrive. Use DDG for personal stuff and only Google at work. The only irreplaceable thing seems to be YouTube but whatever. I am not trusting any new product from Google.

God, I miss Reader. It really was a great thing that Google ruined because they couldn’t somehow cram ads into it.

Such a good retrospective. Reader was amazing.

Gunshot

Who killed Hannibal?

Man, google makes great stuff and ruins it.

I always wondered why Google took this choice. With the help of this article I understand now.

RSS ist still not dead but many commercial websites and platforms are not interested in this because it is harder to monetize.

Although the advantages are obvious. An RSS feed is much more accessible in many ways. It is most times better readable, sortable, offline savable and more efficient to get. What is even better for the environment because a with scripts and external content overloaded web page has a much higher carbon fingerprint.

Google Reader died and so ATOM/RSS will because the lack of commercial success.

Google was angsting so much about Facebook’s success at the time, and weirdly enough if Google was actually good at product management, Google Reader would have been a great basis for creating a social network. Instead they went all in for Google+, whose value proposition over Facebook was… well… slightly nicer web animations.

Google’s an Ad company, and if a product can’t track you and feed you junk ads and seo-gamed content, then it’s not a google product. We see this time and time again. Maybe it’s a good thing? People can take research or ideas (from google or being ex-googlers themselves) and build a better company around the idea/app not shackled by Google’s ad business.

I am more upset that Firefox never really did anything with RSS. Killing projects is kind of Google thing. But Firefox markets itself as the free and open alternative, yet just repeats all the bad things Google does. The little RSS support that Firefox had was removed in 2018.

That said, more broadly speaking I think RSS was and still is fundamentally flawed. It exists has this weird thing outside the Web instead of just being Metadata on the Web itself. The information inside RSS should have been something you can automatically generate by parsing good old HTML markup, not something the server has to provide separately.

Despite all the hype around “Semantic Web”, there is still nothing semantic about the Web. Even extremely common markup elements are missing (e.g. no markup for forum comments and replies, everybody still has to use <div>). At least we finally got a <time> tag, but even that came well over a decade late and plenty of sites are still not using it (this one here).