Who Killed Google Reader?

June 30, 2023 5:43 AM

Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.
posted by 1970s Antihero (51 comments total)

Google+ died because it was a bad product - a bad privacy bug was what finally killed it, as I recall - but I still laugh about the fact that after that huge, tectonic investment, after shoehorning G+ into everything, they found out that 90%+ of user sessions were less than 5 seconds long. Just long enough to realize you’d mis-clicked and find the back button.

People spent hours a day in Reader.
posted by mhoye at 6:21 AM on June 30, 2023 [37 favorites]

RSS readers generally don't pull in ads, and are therefore counter to Google's business model, no?

Of course Google could have figured out a way around this, but that's the story today, anyway.

On the note of RSS, I recently rediscovered it with NetNewsWire. Free and open source, Mac, iOS, iPad. It's actually where I see most MetaFilter posts.
posted by WildMuffin at 6:35 AM on June 30, 2023 [11 favorites]

Killing Reader was unbelievably dumb not just because they did it to benefit a dud like Plus, or because they "only" had 30 million users, but because the people who used Reader were often people whose business was being extremely online. If you were a blogger, or a tech person, or god help you a tech blogger, you probably lived in Reader for most of your workday. When Google killed Reader, they lost the benefit of a doubt from the kinds of people who metaphorically buy digital ink by the barrelful. It takes a lot to alienate the business/tech press but they did it, and I think there's a real argument that they've never actually recovered from that.

Personally, I think there should be a Reader Law, which is that if you have more than 25-50 million users your company gets broken up. Nothing should ever be so big that a product on that scale is a "failure."
posted by Four String Riot at 6:38 AM on June 30, 2023 [37 favorites]

When Google releases a product, people still ask, "how long until Google kills this, like they did Reader?" Which is a legacy of sorts, I guess. I'm not sure Google learned anything, given the Google Pay fiasco a couple of years back.
I'm still mad.
posted by Spike Glee at 6:41 AM on June 30, 2023 [28 favorites]

Did anyone else notice that in that screenshot of the first prototype, the two sites whose feeds are being demonstrated are Slashdot and MetaFilter?
posted by jacquilynne at 6:51 AM on June 30, 2023 [38 favorites]

This is a good history and interviews a lot of the key people involved in developing the product. Particularly Chris Wetherell, Mihai Parparita, and Ben Darnell, all first-class developers. I appreciated this article's insight into internal politics and how not having buy-in from the top execs was part of the project's troubled history.
posted by Nelson at 6:58 AM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Google cancels many products, but there’s very few cancelations you can directly link to the fall of democracy.
posted by Artw at 6:59 AM on June 30, 2023 [12 favorites]

From some guy:

@matthowie:
My favorite memory of once giving a small talk at the Google campus in 2012 was at the end someone asked me what my favorite Google product was and I said Reader, by leaps and bounds that it was a key part of my day on par with Gmail.

Everyone’s face dropped in the room and then my host said “Have you tried Google+? Anything you like about that?”
posted by Artw at 7:26 AM on June 30, 2023 [55 favorites]

I'm not sure Google learned anything

They just cancelled "Project Iris", AR glasses/goggles, which they announced in... [checks notes]... January 2022...
posted by rozcakj at 7:35 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think about Page and Brin regularly, more often than their more in-your-face peers, because they had built up such a winning hand. The search engine, obviously, and Reader, but also GMail and Docs and a host of other brilliant things. Now, the only one of these which is halfway useable is GMail. I was trying to show my son, who’s eight, how to find information online. Google’s search results were such an incomprehensible mishmash, that I couldn’t even figure out how to explain to him how to spot the relevant bits. So I showed him DuckDuckGo instead, and that was easy.

Page and Brin were on the verge of achieving greatness, and they fucked it up so badly, and the only reason I can see for it is that they mismanaged their company horribly. And the first sign of this was not seeing the obvious potential in Reader.
posted by Kattullus at 7:57 AM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

not seeing the obvious potential in Reader.

