Very interesting point. I think free is good when it comes to code, apps, etc... things that can be copied and distributed. It creates a good shared base of stuff on which to build.
But when it comes to services, totally free can sometimes be bad. That's because there's no such thing as a service that's free to run, so the money has to come from somewhere. Either the service is being monetized through some backdoor method -- usually something involving privacy intrusion or data mining -- or it's what economists call "dumping."
Dumping is when you flood a market with free or below-cost goods to kill competitors, and then jack up the price or even kill the market when the competitors are gone. The best example in software is Internet Explorer, which (prematurely) killed the market for browsers and led to the horrible age of total IE dominance of the web.
Google Reader may well have been -- whether intentionally or not -- dumping. If it was intentional, it might be an effort to kill RSS entirely. The big players -- Google, Facebook, etc. (are there more?) -- all have a vested interest in killing independent less centralized ways of aggregating knowledge in order to steer all traffic to them.
I still use a Mac reader called NewsFire. It hasn't been updated in a long time though. I don't even remember if I paid for it, but if it's free I would certainly be willing to pay. Maybe the authors of such apps can capitalize on this.
I've been reposting this for almost four years now and I hope that this meme can stick. It's not about dumping, per se, or about sour grapes or different competition philosophies - it's about recognizing when the interests of a provider are NOT the same as your interests.
if not there already, we should put up quick poll of top x Google Reader alternatives that everyone can vote on (put it on Google Docs to add a bit of irony) w/ a light column for use case (which OS, browsers, etc).
every blog publisher then points to the poll as addendum to each post going fwds, informing readers to choose one in order to keep reading via rss.
can include some directions on exporting GR feeds for any of the GR subs that don't already help the reader do so.
granted requires some work, and we still will lose some users, but overall isn't something like this (or a better idea?) required to ensure blogs/rss ecosystem don't lose readers that don't know there are good alternatives and won't necessarily seek alternatives on their own?
Wasn't that how Rockefeller killed off small local competitors? First sell at prices cheaper than it costs to buy new stock so that small businesses went broke, and abuse the fact that you're big enough to last longer then they do. Then when there is no competition, rise prices again.
I dunno, I was told this once a long time ago and I don't know anything about Rockefeller. I see no flaws with the tactic though (aside from the ethical ones).
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Good that there are laws against it (kind of to be expected - if there weren't natural selection would result big corporations doing it all the time).
When RSS gained popularity I got myself a decent RSS reader and subscribed to a lot of feeds. What happened was that after a short period of time I had +1000 unread posts. At this point I stopped using RSS for a while because it was just too much noise. A few months back I discovered RSS again for myself but this time I did not subscribe to every site I found interesting. There are a lot of news sites which I visit often and they also have a feed in most cases. I do not subscribe to them because I visit them anyway and they are most of the time high volume feeds. Instead I only subscribe to sites (almost always interesting blogs from fellow developers) who write a new post maybe three times a year or so and I only subscribe to blogs from developers/people who only post if they have something very important to say. This made RSS useful to me again because I would never every remember to visit all those sites twice a year… If I see a unread item in my RSS reader I know that I have to read this post soon because it will blow my mind again.
FWIW, an acquaintance of mine worked on one of the early RSS readers (Bloglines, I think). He mentioned that they had run some analytics on their users and found that the typical user would join, add a bunch of feeds, then slowly add more feeds over time until they had a ton of feeds and then would either delete a bunch of feeds or quit using the reader entirely.
I found that kind of funny. They were clearly deriving value from the reader, or they wouldn't've joined or kept adding feeds in the first place; but if they were feeling burdened or oppressed by their reader, why didn't they just stop adding feeds? Or if they had to keep finding new feeds, prune back the old feeds a bit. Why load up on feeds until you need to do a burst of spring cleaning or quit entirely?
There's probably a lesson in ensuring that high-value items show up, and "noisy" feeds have lower visibility, or similar work to make it feel like the user is not obligated to read everything (i.e., make it feel like work).
Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has that).
> Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has that).
I dunno about Bloglines then or now (whoever bought it threw out all the old code and started over), but at least in Google Reader, there is an option to, in the sidebar, omit feeds with no updates. I checked that option. It saves a lot of space for me.
Which is possibly one of the reasons Google Reader was so successful, it sort of looked like it had categories and stuff and satisfied people who thought that was important, but it was really river-of-news at its heart.
