I just wish Google would have been straight-up about this, had a big blog post saying "Here is why we think RSS needs to be replaced, and we've got some big plans to replace it, which involve a, b, c, and existing standard d. It's a bit abrupt but we're coming out with X on timeline Y."
Not this cryptic bullshit. It's like breaking up with someone by just never returning their calls.
This has nothing to do with thinking RSS is dead or needs to be replaced, or whatever. It's just closing a feature request that was never going to be implemented. It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be an RSS reader anyways.
And it doesn't preclude the implementation of Chrome extensions which provide that functionality. It's merely a statement that it won't be integrated into the browser.
(Which is fine by me. Chrome doesn't need to try to be everything to everybody. For that, there's the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite.)
and the closing comment on this bug points to two new ones. I'm not sure why a bug no one cared about until today is getting people this riled up. I'm a loooong time Reader user and certainly never cared about RSS support in the browser (I used to use the RSS button in Firefox years ago, but that was honestly hit or miss on if it would enter the Reader workflow correctly, so I eventually just always searched for the URL in Reader directly).
This story seems like people jumping at another chance to further shame google on the Reader front, which is fine, but this seems like a somewhat dishonest opening for it, especially considering the directness of the closing comment.
> It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be an RSS reader anyways.
Well, I can understand that it might not have been for everyone, but it was super convenient to be able to read RSS "folders" in Firefox. I'm a Chrome/Chromium fanboy these days--I use it on all of my devices--but I still miss that feature. If you don't want to use a certain functionality, it's easy to just avoid it; you can't ever use something that isn't implemented, though.
Clicking on a bookmark and seeing the most recent BBC headlines, for example, was awesome.
Some people want a random subset of news for entertainment. G+ is great for that. Here's a great big pile of recent stuff from everyone, a circle, or a community.
On the other hand, lets say I want to verify I read every story from certain sources (perhaps the BBC?) exactly, precisely once. I don't see a way in the G+ UI to "mark as read" or "only display unread" or whatever. Might exist or might be a weird way to hack it in, but its not intuitive.
For some reason option #1 is semi-popular among news readers, social networking, and old fashioned or online broadcasting, but option #2 is nearly universal among email clients and podcast clients. You'd never use an email client with a UI of "here's a random collection of some recent emails" with no way to tag them as read or deleted. I'd LOL at the idea of a podcast client with "here's a random cast that you may or may not have already heard"
Another horrible UI fail is time based. G+ can only do one linear "newest to oldest" sort. Even the dumbest RSS feed readers have some kind of tag/save/star feature. So you can skim the whole feed, star/save/tag good stuff for later detailed reading. Then once there is no "unread" left, start reading the star/save/tag stories in detail, perhaps much later. This "workflow" is impossible in G+ as near as I can tell.
Finally no one using the "RSS" workflow uses G+, so you get the chicken and the egg thing, where there's no demand for even the most primitive of workflow management in G+ because anyone wanting anything like that uses RSS. So the BBC is a bad example in that their social networking people are probably required to use both, but I suspect that 99% of my RSS feeds are not available in G+ because they self segregate by workflow. You'll need a bigger shock to the system than cancelling goog reader. I switched to newsblur once the crushing demand let up a bit. I'm not going to abandon everything I currently enjoy to watch cat videos on G+.
In addition to VLM's excellent points about the horrible Google+ UI, the feed system is open while Google+ is proprietary and closed. Why should the BBC subsidize Google's business? Why should all of us miss out on innovation which can't happen before Facebook/Twitter adds a feature and Google copies it? Reader might have been the most popular client but there are a ton of tools and services which do interesting things using feeds, none of which are possible in a walled garden.
He does not say that it's a coincidence. He says that the event has probably brought back this issue, and that they have closed it to avoid false hope (since it should have been closed a long time ago according to the last post).
And the closing message is quite clear about this, there's no hidden agenda there, they've just never planned to implement this (and rightly so in my opinion since it would have bloated the browser for something that can easily be an extension).
"The web" has a specific meaning, and IRC and Usenet are not generally considered part of it.
RSS is -- the essential concept was even included in the initial vision for the web:
>With help from Robert Cailliau, [Berners-Lee] published a more formal proposal (on 12 November 1990) to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.[4] This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available."