It was easy for them not to see it because it let people use the Internet the way they wanted to, and not the way that followed Google’s business model.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 7:59 AM on June 30, 2023 [25 favorites]

I think the key insight in this article which is never really articulated but which shines through very clearly to me, is that at the time Google believed it was a company that only made rational decisions based on data, when it was in fact a cult of personality where the only products that were allowed to thrive were products that could claim to be the brainchild of a top exec or one of their favorites. What Reader needed wasn't numbers or features. Reader needed a patron. And nobody at the time - none of the executives, none of the engineers on the project, none of the PMs - saw Google clearly enough to understand that. Nobody thought Google was that kind of company. It was believed almost universally within the company at the time that a high enough quality product would simply overwhelm skepticism and, like, prevail. As if it were a law of nature and not a matter of investment and prioritization. And Reader was this annoying little example of a 20% project gone right but which never played the political games it needed to play because nobody realized there was politics to be played.
posted by potrzebie at 8:00 AM on June 30, 2023 [40 favorites]

I liked this take from Mark Fletcher, who created and ran the RSS reader Bloglines in this era

"Bloglines ... was mostly [a tool] for nerds." I mean, fair. But I'd argue that was the nature of the beast and all feed readers, Google Reader included, along with the greater blogging ecosystem in general, suffered from that. I think that's one of the reasons that Facebook and Twitter won that war. And I also think you can draw some parallels with the Fediverse and its struggles to grow and be easy to use.

Folks blame Google for destroying all that was good and pure about the blog world and early social media. And there's definitely failures on that company's part. But there are other product factors at play. Things we can still learn from.
posted by Nelson at 8:20 AM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

and they fucked it up so badly, and the only reason I can see for it is that they mismanaged their company horribly

Google / Alphabet is worth somewhere around a trillion dollars... By current late-stage capitalism metrics, this is not a mismanaged company.
posted by rozcakj at 8:26 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I still laugh about the fact that after that huge, tectonic investment, after shoehorning G+ into everything, they found out that 90%+ of user sessions were less than 5 seconds long. Just long enough to realize you’d mis-clicked and find the back button.

Or were trying to get that stupid notification badge to go away. I’m still mildly amazed that they actually shipped uncontrollable push notifications which went off, among other things, every time they forced someone in your Gmail history into using G+. The only way which actually worked to stop that was to uninstall the iOS app, which I suspect was part of its demise. They spent something like the first 6 months training users that notifications were obtrusive in every Google property and had very little value.
posted by adamsc at 8:30 AM on June 30, 2023

RSS Readers Are Better Than Ever, Thanks to Twitter & Reddit

(Not because of anything *good* Twitter and Reddit have done, mind)
posted by Artw at 8:31 AM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Mihai Parparita says

A low point in 2011 was when I made a small fix and tweeted from the official Reader account about it

I was told by Vic Gundotra (via a marketing person) that I cannot do that anymore, lest users get the impression that Reader is still actively being worked on.

posted by Nelson at 8:54 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I never stopped using RSS and I'm glad of it, in fact I came to this page via RSS.

However, google reader introduced me to the whole concept. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
posted by benoliver999 at 9:06 AM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

.
posted by kensington314 at 9:08 AM on June 30, 2023

Pro tip: The answer to the question : "Who killed Google _____?" is almost always Google.
posted by fairmettle at 9:12 AM on June 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

rozcakj: Google / Alphabet is worth somewhere around a trillion dollars... By current late-stage capitalism metrics, this is not a mismanaged company.

In some ways it’s an even worse indictment of Google. They have infinite resources, and they can’t even take care of their flagship products. It’s like if Superman couldn’t fly straight or land punches anymore.
posted by Kattullus at 9:30 AM on June 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

I ended up moving to Feedly after Reader went away and it worked great for the most part. But over the years rss has become less useful anyways. Many of the feeds I read would only display a short opening in the feed and to actually read the full article still required to you to click on a link to go to their website where they would show you all the ads anyway. They wanted those views no matter what.
posted by downtohisturtles at 10:32 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have to imagine that the main reason Google seems immune to any cultural change that would allow them to see how damaging their product strategy is around cancellation of projects is that there are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on not seeing that.

