Re-read this blog post with every mention of "Google Reader" replaced with "Google Search" to get an idea of how ridiculous a notion it is that we should just shut up and make our own in a couple of months. Granted, the scale isn't quite the same. Google Reader is not as difficult to replace as Google Search would be, but it is far more difficult than he thinks.
Having said all of this, it is absolutely Google's call if it wants to keep Reader going or not, they don't owe me anything when it comes to Reader or any of their other services that I don't pay for, but OTOH shutting down Reader does mean I'm going to think twice (or four times) about adopting any future Google service. They've now established quite a pattern of killing off things I've grown to depend on, and they are free to do that, but I'm free to avoid their services for fear of being burned again.
Google caches the entire history of an RSS feed from the moment it entered their database. This is in many cases unique, irreplaceable data that's going to have to be systematically extracted over the next few months, because I seriously doubt Google will release the entire data dump.
Sure I could build my own (in fact, I plan to), but this is obviously completely non-realistic attitude to take for every service that can or does bugger you.
Much easier than building these new alternatives is for you to just not read the articles which bother you. Especially since in this case you mostly can know from the title if they will.
I need to have a Twitter account to follow someone's feed. But I don't need to open account anywhere to subscribe to an RSS feed. The blog owner doesn't know who the subscribers to his RSS feed are. RSS anonymous and private. That is the difference. Twitter is like centralized VCS. RSS is like distributed VCS.
Ironically, this is also the reason why Google shutdown GR - they want everyone to "follow" others on Google+. So that all your posts are hidden in some megacorp's servers, creating a "lock-in" situation.
You'll notice, though, that there is one other thing that already manages this perfectly: email newsletter subscription. RSS at this point could really just be made into a microformat on top of email--presumably, just a specific additional MIME-type for messages--and then an RSS "client" would just be a special email client that gives you an alternate view of your own email account's inbox, only showing messages that have a representation in that MIME-type available, and laying them out in the traditional "river of news + passing an item marks it as read" style. And there would be literally no difference experience-wise!
It could even be set up on top of your Gmail inbox, which feels justly spiteful somehow. :)
Now, obviously, not everybody wants to set up their own Sendgrid account or something just to allow RSS subscriptions. Regular "XML file on a webserver" RSS could still exist as the lazy producer-side method, while still changing the consumer-side entirely into something SMTP+MIME-based. PubSubHubbub gateways (like Superfeedr) are already doing something equivalent in cost to sending out email; it would just be a matter of convincing them to add an additional subscription option.
Also, the fact that RSS items would be served with an "additional" MIME-type is important: if all these messages also had a regular text/plain or text/html representation, then looking at your email inbox with a regular mail reader would still show you all the same messages (though they could obviously be filtered away from your inbox into a "Subscriptions" tag if you so preferred.) What was starred in your RSS reader would be starred in your email client. To share an RSS item with a friend, you'd just forward it (and then they'd see it in their RSS client, since the forwarded message ended up in their email inbox!) You'd never lose anything as long as you had an IMAP client to sync it with. Et cetera.
In effect, RSS would no longer be its own special domain, only exposed through special tools; it would "just" be email. And more interestingly, vice-versa! Any message that wanted to (I'm thinking "lifecycle emails" or newsletters) could add an RSS MIME representation, and it would start showing up in your RSS client just like anything you had subscribed to through one of the PuSH gateways. "Email newsletter" would, in fact, become unified as a concept with "RSS." If we're all being called-to-arms to get down to hacking on something, why not set this up instead of just writing a thousand crappy new RSS readers? ;)
---
P.S. While we're at this call-to-arms: you could build another "filtered-MIME-type viewer client" of your email inbox, and make that one a to-do list program. Think about it. (http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2012/03/email-as-todo-list-proto..., http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)
You did need a Google account to use Reader, which made it not so anonymous and not so private.
Once again, RSS != Google Reader. They are not even the same type.
Fuck you and fuck your "no true Scotsman" bullshit. Who appointed you to be king of hackers?
It's kind of like taking away a mechanic's car--they'd still be annoyed you took it away. Just because someone can build something (and maybe not quite to the extent of an entire multi-billion company's skill and attention), doesn't mean they should waste time doing so. If you think you can do better, go for it, but in most cases it's better to use what's out there.
Feel free to disregard my opinion and express your disagreement in whatever terms best reflect you as a person.
I don't see what's untrustworthy, dishonest, or non-transparent about this. I am disappointed they're discontinuing a service I enjoy immensely, but it's their prerogative - they're not required to continue to offer a service if it's not in there interests to do so.
