Convopage
See the entire conversation
131 replies and sub-replies as of Sep 20 2016
And our blog reader numbers at the time were actually pretty massive once we realized we should count them.
this is a good thread.
Yes! Or allow them to be easily spun out as independent cos. Not everything needs to be 100MM+ scale.
I agree. Reader seems to have been erroneously perceived as a consumer app.
spent 10 yrs of life at @slashdot & @sourceforge trying to get power user understood. I failed. So hard.
Power users are a tough group. Like Tolstoy's unhappy families, subgroups of power users are unique
trust me when I say spinning out is very non trivial, and yes it was discussed.
importance outside financial objectives being subjective, this is why a corp culture's bias can be problematic
tho Google has good history of both acknowledging a tech ecosystem and caring about it (e.g. wikipedia servers)
every day. Come join us and preach internally. :)
This.
would it be fair to apportion some blame to execs/the company for not making this clear to employees (PMs especially)?
It was a good run, and you tried you best. Thanks for Google Reader, changed the way I consume web content.
so... it's your fault that you were not a unicorn employee that magically behaves like a founder?
love this thread. It reminds me of my own situation, sadly.
I love this tweetstorm. You own it like a founder.
it's one of the best products that I ever used. I miss it so much. Sigh.
what do you use now for an rss reader?
ah, OK. I used Thunderbird for a while but recently switched to Digg Reader.
thank you for your part in Reader! I now use @NewsBlur and pay $$$ for it
how do you twitter as a reader?
Would the product have been as loved & used as it was if all focus had been directed to on boarding more users. Likely not, right?
don't beat yourself up...everything happens for a reason...
no, the deeper problem was not explaining the engagement of the users you did have. The fraction of time spent online.
that sounded more blamey than I meant it. Google missed that they had what twitter has since built by verifying media people
well hindsight is 20/20...
Google Voice has over 100m active users?
Do you know how many actives Reader had by the end?
how many actives did Google Reader have at peak?
prioritizing ~100m of "ANY" actives vs. hi-tech readers was idiocy. You already had high-impact users of the time.
what led you to this realization?
it's sad to see both Google reader nd video phasing out.I ws a heavy user at dat time.Glad see amazing people behind it
aw, we all failed it equally! (I also believe that scale achievement would've been rationalized as aberrant, same result)
you guys certainly did!
A bit late to confess to the murder given that Urs signed and posted his confession years ago. :-)
A second spring of cleaning
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
googleblog.blogspot.com
"Jail" is such an ugly word. We prefer "involuntary colocation facility". ;-)
This sounds like it'd be great material for season 3 of Serial
So, basically, yuvar the reason, I now hv to try 20 diff apps to see meh collation of my curation. Thx 4 reader tho @_singhshashi
Did you release the code? I remember devs were asking for it to run Google Reader themselves.
Nick is 1000% correct
Don’t worry, a great ecosystem of feed readers emerged after that and the world have benefited from it since.
It was a damn good product. I miss it dearly. If it were to come back, I would be onboard immediately.
I don't think it's quite so simple. We all knew that Reader was a "rounding error" compared to Gmail.
Hence attempts to integrate into larger products: Gmail, prototyped at blog.persistent.info/2006/10/google…, development started by @bhawkes.
Google Reader Redux
(no description)
blog.persistent.info
But just because you can show a product to hundreds of millions of potential users doesn't mean that they'll take to it.
e.g. when we did a Yahoo! Mail/RSS integration usability study and it made it clear that a Gmail integration was not a slam dunk.
Kind sir, this is way too reductive. If you accept the blame then I hope you accept the praise too.
Building digital products is hard. Hindsight is 20/20. Thanks for all the hard work you and the team put into Reader 👏
It will be missed, haven't found a replacement that was 100% the same
is filling the bill for me but i do miss my #googlereader #RIP
is good enough that I'm not looking for anything else but Google was better
I owe you thanks. I had become lazy & complacent. The shutdown of GR reminded me that I should control my own Internet services.
i loved reader. Still miss it. Thanks for a few good years!
(No comment)
I loved, loved GR. I've moved on and bear no ill-will :). I'd buy you a 🍻 for a much used tool that positively impacted my life.
I guess the real mistake was not seeing the potential value of the data (direct access to infoeconomic top percentile of users)
Loved loved loved Reader. Chin up.
thanks for your note. I loved Google Reader. Thanks for making it.
if you can make tasks, calendar & inbox work together, all will be forgiven. Seriously. @feedly is all right.
Great thread. But it is going to be a long one if every former Google PM lists out all of their mistakes...
Compared to other Google products it seemed resource-light. After it shuttered I stopped using RSS, likely to my detriment
Thanks for saying this. I still don't read news the way I used to with Reader but I adapted.
shutting down Reader was your fault? What a terrible thing to have to live with the rest of your life.
Google reader shutting down was a major driving force behind our company. We even say so in
About
Cloudron the best platform for running web apps.
cloudron.io
best product I have ever used. U guys did amazing job. Don't sweat it
Integrating reader with G+ would have helped
I actually loved Google reader. I stopped using any 3rd party rss feed reader.
loved Google Reader, Nick!!
Now I know who to blame. I've spent too many hours trying to find the perfect reader.... my life has been empty.
😒 oh... It only was my favourite product... 😠
I finally have someone to blame.
srsly, though, I miss it to this day. The best social network @google ever had.
After reading this, I'm super bummed that I never got to try it!
Thanks for building a life-changing product. Helped me devour content and cultivate passions.
I still miss google reader
Then you are the reason I abandon all Google properties and switched everything over to Microsoft.
If only I could time travel and use @google Reader again! :)