RSS doesn't have to be a "content" it can be used as metainformation. Here's the obvious UI experience:
You've got lots of bookmarks. Much as browsers recently started downloading and displaying "favicons" (well, maybe not so recently, I'm an old timer), there is no reason a browser can't download the RSS feed from a site and compare the date of the most recent update to the latest date in the browsers history log. In other words if there's something new, its "bold" in my bookmarks and if not, its regular.
Now this is opt-in spamable, if you're running a journalist site or ecommerce, of course you doctor your sites feed to always appear new in someone's bookmarks even if its the same old recycled garbage. But there's more to the 'net than online stores and tabloid journalism.
Another novel user experience would be the trend of turning the "address/URL bar" into a search gateway bar. I think it fairly logical that if I use the "search" bar it should search and prioritize results from RSS feeds I subscribe to, below my own bookmarks and above generic web search results (aka google)
I don't think RSS is very interesting as "content" or an "app" but it could be pretty useful as metainformation.
Man, is it annoying when writers don't know the difference between the internet and the web. Maybe we could have a little test on the account-creation page?
Most of the feeds I read are HTML excerpts with a link to the full article, or notifications with a link to a page. It makes perfect sense to read them within a browser, as I do in Opera.
Note that I didn't say you shouldn't read your RSS feeds in the browser, just that it isn't necessary for it to be part of the core browser itself. Extensions, web apps, etc. are all ways of reading RSS in the browser without it being directly incorporated.
I like that Opera handles feeds the same as email.
Another alternative on Windows is surprisingly IE. The user interface is actually similar to GR where you can read multIple feeds at once when you organIze them In folders. I used it before I switched to GR. It can also import/export OPML
Dude don't play stupid. They don't want people to separate content from form (which would you classify ads as?) which at end of the day means cutting out rss except for twitteressque tidbit links.
You can certainly monetize via RSS ("click through to view the full story"). The is a push towards Google+ and reclaiming resources spent on Google Reader, nothing more.
That wake up call was when they strangled the Reader social community and started pushing Google+ so heavily on Gmail users: this social network wasn't going to be the kind of service you joined because you wanted to, it would be the sort which is even more hassle to ignore than to use.
They didn't need to extend, because virtually everyone using RSS was using their reader.
In a way you could say they "extended" the readers, by providing a better one than existing ones. Better enough, that "nobody" cared to make a competitor, until it was clear it was going to die.
So yeah, it's close enough to embrace, extend, extinguish to me.
The Microsoft extinction was of every product except theirs. The purpose of EEE was to eliminate the competition and capture all the market, and it's kind of hard to do that when you eliminate yourself.
Not to mention, that we can not really say they extended the readers, because the extensions didn't make them incompatible and so prevented people from moving, like the EEE did.
I'm glad people are losing some misplaced trust in Google, but let's not blindingly apply labels to this.
I didn't say it was a suitable replacement. It's hardly an uncommon notion that they're trying to push people to Google+. Most of the behavioral defenses of killing Reader have to do with the fact that "social" won. (I disagree. Different use-cases)
Except that makes no sense in terms of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. The only extending had nothing to do with RSS as a standard, it was keeping archives of feeds around for nearly forever. Everyone loved that feature and the UI, at least more than many of the competing feed readers, so they used it. That's exactly how you want things to compete in a market.
Which brings me to the next point: what market are you even talking about? There were never any profits in the RSS reader market. The only real market was one of interest by users, which Google Reader pretty legitimately competed in and still retained a large number of users (even if by "it's good enough to not bother switching").
There are still a ton of feed readers still around and still free (it's just consuming XML, after all). The ones that people are jumping to are the ones that have worked on their usability and are offering to take money to guarantee the feature that google didn't: storing feed history.
Yeah, they did this whole RSS needs replaced thing already and they called it Atom... I think syndication and walled gardens don't mix very well. EDIT: Not that that is what's actually going on here. I don't even know why I'm commenting on this kind of frenzy creating garbage anyway :(
There is no conspiracy here. That feature wasn't going to be brought back to Chrome, and should have been closed a long time ago. Shutting down Reader shined a light on this issue, so if they hadn't closed it before now is a logical time to close it.