I used it somewhat this way but also subscribed to some big prolific sites that I don't happen to visit that often and then once in awhile, in Reader, I'd glance at the newest 50 items in their list. I didn't have a problem ignoring > 50% of the feeds in my list but still keeping them in my list.
I'd read the feeds I most care about and once in awhile visit the ones I less cared about.
I loved Bloglines and only reluctantly switched to Reader. Like you I mostly used it as a way to check less prolific blogs including blogs by friends and family.
Funny how when unsustainable startups threaten old line industries - newspapers, taxis, hotels, music - with free or rock bottom pricing it's innovation. But when internet companies do this to one another it's the end of the world (literally described as "the apocalypse").
How about we be consistent and say to the developers of paid RSS aggregators -- who built their products on free content in the first place -- that if they don't like innovation or hopeful investments driving prices to zero, they are in the wrong business. Somehow I think if Google had offered any one of them a ton of money to buy their reader and make it free they'd have jumped at the chance. Instead Google built an excellent offering of their own and people are whining.
He's saying that non-techies don't realise that Google Reader != RSS. So won't seek an alternative rss product, hence blogs losing lots of readers. The apocolypse refers to that. I suspect that won't happen as plenty of 'alternative to google reader' articles popping up.
"I remember back when RSS was amazing and something you paid for. I also remember when Google Reader showed up and very quickly started taking over. It was free. It was Google (back before we were all scared of Google) and it wrecked the market for all of the paid RSS services."
His last sentence:
"This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad."
I see what you're saying, that he thinks users are part of the mechanism, but the bottom line is he thinks this apocalypse can be traced back to Google Reader being free.
Embrace, extend an extinguish applies even more to Google's killing support for CalDAV in favor of it's own protocol now that pretty much everyone is using Google Calendar.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Only where Microsoft at least still cared about keeping it's (corporate) customers happy (and therefor providing some long term certainty), the only customers Google cares about are advertisers. They will ruthlessly kill off whatever doesn't suit them.
Being the product in Google's universe will suck worse than being the reluctant consumer in Microsoft's universe.
RSS was dead for non-techies before this too, which is why the audience for Google Reader was so small: it was only techies. Non-techies have simply been using Facebook and Twitter all this time, and now they will just continue to use Facebook and Twitter.
Techies on the other hand will migrate to other products, and RSS will keep chugging along as a techie-only protocol.
RSS and Google Reader itself has an awareness problem. These are just anecdotes, but I introduced Google Reader to multiple profoundly nontechnical friends and family members over the years. Literally every single one of them immediately fell in love with it, and never stopped using it. My mother, who completely lacks understanding of the idea that she can save a file to her computer and get it back later, for whom the web IS the computer, uses Google Reader daily to follow dozens of blogs.
It's not that Reader or RSS have no potential value to anyone who isn't "good with computers." It's that Google never bothered to tell anyone it existed! And why should they? Modern Google doesn't give a shit about the open web or decentralized culture, they want to "own social" and keep everything contained within their cancerous Facebook clone.
People I know who ask me why this mattered and why I used it seem to understand it when I explain it this way: Imagine being able to know when your favorite websites are updated, what that update is, follow the blogs or articles of your favorite writers, and not be limited to what some strangers decided they thought was kewl and up or downvoted.
A lot of people just didn't know you could have a service like Google Reader.
Following any more than a couple sites without this type of service, where you have to bookmark and visit the sites daily or periodically, makes it feel like you're changing channels on a TV without a TV guide view. Which is one reason why sites like this and reddit are so prominent.
In the original EEE, the only extinguished products would be the competitors', not Microsoft's. The point was to capture market share, and that doesn't quite work if you eliminate yourself as well.
And Google never really "extended" either. They didn't add new fields to RSS or made it incompatible in any way. The proof is that I was able to move to Tiny in 5 minutes using Google's own export tool.
A free product enters the paid marketspace, kills all 3rd party competition, then became the defacto standard.
Then it languished for years, but in RSS's case, the product with overwhelming market share gets killed rather than having 3rd parties slowly catch up.
Fortunately RSS aggregation is simpler to replace than an entire browser...
Was the paid market for RSS readers really that big before Google Reader? There were tons of free readers (as you say, it's a pretty simple product to make). I don't remember any big-name paid RSS readers.
NetNewsWire was huge if you were a Mac user, and was released in 2002. NewsGator had a Windows app and paid syncing service, and bought NNW (it's changed hands a few times, now at Black Pixel). Both of these predated Google Reader and were paid apps.
