> Unfortunately Google Reader was the gateway into the RSS realm for those folks who just wanted a quick way to keep track of their news
I confess: I literally cannot understand this. There must be a thousand RSS readers, many of them allowing at least some privacy, some of them by e.g. not running on a remote server, which also means their existence and usefulness does not depend on someone always being kind enough not to pull the plug. What the bloody hell was so special about Google Reader?
Features, performance and, later, social network. I used standalone readers but they were poorly suited for casual use – fire it up, wait minutes for every feed to be checked, etc. – and they require a lot of local storage + CPU to do things like store history, determine whether an item has substantially changed or had only cosmetic corrections, etc.
Reader used Google's infrastructure so it was always running and your feeds were up to date when you opened them (unlike most desktop readers, they also adjusted the schedule automatically so frequently updated feeds were polled more frequently), and they stored everything with first-class search for history, which also came in handy if a popular site was overloaded since the cached feed content could still be viewed.
Finally, the real jump in usage happened when they enabled social features. Being able to see who else had publicly shared or commented on an item was a great way to find people with similar interests and there were many great conversations to be found. See http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network for a rundown of just how popular Reader's social features were. I believe a key reason why Google+ never went anywhere was because Google actively killed the Reader network and a large percentage of early adopters, journalists, writers, etc. got the message that you should never invest more than transient time in a Google product.
"frequently updated feeds were polled more frequently"
Even better, they supported pubsubhubbub, and were a very early adopter. I think even now, most readers don't support this - it's one of the reasons I settled on Newsblur as a replacement. When I tested with my own feeds, I saw new items appear within seconds of publishing them.
I doubt it'd come back from the dead but if they put some effort into making sharing / finding friend's shares in, you might see something similar to separate things to read from status updates and lunch photos. After, of course, unbreaking the social model which won't happen quickly.
But setting up an RSS reader is no different from installing any application. For crying out loud, that means going to an app store for much of the RSS-reading Internet or clicking next, next and finish for the rest of it.
I know I sound like an elitist schmuck when I say it, but I'm increasingly starting to think all this ease-of-use thing is getting a bit out of hand. If there are people are willing to sacrifice performance (Google Reader's UI was slower than Liferea's first versions, and that's something!), privacy and reliability (an installed RSS reader does always work, as opposed to a public, remote service, ran by an advertising company) just because clicking "Install" is hard for them, I honestly wish all these bad, evil companies they're outraged about mine the shit out of them, from their eye color to the size of their underwear. I get legitimate cases (e.g. you're behind company firewall and you're on your work computer so you can't install anything), but installing a program really shouldn't be a difficult task otherwise.
While I get the sentiment, I'm thankful that you don't run the world.
Most computer users forget that they have years and years of experience with computers, because they actually played with computers for their own fun for years. So the things that seem drop-dead simple for them are drop-dead simple if you have years of experience.
I'm certainly thankful my doctor has never told me "you know, if you can't be bothered to understand biology, I'll just let the diseases kill you", when he has 7+ years of knowledge that I don't.
> Most computer users forget that they have years and years of experience with computers, because they actually played with computers for their own fun for years.
The fact that pretty much any user who reads RSS feeds uses applications that do not come with the operating system by default is, I think, proof enough that installing an application is really not that difficult. Being one, I get why Slackware users have issues with that (hhehe) but we're really not talking about a complex maintenance issue here...
I think this is a common attitude today in all walks of life. We seem to be incapable of thinking for ourselves now, whether when using a computer or crossing the street. I'm amazed that we're still allowed to drive cars.
I actually use Outlook as an RSS reader. It's not very good but it works and that way everything is in one place.
Also, I think Outlook is much better than any other mail/calendar client I've ever used.
I read HN, Reuters, Re/Code, Atlantic and New Yorker in Outlook. I love the mostly text-only experience and am finding that I read content in a less prejudiced way when all the color distraction is gone.
E-mail clients are a terrible example. While relatively easy to install, they give you very little control, and no additional privacy.
To get all that, you need your own server. Ideally a home server, but many ISP forbid you to send e-mail at all (they close port 25). The next best thing is a remote virtual machine with root access. Either way, good luck installing Postfix and Dovecot. I have, and there's no way the "average user" could do the same.
>many ISP forbid you to send e-mail at all (they close port 25).
Can anyone name an ISP that forbids their customers from using SMTP to send mail?
My guess is that the person I'm quoting is confused by the longstanding spam-control measure in which the ISP requires the outgoing mail to go through a mail server designated by (and usually run by) the ISP rather than going directly to the recipient's mail server.
I'm not confused, and know exactly what you are talking about.
Call it pedantic, but yes, they do forbid you to send e-mails. Instead, they force you to ask them to send e-mail for you (that's how SMTP relays work). They're not completely forbidding you to use SMTP, but they do require that you go through their servers. That's quite the restricted SMTP usage.
The snail mail equivalent would be to forbid you to ship your mail yourself. Instead you have to give it to the official postal services so they can ship the mail.
Why would they do that? I see only one reason: they want to control your mail. They look at the destination, and maybe decide they won't ship the mail after all. They look at how much mail you send out, and maybe they won't send more than a dozen per day. They may open the mail (or otherwise X-ray it), and take "appropriate" action depending on the content, including not shipping it, building a customer profile of you and your recipients, writing your name on some black list, or archive the mail, just in case.
Spam mitigation? That's just a pretext they use to snoop over your private communications. (Or, more accurately, control their network. They will always push for more corporate control, that's what corporations do.)
Of course, you can bypass the limitation by using HTTP to ask another big corporation to send your mail. And receive and store your mail too. And deeply analyse it so they can show you customized banners. And give it to the authorities whenever they ask for it…
Such an Orwellian nightmare would never fly in the physical world. In the digital one however, they can capitalize on people's ignorance.
> I don't want to use a standalone RSS reader any more than a standalone email client. There's a reason everybody switched to webmail.
I do use a standalone client. IMAP is nice enough with the messages and I don't mix my personal and work contacts, so the addressbooks are easy to sync. Unfortunately, save for Roundcube, which sucks in moderation, I'm not aware of any single webmail client that doesn't suck.
The same goes for my RSS feeds, but I do have a setup that is probably hard to replicate for someone who doesn't work with computers for a living, so that doesn't count in the argument :-).
P.S.: I actually use webmail for work account because IT hates me. It's not too bothersome. The only thing stopping me from migrating my personal accounts to their respective webmail interfaces is not being able to import my abook contacts :-).
This, very much. I often read my feeds while commuting, walking, waiting, etc. with a phone or a tablet. Then I read with one PC or another. If the reads wouldn't be synced, a lot of time would be spent just skipping the posts I've already seen.
I start reading my RSS feed in the morning sometimes on a tablet. On the bus in the morning, I switch to my phone. Sometimes, when I want to read something in more depth or send to a colleague at work, I open it up on my work computer. Then, at home at night, it's back to the tablet or my laptop.
The operating systems involved include iOS, Windows, and Linux.
Which standalone RSS feed will allow me to keep track of what I've read on all places?
You might look at Fever[1] ($30) or Tiny Tiny RSS[2] (free). I seem to remember hearing about a few others back when Google Reader went down, but I don't recall their names.
I confess: I literally cannot understand this. There must be a thousand RSS readers, many of them allowing at least some privacy, some of them by e.g. not running on a remote server, which also means their existence and usefulness does not depend on someone always being kind enough not to pull the plug. What the bloody hell was so special about Google Reader?