Cutting off comments make sense as well as there isn't going to be constructive discussion at this point. Constructive discussion has already been had and a decision was reached. Having comments open at this point just inviting people to grind their axes.
I honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about. Chrome browser will not support RSS natively, seems like they never had the intention to do so to begin with. Why are we up in arms about a product not supporting some specific feature? Why are we equating that with some evil plot?
...there have never been any plans to implement this natively in Chrome.
I don't know why this bug has been left open for years, making it look as
if we're considering this, when we're not. It just gets people's hopes
up, and then makes them bitter when years go by with no action.
This about sums it up for me, and it's completely understandable.
By "somewhere" you mean "at the top of every Gmail page"? Then yes, I'd figure that something Google prominently displays at the top of every Gmail page is probably pretty important to them.
I mean... when something is widely displayed in the middle of a list of things that includes
* Gmail
* Google Docs
* Google Calendar
* Google Photos
* Google Search
and nothing else, then I would naively consider it to be roughly as "core" as the other things on the list. You wouldn't? Why not?
I've never thought about a definition of a "core product" before, but it seems to me that it would be something that the company takes seriously, dedicates a lot of time on, and consciously depends on for user retention and growth. I don't think Reader fit any of those descriptions, and the placement alongside actual core products was an advertisement - a hope that it might become something more, but it never did.
RSS has always been a threat to Google's core business. From Google's perspective, RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads. Ads are Google's only product business-wise.
They've closed the threat containment phase (Reader) and are finally openly out to kill it.
Most of the ad supported feeds I'm subscribed to have one ad post per week. Most ad supported websites have many ads per article. Guess which medium makes Google more money?
1 ad per week on a RSS feed
vs
1 ad per week on an entire website
and the answer would still turn out to be Ad Supported Websites. RSS users are an insanely small group compared to overall users on the web. So yeah, Google probably just decided that supporting RSS just isn't worth their money/time regardless of how it compares to its other services.
But you can't (reliably) run JavaScript in RSS which means no AdWords and no profile/context advertising. That's the stuff advertisers love, not one-size-fits-all banners
> RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads
Virtually no content site puts its entire article into the RSS feed. They want to monetize with ads even more than Google wants them to. If RSS was a threat to anything it would be social news services like G+ which depend on a non-federated model to maintain their walled gardens.
I actually read RSS feeds --- using the Currents application (which is supported by Google and under active development; it's getting updates) on my Android Nexus 10 tablet.
So for those people who claim that Google doesn't care at all about RSS, Currents is certainly a counter-example.
And by the way, Google is a big enough company that to claim that a corporation as a whole as an opinion about any subject or any protocol is a little silly. Take for example, "IBM Loves Lotus Notes; therefore IBM must hate SMTP." Absurd. There is a part of IBM that make a lot of money off of Lotus Notes, yes. There are also lots of IBM engineers and former IBM engineers who hated it with a hot blazing passion. I'm aware of one IBM division which supplied its engineers with a Lotus Notes-free e-mail address because it was necessary for them to do their jobs. Specifically, interact with the open source community with a mail product that wouldn't destroy whitespace in patches....
Interesting connection you made there. Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" was about moving away from proprietary tech towards open web standards. What Google is doing with RSS is the complete opposite.
The fact that the alternative to Flash was an open standard was a convenient convergence of interests. Jobs disliked Flash and wanted to hasten obsoleting it.
I have no inside information, but from reading the proverbial tea leaves and following his career, I think Sundar Pichai might have a similar prerogative and management style with respect to shedding things that are "un-Googley" Particularly things that run locally & sync with their services, e.g. Google Gears, Goolge Desktop, now CalDAV, etc.
Everyone (including Google) wants their own proprietary tech to be what's used, but no one (including Apple) wants to work with the constraints of other people's lousy properietary tech. If Apple owned Flash, they wouldn't have wanted to move away from it, and if Google didn't own Google+ they would probably be pushing RSS as an open alternative.
I could be wrong but I'm not sure people would like the answer. If the reasoning is that Larry Page should write a statement to appease the tech intelligentsia; I'm afraid their actual motivations would be probably be more uncomfortable than the current situation. In other words, I don't think it is necessarily a long term statement about the technical viability of RSS (probably something more to do with protecting advertising revenue, but I don't know).