There are also plenty of paid apps in the mobile space that sync with Google Reader.
If the web had been as unpopular as RSS readers, things might have been different. In a health market, if the leader fails to innovate, competitors come in and steal share.
In an unhealthy market that's not growing any more (like RSS), things get a lot more stagnant because folks aren't actively making product choices any more and there's not a lot of incentive for new entrants.
I'm betting there's not a ton of innovation in the Gopher market, either.
An "application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet." RSS? No. That's a description of Gopher, from Wikipedia.
I just realized something... RSS is the new Gopher.
That description also describes HTTP, SPDY, and a bunch of other protocols. Relatively speaking, RSS never achieved the kind of popularity. Back in about 1993, there were more Gopher sites than HTTP sites.
I think his argument is that "paid" beats "free" because paid can support, whereas free is by definition relying on other revenue (advertising, other paid products) to support it.
When a paid product dies, it's (often) because the product wasn't doing well in the market. When a free product dies, it's because the company couldn't support it through their secondary revenue streams. The product may be the Best Thing EVARRR, but it's a casualty of failures elsewhere. The "bad" comment is likely because it's a lot easier to measure direct risks (i.e., risks associated with your product) than indirect ones (risks associated with your secondary business model, which likely isn't your area of expertise; if it was, you should be in business there).
My problem with the countless thousands of people who are taking this opportunity to gloat using that argument is that they basically are assuming their conclusion, since their argument goes something like this: "Paid services are less likely to shut down. Google Reader was not paid, therefore Reader was not less likely to shut down. Google Reader shut down, providing more evidence for this claim. We-told-you-so!"
But where does the original claim get its support? Are paid services less likely to shut down? We read on HN all the time about post-mortems of, yes, paid services. If we don't know that, then it's just a misleading post hoc argument (and in the counterfactual universe where Reader was a paid service, all the naysayers are now chorusing 'It's a Google service! You can't trust Google! We-told-you-so!').
Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down? I think the reason people intuitively believe this is because a free service has to do two things to be successful: provide a good quality, useful service to people, and provide a way to make money tied to that user base. A paid service really just has to provide a good quality, useful service - since that is what the people are paying for.
> Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down?
I find that hard, because I'm not a business person nor do I usually make the money-for-time tradeoff; hence I mostly only use free services and am mostly affected by free service shutdowns - in other words, selection bias makes my personal experiences unrepresentative. (Is this similar to other techies - like Hacker News users? I think it is.)
However, we can make the general observation that services only sometimes survive the business running them, and businesses shut down all the time. To give two personal examples of paid services I used that have stopped or will be stopping in the near future: Intrade has halted all trading during an investigation, and probably will wind up shutting down; Zeo Inc is shutting down as it looks for buyers of its assets, and while the web interface I've always used to export my data is not yet down, I don't give very high odds for it staying up for more than the next year.
In both cases, I paid good money to use them; it didn't save them.
Right. The problem is that there was a monoculture. Without competing alternatives, innovation stops and the product with a monopoly becomes a single point of failure.
I don't get it, what is supposed to be "new and shiny" about "here is an RSS feed, it will provide dated articles of content to consume from a web source, browse at your leisure". It does its job. It is the only thing on the Internet that does that job. It is the definition of a perfect product... because it just works.
And email is in the same class. Rich text formatted letters between individuals. I don't see how you want to "improve" that either, because it does its job right.
I do agree Reader did the job and therefor didn't have room to improve. Then again, I don't like all the social parts of feeds, I just want my content in a time ordered list of chunks that I can consume at my leisure. RSS does that just fine.
I know, I use one myself -- I meant that Google Reader was so dominant that the competition was much weaker than it could have been, and in some cases the alternatives aren't actually competition because they rely on Google Reader.
When I was building the source list for jkl.io noticed at lot of sites no longer offering RSS and even sites like Wordpress seem to be not offering it frequently (is this authors not turning it on, turning it off, or am I missing something?).
Hand scraping all these sites would be an exercise in insanity so now building an intelligent crawler is already something I have to do much earlier than I wanted. RSS really matters for the open web.
Most sites still have a feed even if the UI doesn't surface it. Pull up the source or Inspector and search for feed, atom, or rss. It's usually in the <head>
For niflet.com I skip sites that don't have an RSS / Atom feed. It's maybe 2% of them. For political sites maybe 10%; it seems a lot of those sites predated WordPress et al. You probably know this already, but for WordPress try adding "/feed" to the URL. This works for lots of other non-WP sites too. The blog author might not even know what an RSS feed is.