Maybe stronger top-down leadership would help, but in theory Google+ had everything it needed to have staying power from the upper echelons, but that wasn't enough to save it from public indifference. So honestly I'm not sure at this point.
posted by Aleyn at 11:10 AM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

I love reading from RSS, and loved Reader. RIP.

there are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on not seeing that.

Upton Sinclair sympathizes, ca. 1930s.
posted by Rykey at 11:31 AM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

I always get confused in Google Reader discussions because I never touched it; my late-2000s customisable-Google-page-for-RSS-feeds addiction was igoogle, which died in much the same way and never even seems to warrant a mention.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 12:33 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Google / Alphabet is worth somewhere around a trillion dollars... By current late-stage capitalism metrics, this is not a mismanaged company.

Sure and I've been a GOOG user for decades. I even own their phones. This month I started trying out other search engines for the first time since Google came on the scene because Google search is failing.
posted by srboisvert at 12:57 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I use google voice, but don’t rely on it as my primary number. I use gmail but I am moving away and it’s not my primary email. I used to have an android phone just because I am a nerd, but I’m not even really interested in what Google is doing.

Branch Plant economics says that it is simply not enough for a product or division be profitable or growing. It needs to be more profitable than if those resources were used for other projects. That’s how you google is a trillion dollar company and there isn’t a single product I want to buy or even invest any time in.
posted by zenon at 1:14 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember iGoogle! I used it for a long time and eventually switched to MyWay, which itself went away. From those heady days when everyone was going to create a "portal page" as their personal homepage to the Internet.
posted by Nelson at 1:46 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Many of the feeds I read would only display a short opening in the feed and to actually read the full article still required to you to click on a link to go to their website where they would show you all the ads anyway.

RSS is just a protocol. It's not guaranteed to allow you to skip over ads and bypass paywalls. It serves up whatever the feed author wants to serve you. You can make the same complaint about email and browsers.

I migrated to Feedly right at the announcement. I pay them for the privilege of searching my feeds, which sounds silly, but the "everything should be free" attitude is one of the reasons why things are terrible.
posted by meowzilla at 2:01 PM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

I dig rss pretty good like but i could use some help finding good feeds
plus yes also i know i am a dumb there is no need to inform me of this fact
thanks in advance my dears
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 3:19 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Being acquired for Emerald Sea bought me a house and other real estate, and the “social multiplier bonus” in 2012 or 2013 bought me a brand new Rivendell bicycle and a trip to Europe.

My team worked really hard on a couple of products that were really really liked by the alpha and beta testers, but were killed a week or two before release. But not before we got our bonuses.

Many people in my team could see the whole cult of personality and petty power dynamics going on. One of the first planned moves the team leaders did was to get a few people from SFO to the restricted building in MTV, where they got desks on the same floor as one of the founders (I can’t remember if it was Larry or Sergei) so they could have casual conversations as he walked by. I am pretty sure this is the reason why we got the max “social multiplier” for our bonuses that year with unreleased and untried products, while teams with working products (but not at Google scale) did not.

If you are at Google and have access to the epitaphs page (if it still exists), it is very interesting to see the long tenured people who left around the G+ era, and with hindsight you may be able to read between the epitaphs’ lines.

I stayed there too long. H1B. By the end of my tenure most of my team took anything that came out of a VP or above’s mouth as satire. The other option was to cry.
posted by Dr. Curare at 4:53 PM on June 30, 2023 [18 favorites]

Ah, Marissa Mayer was screwing with it. That actually explains a lot.
posted by lkc at 4:58 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am a longtime and enthusiastic NewsBlur subscriber and I use it every day. Reader was my first RSS app, but I absolutely never wanted it to be a social network and never touched those features the whole time I used it. I wonder what the ecosystem of RSS apps would have been like had it not so dominated the field during its lifetime.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:18 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

I felt the loss of Reader deeply. Its demise was the first rock to chip the window of Google for me. Eventually I moved everything I could away from Google. I still have a Google account because my whole family has one of my domains for their email addresses. And I retain some Gmail accounts for emergencies, though my primary domain goes through iCloud, and therefore virtually all my email.