Are you certain that they are specifically trying to eliminate it? It seems as though they are merely abandoning it within their product line and within the company as a whole.
Accusations of an attempt to extinguish the RSS format probably can't be considered until they kill Feedburner, which constitutes a massive portion of the web and all RSS trafic.
"Not going out of your way to support technologies you aren't interested in" is not the same as "Going out of your way to kill technologies that compete with your proprietary social network".
If they are trying to shoehorn every man, woman and child into using their social network in a bid to track their respective activities in so as to sell the information to the highest bidder, yes. As it stands, Dropbox aren't so no they are not evil.
On this subject I happened to experience something funny. Maybe one year ago I installed a chrome extension (from the official chrome store) to provide an RSS icon directly in the URL bar in order to subscribe to RSS streams. So far so good, then I don't know when, maybe months later I noticed I had some random popups with ads, it was very strange since I use adblock, I tried to find where these ads were coming from, with no luck. Then a day, I used the chrome inspector to analyze a web page and I observed something strange, on every pages I visited an external javascript was loaded, long story short, turned out the chrome extension was a kind of spyware loading a javascript on every pages I visited and sometimes rising a popup. Maybe it took me more time to find it because I only use chrome mainly for testing, my main browser being Firefox, but this is the kind of experience who removed the little confidence I had on the chrome store, and extensions in general, I'm very careful now on what extensions I install particularly extensions needing to be loaded on every pages I visit.
Why do people keep mentioning Twitter? It's not even vaguely related to what RSS does, any more than, say, a digital radio station you could tune iTunes to.
When you boil it down Twitter, Facebook, and G+ do the exact same thing as RSS,but they are all just easier,less flexible, closed and more centralized. You publish something and your subscribers receive it....seems at least vaguely related to me, imo.
How exactly is Twitter the exact same thing as RSS? I don't really see how someone tweeting about a new blog post being the same as what RSS does in any way other than being notified that a blog post has been written and possibly a title. I agree it is pubsub but that's pretty shaky. If the implication is that because we have Twitter then we do not need RSS .. I just think that's sort of ridiculous; is 140 characters the end of the road now? If not then Twitter is not a great solution to replace RSS. You can argue that RSS feeds have become like unread email but I think that is a different issue.
For non-techies Twitter achieves what they would use RSS for (notification of content) with convenient annotations. Yes they are very different, but that's how it works in principle. I doubt RSS will ever be completely gone, but the number of human readers was never high and is unlikely to go up in future.
Even apps that make use of it will be moving away from the user being directly aware of it.
I agree with you. I wasn't saying twitter is the exact same thing. Just vaguely related (as you said.. pubsub). Even without the character limit Twitter's functionality is a subset of what you can do with RSS.
Insofar as a lot of sites publish their entire feed to Twitter, composing a huge list of publications could replicate Reader to an extent.
I've considered doing it as a stopgap, but it's just too laborious for sets of feeds numbering over 100, and will be inconsistent because some feeds will undoubtedly lack Twitter accounts.
Because if you can't subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds to follow the news and click on what interests you, the two options you're left with are either remembering to open a bunch of different sites a bunch of times a day to check the news or looking at your twitter stream. Most people I know have opted for the latter. In an RSS free world, I would too. Perhaps with the exception of opening HN (which I already do) and maybe reddit a few times a day.
Well, I haven't used RSS in years. I just follow bloggers & websites' on twitter. My twitter feed spits out all the news articles into a passive stream of noise without interrupting me (like an email would do), so it's pretty similar to RSS for me.
The past 72 hours: Google Reader shutting down, Chrome's RSS extension removed from everyone's browser and the Chrome store, and "implement RSS natively" issue is now set to "wontfix". Way to be evil, Google.
That's a pretty whiny feature request. I read the first few dozen comments, and I don't really know what exactly was being requested.
It's clear to me that the right approach is an extension specific to your preferred RSS reader. I understand that some browsers have an RSS reader built it, but that still doesn't make it a core feature that's going to be used by a big portion of their users.
This feature request asks for two things to be native in chromium:
1. have an indicator in the browser interface that an rss feed is available for the current page.
2. have a preview of rss feeds rather than unstyled xml. It is just a matter of adding style for some xml files the way shiira[1] first did or the way safari[2], opera[3] or firefox do.
