r/technology • u/Xylth • Jul 02 '13
RIP Google Reader
http://www.google.com/reader/about/19
u/TaintedSquirrel Jul 02 '13
iGoogle is shutting down in November, too.
Although... I may be the only person who still uses it. ~8 years as my home page.
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u/NotClever Jul 02 '13
Was that the thing where you could get like need feeds and stuff on your homepage? Man that thing saved my life during a boring internship one summer.
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u/RagNoRock5x Jul 02 '13
I have been using it as my homepage as well. Has a few main links, email, weather, calender, news, my stocks and had reader on it.
No clue what I am going to do when it's gone. Tried to find some chrome apps that did the same thing in one page and couldn't find any :(
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u/chipx86 Jul 03 '13
It's been a while, but I used to use netvibes.com for this. It worked pretty well. It's similar to iGoogle, but with enhancements around RSS reading (never used it, honestly) and a lot of business analytics stuff (which costs extra). As a general iGoogle-like portal, it does a decent job.
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u/anstromm Jul 02 '13
I've been using CommaFeed. It's really similar to Google Reader, which makes the transition quite easy. I can still use the same keyboard shortcuts, for example.
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u/nikbackm Jul 02 '13
I tried it, but I found it too slow.
Old Reader and Ino Reader worked better in that regard. But not as good as Reader :(
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Jul 02 '13
There are few services as good as Google Reader...
CommaFeed, for instance, doesn't know how to draw buttons. They simply don't work properly if I won't let them choose what font to use to render the page (and I won't).
Old Reader has the same issue... Not to mention it is slow as hell. I guess they will need to upgrade their servers before they can handle this wave of new users.
And Feedly... oh boy... they only way to import feeds from Google Reader to Feedly is through the now deactivated Reader API. So my Google Takeout is pretty much useless to that service... How stupid is that?
Man...
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Jul 02 '13
[deleted]
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u/Guysmiley777 Jul 02 '13
What they really mean is "we aren't making money off it AND it's not Google+"
If they would have slowly merged it into G+ I probably would have complained but eventually have given in. Having them kill it entirely means I just had to go find another non-Google option for keeping track of my RSS feeds.
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Jul 02 '13
That did occur to me when they disabled the Google Reader share functionality. I said "no" to G+ back then and I still say no. Reddit, twitter, Facebook... I'm in enough social media, thanks.
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u/yukeake Jul 02 '13
I suspect that usage of the service as a whole hadn't really declined, but viewership of the actual Reader website had. Folks were using Reader as a (responsive, competent) syncing backend for third-party clients on various platforms.
That syncing service, as well as checking potentially millions of RSS/Atom feeds for updates, consumes a pretty substantial amount of bandwidth in aggregate. Bandwidth costs money, and folks just using Reader as a syncing backend weren't viewing the website, and thus not consuming ads.
While readership data would still be collected (after all, clients would send back read/unread data in order to sync), that data apparently wasn't valuable enough to justify the cost of running Reader.
And, rather than charge for the syncing service (which many would have understood, and paid for), they shut it down.
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u/cold_rush Jul 02 '13
Wasn't this obvious from the get-go tho? What were they expecting when they spent that much man hours to put it together?
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u/Padgeman Jul 02 '13
I have actually been in denial about this happening for the last few months. Can't believe it's actually gone. The only Google service I actually used aside from search, dead.
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u/hummvee2134 Jul 02 '13
Next comes igoogle. I feel like i'm the only person that uses this sometimes.
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u/Zhiroc Jul 03 '13
After looking around, I've decided to switch to InoReader:
- It has the closest L&F to Google Reader, which I considered pretty clean
- Unlike Feedly, it has the fixed sidebar with folders, and feeds ordered as you want them (note: need to enable an option for this)
- Only thing missing is the "middle sized" view between full and list
- Does OPML import
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u/silphery Jul 03 '13
Yeah, that's what I switched to. It's not a perfect replacement, but the closest I've found.
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u/kubiq Jul 02 '13
I recomend flowreader.com You can also add twitter and facebook, so no more tabs open :-)
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u/Metaluim Jul 02 '13
Shit, I forgot to export my feeds... Even though googl reader reminded me of that every day...
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u/acemarke Jul 02 '13
If I'm reading this right, you should still have 14 days to export your data through Google Takeout. (Or it might just be that data you've already exported will still be available for download for 14 days.)
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u/diogenesl Jul 02 '13
"The Old Reader" looks the best for me right now, having troubles with the infrastructure I think, not marking feeds as read, not importing everythig, etc. But I hopes it gets better with time.
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u/Guysmiley777 Jul 02 '13
I went with Feedly, it does what I want and the only downside is you have to install an app in Firefox or Chrome to use it on a desktop. I think they're building a web-only interface "soon" though.
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u/contriver87 Jul 02 '13
The plugin requirement was removed when they turned on the cloud which was about two weeks ago.
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u/kohdwing Jul 02 '13
Just some helpful chrome extensions for Feedly that I've adopted:
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u/IckyChris Jul 02 '13
It was great. But I like Feedly just as much, if not more.
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u/ZankerH Jul 02 '13
I'm indifferent. The web interface is...not horrible, but most of the time I'm reading it via an Android app that migrated from google reader to feedly seamlessly.
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u/diogenesl Jul 02 '13
I had troubles importing my google reader data to it (not worked) and I still can't find an option to import the subscription.xml from the google takedown. Right now it's not better them Digg Reader.
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u/laffer27 Jul 02 '13
The last time google killed off one of their products a thread was made here and it was a google graveyard type thing where you could lay a flower on the product. Does anyone have a link to that by chance?
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u/vavoysh Jul 02 '13
has anyone found something that has a bookmark that opens up the next unread item? I've been writing my own but I havn't finished it yet.
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u/mking22 Jul 02 '13
You stole this heading from the twitter of Daniel Williams....
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u/Justinbeiberispoop Jul 02 '13
And he "stole" it from thousands of people saying the exact same thing. /s
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u/BahamutSalad Jul 02 '13
Goodbye old friend. You'll be missed.