That's like Walmart moving into your small town, pricing its items so low that no local retailer can compete, watching all the local stores shut down, and when only Walmart is left they say "Not enough money to be made here, we're shutting down".
> honest(y) transparency
I think they are being very transparent about it, gave the users plenty of time to migrate to another service, being very clear about their timelines.
> a question of trust
With that I agree with you, though, what is the option? Because if a giant as google is pulling a service out, who should you trust with it? smaller companies? While they might be more interested in keeping the service up, they are more susceptible to other thing that may cut the life of the product short.
What is the other option? Self hosting, that's a whole other discussion, it might be the solution, but it's far from perfect.
> Why should anyone trust Google ever again?
What can you trust 100%? Even google, facebook, twitter might go broke in some years, giants have fallen before, but one might argue that it's still the safe bet.
"There have been far too many HN articles on how evil Google is for canceling a free service, how this product cancellation is a symbol, how Google should never have given anything to anyone if they were going to cancel it later."
If a large company starts giving away a service that one would normally expect to pay for, and if it puts its marketing muscle into getting everyone to use the service instead of alternatives, it has responsibility towards those users for quite some time to come, having killed the market for others.
Now dozens of developers of RSS clients have to scramble to replace the GR backend that everyone is using. For example, Aaronbretthorst sent out an email today about the client he's working on:
"To be honest, I never intended to announce my project this week. I started working on Viafeeds on February 11th, and expected that I'd have at least six months to get it working and well-polished before Google shut down Reader. Unfortunately, things didn't work out the way I expected, and I've been forced to accelerate my timetable. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that I was an avid Reader user, and want to make sure that I have a product at least as good to use on my iPhone, iPad and desktop before it shuts down on July 1st."
If someone was leeching off my unsecured wifi and came to depend it, I'd laugh in their face if they complained when I put a password on it. I could understand people getting mad if they jacked prices after shutting out competition, but saying they have to maintain a product at their own cost for third parties who gave them nothing but more work?
If you knew that your entire town had switched from dialup to using your unsecured wifi, and they installed dozens of extenders all over town at their own expense, and you knew about that but allowed it for years, and then you suddenly pull the plug, then yes, that'd be a dick move.
"I could understand people getting mad if they jacked prices after shutting out competition"
I would've been absolutely fine with that and I think many GR users would've been happy to pay.
Here is my case for calling it satire:
It starts off with caricatures...
every single one of these people do indeed have Twitter
profiles, and they are entrepreneurs also, and they're
thinking about their next pivot, and they certainly have
an opinion on NodeJS versus Clojure even though they've
never gone past the tutorial on either platform [...]
the only thing in between a hacker who misses Reader and a working
Reader implementation past-June is... nothing
Reader's cancellation will have absolutely no impact on RSS.
Reader isn't RSS. It isn't anything but a consumer, one of many,
of the RSS standard.
whoever is in possession of your RSS feeds probably knows
you more intimately than Target, which supposedly knows
when a woman is pregnant before her father. It's an
intimate relationship, based on trust.
Entitlement without effort is like representation without taxation.
Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly
highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals
used Reader.
It's Lake Wobegon and all you need to enter is a Reader account and some outrage.
You wrote a post to HN about how those who are complaining about Google Reader (a group you admit is not all programmers) should stop complaining about Google Reader's shutdown because these people could just whip up their own alternative? And you see no other facet of this situation that is worthy of being upset about?
You very successfully just trolled HN. And that wasn't even your intention?
Ask any company who makes money from an email list what would happen if everyone suddenly became unsubscribed and they had to just sit and hope they would all subscribe again. Listen for the wails :)
I'm concerned about the standard. Because having all information circulating through walled gardens is bad. My opinion is that the root cause is not that not enough people used GReader (you didn't wrote that, but others did), but rather that Google had no (good enough) revenue model with RSS.
If a sustainable and easy to use pay model finally emerges, then open standards would keep those different sources syndicated. Because syndication is not something people will give up soon, at the opposite.
Instead of writing this, he should have made a Google Reader clone and got rich this weekend.
Worst case scenario: you try a different RSS reader, and it works okay. You are in no danger of missing that all-important news article or blog post that all your friends are reading.
I take it back. Worst case scenario: RSS itself implodes, is obliterated from the face of the earth, and now you have to visit news websites and (manually!) click the refresh button to ensure that you're not missing that life-or-death article or blog post.
Wait, hang on -- I take it back. Here's the really-truly worst case scenario: instead of sitting impatiently with your lips wrapped around the proverbial firehose, desperately afraid that your content-thirst can never be sated without Google's help, you go out and actually create some content of your own.
(Or just buy a fucking newspaper. Jeez.)