It is clear to me that the second is nice for the user even if the chromium developpers do not intend to implement a full rss reader as it just consists in making some common web documents readable directly in the browser, it is far more logical for a web browser to display rss than to display pdf... The first point is said to distract the user and clutter the interface so I can understand why it should be an extension (firefox voluntarily suppressed this indicator a few years ago).
I'm also going to become less reliant on Google services because when they decide other open standards are less profitable than getting more eyeballs Google+ I don't want to be stuck like I am now.
That's been standard procedure for issues getting a lot of off-topic comments, or have the potential for the same, for some time, and it's definitely welcome when trying to track the status of popular features/bugs. The point of issue comments is to contribute to getting an issue fixed or resolved, not to act as a discussion thread. It's quite clear this was a done deal for some time and there's nothing further to discuss in that issue.
Especially given that every comment gets emailed to everyone who'd starred the bug. Leaving comments open (and receiving "BUT WHYYYY" comments) just annoys the hell out of everyone who'd starred it.
Once a decision is made, further discussion is waste of everyone's energy. If the decision weren't final, the bug would remain open. People can post angree screeds elsewhere, like on their blogs' RSS feeds.
The engine switch doesn't bother me. It's just that Opera as a company is currently in flux, and they are discontinuing work in their Dragonfly web inspector, for instance, which does not at all suggest a good future ahead of Opera.
Firefox is pretty much the polar opposite of Opera in terms of features, although I like their work on open standards like Opera's.
Google next move: Remove Adsense for RSS. By the way Google Currents is doing good job as feed reader and it is relatively new product. I don't think Google has declared war to RSS. Since most of its APIs is based on Atom. May be they want to make a transition to JSON based standard.
"For a better user experience, we have migrated your feeds to a custom Google+ profile. We hope you will enjoy connecting with friends, family, and advertisers while reading news brought to you by Cuke(R)!"
The 1600+ people watching that bug, and the millions using reader are the minority. RSS is for hackers, and Google doesn't want to invest in those people. (Us)
RSS isn't for hackers, it's for infovores. The same people who make the majority of pageviews on the internet, oh and also make most of the pages on the web. It's for a minority, but that minority is the very tip-top of the most hardcore users of the web. It's not going away.
It is worth mentioning a large part of the reason RSS is so reclusive is that none of the browsers kept the "subscribe via RSS" button in the nav bar Firefox had 6 years ago. Back then it was one click to add feeds to the browser, and anyone could use it. Now you have to go out of your way looking for it.
I remember the FF bugs for removing it suggested only 7 percent of people used it.
What frustrates me is that 7 percent x web scale is not a small figure; and many of those were curators - prepping info for others.
Not sure if they still do this, but Mozilla used to give new hires a little toy and say, "This is your million users; try not to abuse them too much." That concept is built-in to the culture there. Why take up space and memory for the 93% of users who don't use that feature, when an add-on can do just as good a job for the 7%?
I'd say that the movement from print news to digital news and per-author and per-article consumption and the resulting "curation" craze means RSS is more relevant now, not less.
It's just that companies like Facebook and Google are trying to lock in users on their own platforms.
Makes you wonder what is ahead for Blogger. It will probably be assimilated eventually.
That's like saying HTML is for hackers: ordinary users shouldn't need to look at the raw serialization format if the service is any good. The many not hackers I interacted with on the old reader appreciated the way they could keep track of interesting things even if they were only shallowly aware of how it worked.
Exactly. Here on HN we can see people complaining about Chrome being bloated, slow and that they're considering moving back to Firefox as result.
Since only a minority of Chrome users are RSS users, it makes sense to have it as an extension. They're not stopping anyone from building one. So, hack away.
I love Firefox but I have hard time seeing in what universe Chrome is more bloated or slower than Firefox. Firefox is about on par with IE for start up speed at this point, I believe.
Yes, my point is that being "the product" is not necessarily bad or wrong, and more importantly, that screaming that cliche on HN is very inconsistent.
A company gets X in revenue from a product. Whether that X comes from ad revenue or subscription fees seems immaterial. Either way, Google Reader would have been a rounding error in the grand scheme of things at Google.
Not this cryptic bullshit. It's like breaking up with someone by just never returning their calls.