For a while I didn't do much with RSS. A few years ago I decided to give it another try. I pay for a Feedbin account so I can read on Windows and get more than just RSS, but most of the time I use I pull it into NetNewsWire on Apple, including for the first glance at MetaFilter and AskMe posts.

I no longer trust Google with anything. Searches? DuckDuckGo. Email (for myself)? 99.9% iCloud. Chrome? Don't make me laugh. Docs, Photos, etc.? I never used them anyway.
posted by lhauser at 6:37 PM on June 30, 2023

Plugging miniflux again as decent rss reader with a small footprint and several options for hosting.
posted by soelo at 6:42 PM on June 30, 2023

I've seen discussions that killing Google Reader had long-term serious negative impact on Google Search, because all the members were annotating and helping sort real from spam and indicating what was useful or interesting via their shares, in an extremely easy-to-parse way.

Trying to track down that conversation in my bookmarks, I found ... Twitter users who have since deleted their accounts. (sigh)
posted by Pronoiac at 7:16 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think about Google Reader at least once a week. RIP.
posted by johnxlibris at 8:34 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

The article mentions Artifact. Anyone here tried it?
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:57 PM on June 30, 2023

But over the years rss has become less useful anyways. Many of the feeds I read would only display a short opening in the feed and to actually read the full article still required to you to click on a link to go to their website where they would show you all the ads anyway. They wanted those views no matter what.

This was a concern even in the 2000s but it’s been pretty manageable since around 2005 when Brent Simmons updated NetNewsWire to use an integrated WebKit browser, which meant that the feeds which did this rendered their regular page in my feed reader’s normal content pane. I switched to NewsBlur around 2010 and it has toggles for displaying the feed text, extracted site text, or the entire page inline which are sticky per site.

Long term, I think those ads are important: people who make things worth reading need to get paid and that’s not a great match for syndication formats designed to spread content around effortlessly. I really don’t like ads but I also don’t want to live in a world where there’s a lot of free BS while good writers and journalists are struggling to make rent. I know of a handful of publications which offer paid feeds – which are imperfect and definitely on the honor system – but we need to do more.
posted by adamsc at 9:21 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

The article mentions Artifact. Anyone here tried it?

I like Artifact because it surfaces articles from sources I wouldn't ordinarily see, because they're not in my Feedly queue (which is the first thing I look at). At first it showed a lot of junk I wasn't interested in, so you have to do a fair amount of filtering of publications you don't want to see and topics you're not interested in.

My favorite feature is when you run across a clickbait headline you can press a button saying it's a clickbait headline, and their "AI" engine will write a new headline based on the content of the article, which seems like a reasonable use case for machine learning to me.

The weakest feature (which I hope they're working on) is that they don't distinguish well between niche articles from a week or two ago, which are fine because I haven't seen them yet, and mainstream topics from a week or two ago, still telling me about the search for the Titan submersible being underway. (These seem to come and go though.)
posted by Umami Dearest at 12:25 AM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think the loss of Reader is one of the main reasons geriatric millenials have trust issues.

The start of a slippery slope. Good stuff will get taken away. There's nothing you can do to stop it.

I remember choosing my smartphones based on which had the best Reader experience when I tested them in a shop.