Yeah I've noticed a few hidden ones, perhaps I need to make a script and go back to check the ones I thought didn't have one. niflet.com looks great, I like the minimalism.
An alternative Narrative might be that RSS has a renaissance. People who used to think Reader was a magic way to read websites may now be forced to think about RSS as the way that happened. The standard may get some press again as a result. Already is getting some press in fact.
Can someone explain me, why Google shutting down their reader is such a big deal? I use Thunderbird as my RSS reader, and after two days of everyone panicking I feel like I missed something about RSS/Google Reader.
One of the biggest impacts are on those of us who use multiple devices to read feeds, Google Reader synchronized the read/unread status of all the elements so if you saw something on your phone you wouldn't see it again on your desktop (unless you starred it which is like +1 but just for yourself).
Synchronization, I use 5 computers (some with 2 OSs), 2 tablets and a phone for a great quantity of feeds with different frequency of weekly/monthly posts. I do not care how I read these posts but I care to sync them in all these device.
I felt the same way. What's dying down is the service NOT the RSS itself. There are still plenty of alterative to choose from. I use Feedly mainly now though honestly I don't use Feedly as much as before.
Same here. I use NetNewsWire which attempts to use Reader to sync, and does a somewhat poor job of it. Won't be a big deal, in any case. I had no idea so many people used Reader like this.
RSS as a content discovery tool is very valuable, especially on mobile devices where sifting through bookmarks and downloading entire pages is nearly impossible. The Google Reader app for Android works so well that it earned a spot on my phones home screen (one of the few apps besides email and messaging). I hope the next iteration of readers really focuses on mobile, where the greatest opportunity/need exists for RSS.
That's a bit silly IMO. If you've removed the way that those viewers like to view your content, even if they like you, they might not find a suitable replacement in their eyes to the tool they previously used. I have over 200 feeds in my RSS reader that I "consume". If that reader went away (which it is), then I'd probably pay attention to 10ish. Does that mean that I only "care" about those 10? Of course not. I like to monitor the others for headlines or keywords. Just because I don't read every one every day does not mean I don't care. And, when my reader goes away, I won't be back all b/c the medium I use will have changed.
It depends. If you use GReader to read 10 RSS, you can move to FB/Twitter/Mail newsletter.
If, like you or me, use GReader to read 200 feeds, you will find an alternative that suits your needs. Or code it, be it a full RSS parser, or just a greasemonkey addon to change feedly appearance.
Because you care about reading your news, one way or another.
Edit: one thing is special in this case: GReader users are more "power users" than usual. So we are not talking about TMZ site going down. That's why I think that people who really care will try to find an alternative.
I suspect any real competitor in the rss space will provide an instant import via the zip of bookmarks / feeds / etc soon anyway.
I'm just worried about an Android app that can fill Readers roll. I use it for reading webcomics since I can swipe left or right to move through my subscriptions, which is much more efficient than any other means to browse them on mobile.
I never found a Reader I liked until I began using KDE's <b>Akregator</b> (works fine in Mint XFCE as well) a few months ago. Very easy to use and add feeds to (nerdship not needed). I follow three-dozen podcasts and blogs daily ... impossible without it.
Very interesting point. I think free is good when it comes to code, apps, etc... things that can be copied and distributed. It creates a good shared base of stuff on which to build.
But when it comes to services, totally free can sometimes be bad. That's because there's no such thing as a service that's free to run, so the money has to come from somewhere. Either the service is being monetized through some backdoor method -- usually something involving privacy intrusion or data mining -- or it's what economists call "dumping."
Dumping is when you flood a market with free or below-cost goods to kill competitors, and then jack up the price or even kill the market when the competitors are gone. The best example in software is Internet Explorer, which (prematurely) killed the market for browsers and led to the horrible age of total IE dominance of the web.
Google Reader may well have been -- whether intentionally or not -- dumping. If it was intentional, it might be an effort to kill RSS entirely. The big players -- Google, Facebook, etc. (are there more?) -- all have a vested interest in killing independent less centralized ways of aggregating knowledge in order to steer all traffic to them.
I still use a Mac reader called NewsFire. It hasn't been updated in a long time though. I don't even remember if I paid for it, but if it's free I would certainly be willing to pay. Maybe the authors of such apps can capitalize on this.