I'm still using Feedly. And it's fine. But it's still not as slick.
posted by chrispy108 at 2:28 AM on July 1, 2023

It was the sharing feature, with comments, which made it special. It’s the last social media platform which encouraged the kind of interactions which build friendships. One of my closest friendships, though my friend sadly passed away, was built through Reader.
posted by Kattullus at 3:08 AM on July 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

> However, google reader introduced me to the whole concept. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I think I was introduced to the concept by, of all things, LiveJournal. People could set up RSS feeds to replicate into LiveJournal, so for a while I followed quite a number of RSS feeds via my LJ Friend's page. Being on livejournal, each post in the feed got it's own comment section, so I think in some ways that feature foreshadowed Reader.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:18 AM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

I just installed NetNewsWire on iOS … thanks for the pointer. So, being a retired OS guy, what I don’t know about the web is pretty much everything, which is prepatory to asking whether I should expect to see comments on MF threads? Or is the idea just that I can see the top-level posts and I should suck it up?

I just got started using Reader about a year before it vanished. I am actually thinking of shifting to a pay-for-it search engine because Goog has become so unusable (especially on my phone—it dumped me into some YouseTube page that I could barely figure out how to get out of. WTF?)
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 9:56 AM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

No, you won’t see comments in a metafilter rss feed unless you subscribe to a specific thread or the popular comments feed. Look at anyone’s profile and you will see the rss icon after their post numbers but not after their comments. Also, there is a subscribe link on their favorite posts but not on their favorite comments.
posted by soelo at 10:16 AM on July 1, 2023

I joined Google right before Reader was killed, and coincidentally ended up on a team (Chrome Extensions) with Mihai. I remember him having to do a bunch of work to shut down Reader (on top of his regular job, which struck me as twisting the knife). I don't have much else to add because, at the time, he understandably did not want to talk about Reader much.

Anyway, shortly after that I left Chrome because of the politics and management in that group.
posted by reventlov at 11:44 AM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Mihai Parparita: 10th Anniversary of Google Reader Shutdown. (Found via my RSS reader, which is delightfully good at showing me everything someone writes even if they only write infrequently.)
posted by Nelson at 2:22 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ah, Marissa Mayer was screwing with it. That actually explains a lot.

The moment I opened this, I was just waiting for Mayer to pop up. She shows up in every story about Google from that era, and in no story does she come off favorably. (I remember feeling shock and outrage when Doug Bowman wrote about how she handled the design team.)

Those stories only stopped because Mayer moved from Google to Yahoo, where she vehemently opposed maternity leave and destroyed Tumblr, among other things. Now she apparently works in AI, so I'm sure new terrible things are on their way!
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:55 AM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thirding NewsBlur. It's all a blur (ha) these days, but as I recall I used Google Reader and Bloglines, and when they shut down I exported myself over to NewsBlur. Which, like Metafilter, is NOT free and thus has managed to keeping ticking along. I think it costs $24 per year.

But the really funny thing is that quite a few years ago, I stopped checking it. I'm still paying for the NewBlur service, and in fact even updated my credit card recently, but I haven't checked all those RSS feeds in many years. Maybe when I get more time ...
posted by intermod at 1:10 PM on July 2, 2023

I have probably said this elsewhere on the blue, but a while back I was looking for a digital image management tool and was thoroughly befuddled at the number of people that suggested Google Photos. First of all it has minimal actual FEATURES, or at least features that one can CONTROL, and second of all it's Google so it could vanish in a blink! Don't people pay attention? (it was hard to find any kind of solution that wasn't some manner of SAAS or Very Old...I ended up settling on a local install license of ACDSee which has worked out okay.)

In terms of trying to otherwise degoogle myself I now use firefox and tutamail. Still have an android phone, tho.
posted by hearthpig at 2:06 PM on July 3, 2023

I enjoyed Reader when it came out but it was really the social features that made it special for me and can't really be replaced. Everyone I knew had Gmail and was able to use Reader easily. The interactions I had that way were the best I've had on any social media style website and I made friends that I never would have had without it. Since Reader was shut down I drifted away from most of those people.

To get something similar now I would have to force friends to sign up for a particular feed reader and then hope we had enough critical mass that people would actually remember to use it. Twitter actually did this fairly well for me - except I had to start over because I never could convince anyone else to use it - until the new ownership took over. Metafilter is the only thing left that even comes close.
posted by Nec_variat_lux_fracta_colorem at 3:38 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]